# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S341
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther and Melanchthon. 341

somewhat irritable temperament, have now and then grown a little put out over the answers he received, and vented this displeasure in epithets such as asinus [ass] and the like. In the later part of his life, out of special regard for the Hungarians, who were not masters of German, he delivered edifying addresses in Latin, which lie before us in his Postil, into which he also let flow many a scholarly remark and other interesting communication out of the treasury of his reading and experience. With a devotion and self-sacrifice that cannot be sufficiently praised, he entered into the personal and scholarly needs of his hearers. He and his wife were, to excess, generous and hospitable, and would probably never have come out of their financial embarrassments had not a faithful household companion kept some watch over their affairs. When the Duke of Prussia wished to make him a gift, Peucer — Melanchthon's son-in-law, whom the Duke had consulted on the matter — said that money ought by no means to be given to his father-in-law, for he would infallibly give it away again, but rather a cup or something of the kind. But even such gifts the inexhaustibly good heart of the noble man knew how to turn to liquid use. What an immense sum of letters he wrote in the service of others — how often prefaces for aspiring authors, how many he presented with scholarly work outright, or at least gave shape and substance to attempts laid before him. Even on the lectures of some of his colleagues he exercised a very strong influence. And for this he did not always receive thanks. When Cordatus, once present as a listener at Cruciger's lectures, heard the proposition, which troubled him, that good works are the causa sine qua non [indispensable condition] of justification, the burden of this proposition fell upon Melanchthon, the actual author of the lectures that Cruciger delivered. Raßeberger says: "Upon such good nature of Philip's many Magistri relied, to whom it otherwise did not come so hard, as it would have if they had had to work out their own lectiones [lectures] themselves. For no labor was ever irksome to Philip, and he gladly served everyone." What an immense propaganda for the Reformation lay simply in the fact that a teaching power of such effect worked in the spirit of the Gospel. It was the great power of the learned school, the great power of humanistic culture, the great power of truly theological inquiry after truth, which Melanchthon brought to the service of the Reformation. And this alliance of powers the Protestant church must preserve, if it is to fulfill its great mission in the kingdom of God on earth.

If one compares the development of Melanchthon with that of Luther, it throughout gives the impression of the well-balanced, the free of struggle and leap, the organic. The devout son of devout parents, of an innate thirst for knowledge, is led by teachers such as one could only wish for him — above all by Reuchlin, his kinsman by God's wonderful providence — along the path of humanistic culture to Wittenberg, where, borne up by the spirit of the University of Wittenberg and guided by Luther, he enters, with his rich gifts of mind, upon the path of struggle and victory of the Reformation,