His courage and his assurance of the ultimate victory

of the truth never faltered. But he lost the cheerful spirits, the joyous tone, that had before characterized him. He took dark views of the wickedness of the times and of society about him. He was weary of the world, weary of life, and longed to be released from its burdens. He was old, he said, useless, a cumberer of the ground, and he wanted to go. His disaffection with Wittenberg, on account of what he considered the laxness of family government and reprehensible fashions in respect to dress, was such that he determined to quit the place, and he was dissuaded only by the united intercessions of the Elector, and of the authorities of the University and of the town. He fell into a conflict with the jurists on account of their declaration that the consent of parents is not absolutely indispensable to the validity of a marriage engagement, and he attacked them publicly from the pulpit. The friendship of Luther and Melancthon was not broken, but partially chilled in consequence of theological differences. There were two points on which Melancthon swerved from his earlier views. From the time of the controversy of Luther and Erasmus, Melancthon had begun to modify his ideas of predestination, and to incline to the view that was afterwards called Synergism, which gives to the will an active, though a subordinate, receptive agency in conversion. On this subject, however, the practical, if not the theoretical views of Luther were also modified, as is evident from the letters which he wrote in reply to perplexed persons who applied to him for counsel. The difference on this subject between him and Melancthon, if one existed, occasioned no breach. It was not until after Luther's death that his followers made this a ground of attack on Melanc

1 Galle, p. 139. Luther writes to Spalatin that in his whole life and in all his labors for the Gospel, he had never had more anxiety than during that year (1544). De Wette, v. 626.

LAST DAYS OF LUTHER.

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thon and the subject of a theological contest. But, on the Lord's Supper, the matter on which Luther was most sensitive, Melancthon, from about the time of the Diet of Augsburg, began to deviate from his former opinion. The spell which Luther had cast over him in his youth was broken; and, influenced by the arguments of Ecolampadius and by his own independent study of the Fathers, he really embraced, in his own mind, the Calvinistic doctrine, which was, in substance, the opinion advocated by Ecolampadius and Bucer. Melancthon still ⚫ rejected the Zwinglian theory which made Christ in the sacrament merely the object of the contemplative act of faith; but the other hypothesis of a real but spiritual reception of Him, in connection with the bread and wine, satisfied him. Melancthon's reserve and anxiety to keep the peace could not wholly conceal this change of opinion; and persons were not wanting, of whom Nicholas Amsdorf was the chief, to excite as far as they could, the jealousy and hostility of Luther. The result was that the confidential intimacy of the two men was interrupted. For several years Melancthon lived in distress and in daily expectation of being driven from his place.1 “Often," he says, writing in Greek as he frequently did, when he wanted to express something which he was afraid to divulge-"Often have I said that I dreaded the old age of a nature so passionate, like that of Hercules, or Philoctetes, or the Roman General, Marius."2 In remarks of this sort he referred, as he explained later, to the vehemence common to men of a heroic make. Yet,

1 Corpus Ref., v. 474. Galle, p. 142. A letter of Melancthon to Carlowitz, the Councilor of Duke Maurice (Corpus Ref., vi. 879), written just after the close of the Smalcaldic War, in which he speaks of the loveixia of Luther, affords proof of the uncomfortable relations in which he had stood with the strictly Lutheran Court of the Elector. This letter, which was written, says Ranke, at an unguarded moment, gave, under the circumstances, just offense to those who cherished the memory of Luther. See the remarks of Ranke, v. 3 Galle, p. 149.

53.

