# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S338
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

338 Luther and Melanchthon.

character. But if we bring this out, let us not forget that Luther, for his time, was unusually well versed in Hebrew. What Luther was for the German language, J. Grimm may tell us: "Luther's language must, for the sake of its noble, almost wonderful purity, as well as for its powerful influence, be held to be the core and foundation of the setting-down of the New High German language. One may in fact call New High German the Protestant dialect, whose freedom-breathing nature long ago overpowered, unbeknownst to them, even the poets and writers of the Catholic faith. Our language has sunk, but whatever has nourished and rejuvenated its spirit and body, and at last driven forth the blossoms of new poetry, we owe to no one more than to Luther." This merit of Luther's is so undeniable that it has paved his own way into the Walhalla. We have seen what a versatility of studies Melanchthon developed in his youth. This, however, was no youthful dilettantism that the matured man cast off. Even though Melanchthon did not pursue some of his studies further, such as jurisprudence and medicine, he nevertheless remained master of most of them, devoted independent powers to astronomy, physics, and history, but was for a long time, through his textbooks, the highest authority for the study of dialectic, rhetoric, ethics — philosophy in general. One would, however, form an incorrect picture of Melanchthon as a man of scholarship if one saw in him an abstract, metaphysical theorist. What Melanchthon achieved in the field of philosophy counts for more in its motives than in its execution. Melanchthon was neither a speculative nor a mystical nature. He was more clear and true than deep, and in his philosophical expositions more a learned and skillful expounder of given material than an independent and productive thinker. In grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and physics as well, Melanchthon's merit consists chiefly in the scholastic working-up of these disciplines. The classical studies were for Melanchthon the indispensable means of true culture of the mind and the key to all scholarship. But to an overall view of ancient life, and to a deeper grasp of its relation to Christianity, he did not attain. Melanchthon was, in scholarship, not a theorist but a teacher. He possessed, in both oral and written presentation, clarity, simplicity, consistency, objectivity, and forcefulness. In everything, what mattered to him was true instruction. Therefore he viewed all the sciences he taught from their practical side. Grammar is to him a sure guide for speaking and writing a language; dialectic is the art and the way of reasoning, whose functions are defining, dividing,