# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S340
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

340 Luther and Melanchthon.

say wonderful, of a divine, grasp of truth. While Melanchthon was only a great scholarly talent, Luther was one of the greatest spirits who ever walked this earth — genius from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, thoroughly original as a nature and thoroughly original as a man of the Spirit of God. If Melanchthon was a divinely gifted teacher of the humanistic and theological sciences, Luther was a prophet of the truth, whose fullness of spirit was too great to be confined within the forms of scholarship. What must be said of the heroes of German literature, Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and others — that they were more than scholarly and yet wellsprings of life for scholarship — holds true of Luther in a special sense. If Melanchthon was great as a teacher, but as a personality more noble, faithful, and truly evangelical, then Luther, for the greatest cause, was the greatest personality. Everything that Melanchthon wrote toward the interpretation of Scripture is far outweighed by Luther's Bible translation alone. Not even Luther's expositions of the first Book of Moses and of the Epistle to the Galatians are matched by any of Melanchthon's surviving commentaries, which are not nearly as significant as one might expect. If Melanchthon stands alone as a teacher in the age of the Reformation, then, as a man of theological scholarship, Calvin is his superior. Calvin is the greatest* exegete and the greatest dogmatician of the age of the Reformation. But even Calvin, as a personality, stands only as an epigone, in whom understanding and will had to supply what nature did not provide, next to Luther. Neither Melanchthon nor Calvin were men of the people. Of the popular heart, the popular eloquence, the popular wisdom of life, the popular poetry of Luther, neither of them had anything. Melanchthon spoke Latin by preference, could not preach, did not know how to speak with the common man in his own tongue, and often let himself be taken more by the circumstances of life — which Luther always mastered — than he knew how to take hold of them himself. He was simply not the master of life, but the master of the school, and as such, however, also the master of Germany. It is well known that from near and far everything streamed to him, that often 2,000 hearers sat at his feet, that at his hospitable table conversation was once carried on in thirteen languages, and that his pupils and textbooks worked far beyond the borders of the Reformation, and long after, even once the grave had closed his mouth. Melanchthon was so beloved a teacher that, at a time when Germany already hung on his every word, he set up a private school in his own house, in which he taught the elements. He was also in the habit of turning from the lectern to address questions to individuals, and, as Raßeberger reports, may well, in his somewhat

* Probably means: he who, in his own time, best answers to the demands now made of exegesis and dogmatics. L. u. W.