2 Corpus Ref., v. 310. Galle, p. 140.

in previous years, none had been more just and forbearing in reference to the undue tendency to concession and compromise on the part of Melancthon, than Luther. For the change in their relations, the fear and consequent reserve and shyness of the one were not less responsible than the imperious disposition of the other. It would be a mistake to suppose that Luther lost his confidence and love towards his younger associate; for expressions of Luther, in his very last days, prove the contrary. It would be an error, likewise, to suppose that Melancthon ever came to regard him as other than one of the foremost of men, a hero, endowed with noble and admirable qualities of heart as well as mind. But the original contrariety in the temperament of the two men, joined to the infirmities of character in Luther, which were aggravated by long years of strenuous combat and labor, and by disease, had the effect to cloud for a while their mutual sympathy and cordiality of intercourse. But the great soul of Luther shines out in the last letters he wrote several of them affectionate epistles to Melancthon- and in the last sermons he preached at Eisleben; where, within a few rods of the house in which he was born, full of faith and of peace, he breathed his last. "He is gone," said Melancthon to his students, "the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof, who ruled the Church in these last troubled times." In the course of the funeral address which Melancthon pronounced over the grave beneath the pulpit where the voice of Luther had so long been heard, he referred to the complaint made against Luther's excessive vehemence, and quoted the frequent remark of Erasmus, that "God has given to this last time, on account of the greatness of its diseases, a sharp physician." With grief and tears, he said, that choked his utterance, he set forth the grand labors of Luther, the kindness, geniality, and dignity of his character, his freedom from personal ambition, the wisdom and sobriety that were mingled

with his irresistible energy as a reformer. If even in this address, and still more in subsequent letters of Melancthon, traces of a partial estrangement may be detected in his tone, the effect is only a discriminating instead of a blind admiration of one with whom he was connected by an indissoluble bond of love.1

Luther, whatever deduction from his merit may be made on the score of faults and infirmities, was one of those extraordinary men of whom it may be said, in no spirit of hero-worship, but in sober truth, that their power, as manifested in history, can only be compared to that of the great permanent forces of nature. "He is one of those great historical figures in which whole nations recognize their own type."2 A life-long opponent of Protestantism, one of the first Catholic scholars of the age, says of him: "It was Luther's overpowering greatness of mind and marvelous many-sidedness which made him to be the man of his time and of his people; and it is correct to say that there never has been a German who has so intuitively understood his people, and in turn has been by the nation so perfectly comprehended, I might say, absorbed by it, as this Augustinian monk at Wittenberg. Heart and mind of the Germans were in his hand like the lyre in the hand of the musician. Moreover, he has given to his people more than any other man in Christian ages has ever give to a people: language, manual for popular instruction, Bible, hymns of worship; and everything which his opponents in their turn had to offer or to place in comparison with these, showed itself tame and powerless and colorless by the side of his sweeping eloquence. They stammered; he spoke with the tongue of an orator; it is he only who has stamped the imperishable seal of his own soul, alike upon the German language and upon the German

1 Galle, pp. 144, 145.

2 Dorner, Hist. of Prot. Theology, i. 81.

mind; and even those Germans who abhorred him as the powerful heretic and seducer of the nation, cannot escape; they must discourse with his words, they must think with his thoughts." 1

The Smalcaldic war began in 1546. Notwithstanding the disadvantageous situation of the Protestants, had the military management been good, they might have : achieved success. But a spirit of indecision and inactivity prevailed. The Elector, John Frederic, drove from his territory the forces of Maurice, but was surprised, defeated, and captured by Charles at Mühlberg, on the 24th of April, 1547; and soon after the Landgrave surrendered himself and submitted, to the Emperor. The victory of Charles appeared to be almost complete. His plan was to bring the Protestants once more under the Catholic hierarchy, and to make them content by the removal of external abuses. His estimate of the true character and moral strength of Protestantism was always superficial. Hence he put forth a provisional formula-called, after the sanction of it by the Diet, the Augsburg Interim -- at the same time that a scheme for reformation was by his authority laid before the German bishops, in which changes were proposed in points of external order. The work which he had thus commenced he hoped that the Council of Trent would complete. But this plan, however promising it seemed to the Emperor, had to contend not only with the opposition of earnest Protestants, but also with the discordant ideas and projects of the Pope. Charles had counted upon suppressing Protestantism by the joint influence of his own power and of the Council. But the Council had begun its work, not with measures looking to a reformation, but with the condemnation of the Protestant doctrines. Moreover, Pope Paul III., although he hoped that benefit would result to the Church

1 Dollinger, Vorträge, etc. (Munich, 1872). See, also, his earlier work, Kirche u. Kirchen (1861), p. 386.