# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S342
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

342 Luther and Melanchthon.

naturally not without becoming entangled in their oppositions as well, but lifted up by an immense success that in a short time made his name one of the most illustrious in Europe. There we find nothing of Luther's struggles with the distress of daily life, his terrors before the Judge of the world, whose lightning-bolts hurl him, in the midst of a boldly advancing career, into the cloister; nothing of his despairing wrestling after righteousness and peace with God; nothing of those fearful duels with the prince of this world; nothing of the temptations of an immense energy of action, of the polemical outbursts of fire of a nature that had the stuff to wrench its age out of joint. Melanchthon was the man of calm development, of quiet planting and building, of good-natured mildness, of humanistic measure, of loving connection, of dispassionate deliberation, of the unwearying mediation of opposites.

From the presentation of the Augsburg Confession down to the Peace of Augsburg (1530–1555), the possibility of a reunion stood open at the many religious colloquies, not merely open but at times not even far off. What the representatives of the Roman party emphasized in the many negotiations — the necessity of a unified organism of the Church, the historical continuity of its development, the significance of ecclesiastical authority — found the most recognition among all Protestants in Melanchthon. Firmly and deeply as he was rooted in Scripture, he nevertheless looked upon everything he set forth with ecumenical eyes, and to remain in connection with the fathers was always his concern. What determined him, quite particularly, to the doctrinal changes for which his fellow believers so greatly suspected him, was the wish to remain in unity with the fathers. If Melanchthon, by the mildness and breadth of his manner of teaching, and by his departure from the Lutheran confession in the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, came closer than any other leader of the German Reformation to the Reformed, then nothing is more untenable than the tendentious claim that he was the leader of the Reformed cause among the German reformers — since the characteristic features of the Reformed Church, namely an abstractly carried-through scriptural authority, an unhistorical method, an emphasis on the rights of the congregation over against episcopal aristocracy, and a purely spiritual form of worship, stand in contradiction to that historical, conservative, connecting cast of mind which was a characteristic peculiarity of Melanchthon's. And it is this connecting of Protestant truth to what has always, everywhere, and by all been acknowledged — to the ecumenical essence of Christianity, to the historical life of the Church — that Protestantism must hold fast to, if it does not wish to sink to the level of a sect. An ecclesiastical direction that has nothing to seek in the past has nothing to seek in the future either.

Mildness was Melanchthon's cardinal virtue; humanistic, historical, ecclesiastical mediation was the task to which his peculiar character pointed him. But he lacked the temper of character that was Luther's, whose heroic