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He, who in the 'Epistolae Virorum Obscurorum, had failed to exhibit in his satire the solemn earnestness which recommended itself to Luther's taste and judgment, now openly declared his concurrence with Luther's fundamental ideas of religion and theology, and his high appreciation of Scripture and of the Scriptural doctrine of salvation.
Rome is the leprous gentleman, and Luther is the man of God who told her how to become clean. The only difference is this: Naaman listened to wise counsel, and finally did what he had been told to do, and was cleansed. Rome disdains to this day to listen to the ill-bred son of a peasant, the theological upstart Luther, and remains as filthy as she has been. Luther's "Discovery" of the Bible.
He adopted here for the most part, as in other matters, a calm and courteous tone, and exercised a power of self-restraint to which Luther was a stranger. But with a lofty mien, though in the same tone, he rejected Luther's propositions, as the fruit of ludicrous obstinacy and narrowness of mind, nay, as a retrograde step into Popery.
He could not sing any of the words of Luther's great hymn, but he opened his mouth and emitted loud, deep, and partially harmonious notes.... Far below, this deep chanting struck on the ears of a little camp of Christianised half-breeds who were lumbering. They were breakfasting, but they rushed out cheerfully, quite prepared for the Second Advent.
In 1532 they appointed Luther's friend Nicholas Hausmann their court-preacher, and invited Luther and Melancthon to stay with them at Worlitz. George, in virtue of his office as archdeacon and prebendary of Magdeburg, himself undertook the visitation, and had the candidates for the office of preacher examined at Wittenberg.
One of them is a decree signed and sealed by the hand of a successor of Charlemagne, in the year 896. A signature made by a hand which vanished out of this life near a thousand years ago, is a more impressive thing than even a ruined castle. Luther's wedding-ring was shown me; also a fork belonging to a time anterior to our era, and an early bootjack.
But Luther's friendship with him was broken for ever. In another quarter also Melancthon had been charged with deviating in certain statements from the path of right doctrine.
They both possessed a fine command of the German language, and they were fired by a common hatred of Rome. Hutten had little or none of Luther's religious fervor, but he could not find colors too dark in which to picture to his countrymen the greed of the papal curia, which he described as a vast den, to which everything was dragged which could be filched from the Germans.
Thus on board the Hohenzollern, during his annual yachting cruise along the coast of Norway, he invariably conducts divine service on Sunday morning, taking his place in front of an altar erected on deck, upon which the German war-flag is spread, in lieu of an altar-cloth. Luther's hymns, accompanied by the trombones of the band, are sung.
These writers claim that Luther was, in the first place, morally unfit to undertake the translation of the Bible. To show to what desperate means Luther's Catholic critics will resort in order to make out a case against him, we note that one of the most recent disparagers of Luther informs the public that Luther's original name had been Luder.