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Updated: June 7, 2025
Alas! in the morning it turned out to be rather heavy. Repetto, who is very fond of reading, has lent us a short biography of Melanchthon, which we are reading aloud. In one of the Glasgow papers that came from the Loch Katrine there is a notice of De P 's sudden death in Paris. It is curious we should have learnt the news in this way.
The hero of the Reformation, Luther, with whom Melanchthon may be associated in this matter, could be no less pusillanimous on occasion than the hero of the New Learning, Erasmus. Luther undoubtedly saw in Sickingen's revolt a means of weakening the Catholic powers against which he had to fight, and at its inception he avowedly favoured the enterprise.
Melanchthon himself furnished a striking illustration of the justness of this remark; for although, like other reformers, he taught the doctrine of a divine fatality of all events, in order to humble the pride of the human intellect, his own reason afterward rebelled against it. He not only recanted the monstrous doctrine which made God the author of sin, but he openly combatted it.
When John Huss was being led to execution, there was stuck on his head a paper cap, scrawled over with pictures of devils, to whom the wretched priests by whom he was surrounded consigned his soul; but again and again he cried, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." These were also the last words of Polycarp, of Jerome of Prague, of Luther, of Melanchthon, and of many others.
Melanchthon and Bucer, and with them several of the greatest pulpit orators of Germany, had set out to come to London, and, as delegates of the Germanic Protestant princes, to nominate the king as head of their alliance. Leti, vol. I, p. 180. Granger, vol. "Peace, then, to the ashes of unhappy Anne Boleyn!
I laid my hand on it, and thought his hand also had passed over the paper which he has made living with his thoughts. Melanchthon, of whom a far more delicate penmanship might have been expected, wrote a coarse, rugged hand, quite like Dr. Bishop's.
It speaks volumes for the integrity of Luther that both sides were willing to permit him to arbitrate their differences. The invitation came originally from the peasants and was addressed to Luther, Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, and the Elector Frederick jointly, but it was not acted on until Count Albert invited Luther to come to Eisleben.
I considered that this doctrine was either a paradox or a truism a paradox in Luther's mouth, a truism in Melanchthon. I thought that the Anglican Church followed Melanchthon, and that in consequence between Rome and Anglicanism, between high Church and low Church, there was no real intellectual difference on the point. I wished to fill up a ditch, the work of man.
Melanchthon, a man of sound and moderate ideas, made little systems from the several parts of philosophy, adapted to the truths of revelation and useful in civic life, which deserve to be read even now. After him, Pierre de la Ramée entered the lists.
Hence it was, that Melanchthon himself could not long submit to his own doctrine; and he who had undertaken to teach others humility, became one of the most illustrious of rebels. This suggests the profound aphorism of Pascal: “It is dangerous to make us see too much how near man is to the brutes, without showing him his greatness.
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