# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 12 24_S66
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

66

the Lord's Supper, how he might properly conduct himself in it; for he was given to think that the Herr Praeceptor in this point certainly did not hold with Luther. Hereupon Philip answered Aemilius that Luther had written too clumsily of this matter; "for do you suppose," said he, "that Christ lets himself be torn with the teeth and digested again through the body?" When Aemilius thereupon pressed further upon this answer, saying that it would be only fair for Master Philip to compose this misunderstanding with Luther, since they both still lived, for the sake of posterity, that they might not be left in doubt, which could well be done now, while they were in their sound life and reason; Philip answered angrily: "Yes, you Harz people (for Aemilius was Luther's countryman and kinsman) have such hard heads that if one but tell you anything, you at once fly in one's face, throw the sack before one's door, and let no one be good for anything." From this it is in some measure to be gathered that Philip held Luther in almost the same suspicion in which the Swiss held him and falsely accused him, as though Luther taught the papistic transubstantiation or a Capernaitic eating."

We have now to consider Melanchthon's mind and conduct after Luther and to his death, that is, in the period from 1546 to 1560. Scarcely had Luther departed this life, and scarcely had the excellent testimony (unhappily the last of its kind) died away which Melanchthon had given at his grave, when he revealed in a letter to the Privy Councillor von Carlowitz a quite opposite disposition, writing to him (it is almost incredible) the following: "I will open to you my whole heart; until now I have lived in a, I might say, shameful bondage, in that Luther served his own opinion, and that with no small ambition, rather than the common good." With this utterance the conduct of Melanchthon quite agrees in an occurrence which the aforementioned Ratzeberger reports in another writing. For when in the year 1547 Melanchthon declined again the call to the university to be newly founded at Jena, which he had already accepted, and took his way from Weimar by way of Halle, he said to the church servants, and especially to Dr. Goldstein, who gave him escort as their teacher: "He thought to gather a university again at Wittenberg, and now the time had come also when he might speak out his opinion openly, which he had not dared in Luther's lifetime." Thereupon Dr. Goldstein answered him: "Ah, dear Herr Praeceptor, if you had not been agreed with Luther in some matter, you should have brought it forward as long as he lived; but if you now lead a different doctrine, you will surely find many who will contradict you." At this speech Philip changed color in his countenance, and the vena bifurcata on his forehead swelled up, which was a sign of his agitation of mind, turned abruptly away from him, and spoke no further word with him, but went on his way.

Still more unreservedly did Melanchthon express himself to the Brunswick preacher Caleander, as Schlüsselburg relates in the Theologie der Calvinisten. Caleander at a visit begged Melanchthon, for the sake of the honor of God, and the welfare of the Church, that he would but make known his opinion on the holy Supper publicly in a single leaf, whether he held with Luther, which very many were inclined to doubt, or whether he was addicted to Calvin, which most believed, because the Sacramentarians in their public writings misused his name, patience, and silence for the spread of their error. Thereupon Melanchthon answered in wrath that he had written enough, but if he were provoked to write more, he would publish a writing by which the whole world should be roused. Caleander begged quite humbly and kindly that he would not take the request made of him in ill part; he had made it that he might excuse him against those who say of him that he does not believe the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper. Thereupon Melanchthon picked up a little piece of paper from the ground and threw it at once away again, with these words, spoken in the greatest vehemence and indignation: "My Herr Caleander, if the natural and true body of Christ is in the blessed bread of the holy Supper, as you believe, why is his body not also in this paper? When Caleander had heard this harsh and untheological speech from Melanchthon, he went away from him sorrowful.

When in the year 1549 Calvin and Martyr, by their Declaration, made common cause with the Zwinglians, Melanchthon did not do the least thing against it, and continued also constantly in friendly relations with them, and when others wrote against them, he testified his displeasure at it. Joh. a Lasco, who had gone over to the Reformed, he likewise let do and rule as he would. On the other hand he declared in the years 1557 and 1559 to the Lutheran churches in Lower Saxony that he rejected the Sacramentarians, and in his German examen Ordinandorum he confesses that he is one with them in doctrine, if they would contradict Calvin. Yet already in the last-named year he gave at the Frankfurt convention, for the settling of the doctrinal disputes, a very indefinite, ambiguous, Calvinizing declaration with regard to the doctrine of the holy Supper, which, in spite of all objections, maintained its place. In the year 1559 he drew up, at the commission of the Elector Palatine, an opinion as to how the doctrinal dispute that had arisen between Heshusius, then still faithfully Lutheran, and the Calvinistically minded Klebitz might be settled, in which he advised that both be removed from their offices. In the year 1560 he wrote in similar affairs to the Bernese preacher Hardenberg, who for three years already, with the boldest attacks upon the 10th Article of the unaltered Augsburg Confession, favored by a Melanchthonian Wittenberg opinion, had gone on; this fire he stirred up still more, in that he wrote to him: "I exhort you, if they begin strife with you (namely the orthodox theologians Heshusius, Martin and others), that you reserve to yourself the right to appeal to P. Martyr, to me, and to other friends."

This letter, as also the wish found after his death upon his writing desk, on a slip, that God would deliver him from the fury of the theologians, by which he naturally could mean only those who rebuked his departures, — these are, to our knowledge, the last saddening intimations of his altered disposition. This inclination of Melanchthon toward the Reformed doctrine was the source of the ever wider and more manifest spread of it, of the strengthening of the adversaries in false doctrine, of the manifold grievous offenses of the orthodox, of the general falling away from the Lutheran doctrine, as also of all the disorders that have proceeded from it. The pupils of Melanchthon, who were too much taken with the authority of their teacher and held him for a second Luther, held the most influential church offices and so found opportunity enough to propagate the Calvinistic errors; this took place especially by means of the Corpus doctrinæ christianæ, a book which contained several writings of Melanchthon, e.g. the altered Augsburg Confession, the Loci theol., etc., likewise leavened with the leaven of false doctrine, and was forced upon the Lutheran congregations as a symbolical book. It had come so far already twenty years after Luther's and six years after Melanchthon's death (1566) that the Lutheran doctrine was still publicly in vogue in only a few places. The land of Saxony, formerly a fair paradise, where the pure doctrine for so long flourished, blossomed and bore fruit, was overspread with the weeds of the Calvinistic doctrine, and even when it seemed at last to have been rooted out by the help of the Formula of Concord, it grew up again anew soon afterward through the intrigues of Chancellor Crell, of shameful memory. In Denmark also and Sweden this false doctrine pressed in ever more strongly; but especially with regard to the Palatinate and Bremen and their complete falling away to the Reformed doctrine, we cannot sufficiently lament the wounds which Melanchthon has thereby dealt his and our mother church; and does not also the phantom of the present Union, with all the calamity which it has brought and still brings to the Lutheran Church through the tearing away of many thousands of her children, originate from that false tendency, of which the "Kirchenfreund" makes so much boast; has Melanchthon in this matter proved himself in a manner pleasing to God and salutary, "so soothing and sweetly refreshing," — was his influence, like Luther's, "equally necessary for the founding of the Luth.