# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S343
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther and Melanchthon. 343

trust in God, whose eye took in the great and the whole of a situation. While Melanchthon, before and at the presentation of the Augsburg Confession, wanted to know nothing of an alliance with the Swiss and the Upper Germans, because he believed that fellowship with them would be a hindrance to reconciliation with the Roman party, and judged, on Zwingli's sending his confession to Charles V, that the man was simply mad, he later on pursued an alliance with the Swiss and Upper Germans quite eagerly, and came to an understanding with Calvin to such a degree that Calvin, when pressed by the German Lutherans on the question of the Lord's Supper, felt able to appeal to Melanchthon as being as closely joined with him on this point as with his own inward parts. And it was this same Calvin who afterward sharply rebuked Melanchthon for his yielding to the Romanists at the time of the Interim. Melanchthon himself had to confess that he had erred in this. That was no small matter. It concerned, in truth, the being or non-being of Protestantism. Let us judge the man of mildness as mildly as possible. He often showed an admirable candor, always acted as an honest man, and was guided, even where he was weak, by a noble striving after unity and reconciliation. It is as true as it is beautifully put, what Titius said here a hundred years ago: Erravit Philippus, sed ingenio non animo, facilitate ingenita non dolo, candore nimio non gratiae aucupio [Philip erred, but through intellect, not through will; through native pliancy, not through guile; through excessive candor, not through a hunting after favor]. In his striving to mediate all oppositions Melanchthon erred, and indeed at times to a degree that even now cannot be regarded without a certain sense of injury. What is one to say when Melanchthon, at the time of the Augsburg Confession, in all likelihood wrote to Cardinal Campegius: "We are ready to obey the Roman Church, if only, out of that goodness which she has continually shown toward all peoples, she will silently pass over or relax some few things which, even if we wished, we could not alter. Moreover we honor the dignity of the Roman pontiff and the whole constitution of the Church with the deepest respect"? Such a thing could, in truth, have come from Melanchthon alone among all the reformers. Those who now wish to found German Protestantism upon Melanchthon forget that if he alone had prevailed, there would now be no German Protestantism at all. In his efforts toward union Melanchthon did not consider that if the Reformation, for the sake of a unionistic reconciling of oppositions, abandoned the principle Melius est ut scandalum fiat quam ut veritas relinquatur [it is better that offense be given than that truth be forsaken], it thereby pronounced sentence of death upon itself. After three ecclesiastical individualities — the Roman, the Lutheran, the Reformed — had, in the immense struggle of the Reformation, wrestled themselves into being, these three souls demanded also three separate bodies. Does anyone seriously believe that if the German Reformation had contented itself with taking, within the great organism of the Roman Church, the place of a merely tolerated tendency, it would still exist today? Mightier than thoughts are the