LUTHER CONTINUES HIS TRANS

LATION OF THE BIBLE WITH
THE ASSISTANCE OF MEL-
ANCTHON, 1523-4.

ROM the confused

FROM

crowd of the iconoclasts, and their fanatical excesses, we enter once more Luther's silent cell, to witness the quiet progress of his translation of the Bible. At his side stands the younger friend and assistant of the reformer, Philip Melancthon, the distinguished teacher of the Greek language at the young university. According to Luther's description, he was 66 a mere youth in age, figure, and appearance; but a man when one considered the extent of his knowledge."

This was the beautiful period of their friendship, when each labored in the same spirit at their common task, full of admiration

of the higher gifts of

the other. "See how

Luther says in 1522, "No commentator has come nearer to the spirit of the Apostle Paul than my Philippus."

Luther's opinions of the Scriptures were somewhat curious. "I frankly own," he says, "that I know not whether or no I am master of the full meaning of the Psalms; although I have no doubts about my giving their correct sense. One man will be mistaken in some passages, another in others. I see things which Augustin overlooked; and others, I am aware, will see things which I miss. Who will dare to assert that he has completely understood a single Psalm? Our life is a beginning and a progress; not a consummation. He is the best, who comes nearest to the spirit. There are stages in life and action-why

In

that we proceed from knowledge to knowledge. The Gospel of St. John is the true and pure Gospel, the principal Gospel, because it contains more of Jesus Christ's own words than the rest. like manner, the Epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter are far above (?) the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke. In fine, St. John's Gospel and his First Epistle, St. Paul's Epistles,-especially those to the Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and St. Peter's First Epistle, are the books which show thee Jesus Christ, and which teach thee all that is necessary and useful for thee to know, though thou wert never to see any other book." He did not consider either the Epistle to the Hebrews or the Epistle of St. James of apostolic authority.

THE lower classes, the peasantry, who had so long slumbered under the weight of feudal oppression, heard princes and the learned speak of liberty, of enfranchisement, and they applied to themselves that which was not spoken for them. The reclamation of the poor peasants of Suabia will remain, in its simple barbarism, a monument of courageous moderation. By degrees, the eternal hatred of the poor to the rich was aroused; less blind than in the jaquerie, but striving after a systematic form, which it was only to attain afterward, in the time of the English levelers, and complicated with all the forms of religious democracy, which were supposed to have been stifled in the middle age. Lollards, Beghards, and a crowd of apocalyptic visionaries were in motion. At a later moment, the rallying cry was the necessity for a second baptism: at

the beginning, the aim was a terrible war against the established order of things, against every kind of order-a war on property, as being a robbery of the poor; a war on knowledge, as destructive of natural equality, and a tempting of God, who had revealed all to his saints. Books and pictures were inventions of the devil. The peasants first rose up in the Black Forest, and then around Heilbronn and Frankfort, and in the county of Baden and Spires; whence the flame extended into Alsace, and nowhere did it assume a more fearful character. It reached the Palatinate, Hesse, and Bavaria. The leader of the insurgents in Suabia was one of the petty nobles of the valley of the Necker, the celebrated Goetz of Berlichingen, Goetz with the Iron Hand, who pretended they had forced him to be their general against his will.

The reformation in the Church is in danger of being swallowed up by a political revolution; the internal freedom of the Christian is to justify rebellion against the state. This stormy flood Luther opposes with his whole being; shudderingly he seems to look into a bottomless abyss that opens before his people.

In May, 1525, he wrote to his brotherin-law from Seeburg, where he had warned the people against rebellious proceedings: "Though there were many more thousand peasants, they are all of them robbers and murderers, who take to the sword for the sake of their own gratification, and who want to make a new rule in the world, for which they have from God neither law, nor right, nor command; they likewise bring disgrace and dishonor upon the word of God and upon the gospel: yet I still hope that this will not continue nor last. Well, when I get home, I will prepare myself for death with God's help, and await my new masters, the robbers and murderers. But sooner than approve of and pronounce right their doings, I would lose a hundred necks, so God in his mercy help me!

He had already warned the peasants, some time previously, in his " Admonition to Peace," and said: "Be ye in the right as much as ye may, yet it becometh no Christians to quarrel and to fight, but to suffer wrong and bear evil. Put away the name of Christians, I say, and make it not the cover for your impatient, quarrelsome, and unchristian intentions. That name I will grudge you, nor leave it you, but tear it away from you by writing and preaching, as long as a vein beats in my body."

LUTHER'S MARRIAGE.

FROM the agitation caused by his opposition to the iconoclasts Luther had returned to his Bible; from the annihilating struggles of a political revolution he turned to the symbolical erection of a Christian household-to the foundation of a family in the true German and evangelical spirit. Even during the storm of insurrection he wrote in the spring of 1525: "And if I

I

can fit it, I mean to take my Kate to wife ere I die, in despite of the devil, although I hear that my enemies will continue. hope they may not take from me my courage and my joy. A few weeks later, on June 13th, he was united to Katharina for life in the house of the town-clerk (Stadtschreiber) of Wittenberg: his friend Bugenhagen blessed the sacred union, in the presence of the lawyer Apel and of Lukas Kranach. "Beloved Heavenly Father," so did he pray, "as thou hast given me the honor of thy name and of thine office, and willest also that I should be called and be honored as a father, grant me grace, and bless me, that I may govern and nourish my dear wife, child, and servants in a divine and Christian manner.

. . I have not known how to refuse to my beloved Lord and Father this last act of obedience to his will which he claimed of me, in the good hope that God may grant me children. Also that I may confirm my doctrine by this my act and deed; seeing that I find still so many faint hearts, notwithstanding the shining light of the gospel. . . . . I have reaped such great discredit and contempt from this my marriage, that I hope the angels will rejoice and the devils weep. The world and her wiseacres know not nor understand this word, that it is divine and holy. If matrimony be the work of God, what wonder that the world should be offended thereat? Is it not also offended that its own God and Maker has taken upon himself our flesh and blood and given it for its salvation, as a redemption and as food? . . Matrimony drives, hunts, and forces man into the very innermost and highest moral condition; that is to say, into faithsince there is no higher internal condition than faith, which dependeth solely upon the word of God. . . Let the wife think thus: My husband is an image of the true high head of Christ. In the same manner the husband shall love his wife with his whole heart, for the sake of the perfect love which he seeth in Christ, who gave himself for us. Such will be a Christian and divine marriage, of which the heathens know nothing. It is the highest mercy of God when a married couple love each other with their whole hearts through their whole lives."

His bride, Catharine von Bora, was a young girl of noble birth, who had escaped

succeeded tolerably in both. Come, and be crowned with lilies and roses." (December, 1525.) In April, 1527, on being made a present of a clock by an abbot of Nuremberg, "I must," he says, in acknowledging its receipt," I must become a student of mathematics in order to comprehend all this mechanism, for I never saw anything like it." A month afterward he writes: "The turning tools are come to hand, and the dial with the cylinder and the wooden clock. I have tools enough for the present, except you meet with some newlyinvented ones, which can turn of themselves, while my servant snores or stares at the clouds. I have already taken my degree in clockmaking, which is prized by me as enabling me to tell the hour to my drunkards of Saxons, who pay more attention to their glasses than the hours, and care not whether sun, or clock, or whoso regulates the clock, go wrong. (May 19th, 1527.) "You may absolutely see my melons, gourds, and pumpkins grow; so I have known how to employ the seeds you have sent me." (July 5th.)

Gardening was no great resource, and Luther found himself in a situation equally strange and distressing. This man, who governed kings, saw himself dependent on the elector for his daily food.

THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN LUTHER AND ZWINGLI ON THE SACRAMENT.

TEN years earlier Luther had stood at Leipzic opposed to the principal and dexterous theological champion of the court of Rome; here, at Marburg, we find him opposing the spiritual head of the Swiss Reformation. Wittemberg and Zurich, Saxony and Switzerland, represented by their most distinguished professors, debated in the castle at Marburg, from the 1st to the 4th of October, 1529, upon the theological interpretation of the sacrament of the Lord's supper, and upon the words employed in instituting it.

The profound mystery of the sacrament of the Lord's supper, in its depth and power entirely beyond the range, and indeed opposed to the scholastic contro