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Updated: May 17, 2025
As he had done formerly in his treatise on Christian liberty, and had now good reason to do with the Wittenbergers, he exhorts men to a loving and merciful regard to their weaker brethren, whose consciences were still ensnared by the old ordinances respecting fasting and masses. They ought not to be taken unawares, but instructed kindly and, if unable to agree at once, dealt with patiently.
A noble lady, Argula von Staufen, wife of the Ritter von Grumbach, formerly in the Bavarian army, who had written publicly for the cause of the gospel, and thereby incurred, with her husband, the displeasure of the Duke of Bavaria, and who was now in active correspondence with the Wittenbergers and Spalatin, expressed to the latter her surprise that Luther did not marry.
'You wish, he says, 'to serve God, and you don't know that you are the forerunners of the devil. He has begun by attempting to dishonour the Word; he has set you to work at that bit of folly, so that meanwhile you may forget faith and love. Thus Luther wrote in a work intended for the Wittenbergers.
He commissioned two of his counsellors to preside, and was anxious himself to be present. How much depended on the impression which the disputation itself, and Luther with it, should produce upon him! On June 24 the Wittenbergers entered Leipzig, with Carlstadt at their head.
On receiving the news from Wittenberg, he wrote to Spalatin, 'Good Heaven! our Wittenbergers will allow even the monks to have wives, but they shall not force me to take one. And he asks Melancthon jokingly, if he was going to revenge himself upon him for having helped him to get a wife; he would know well enough how to guard against that.
Zwingli begged it with tears in his eyes before the landgrave and all present, whilst he added: 'There are no men with whom I would rather be united than with the Wittenbergers. With the greatest zeal and as urgently as possible they endeavored to appear in harmony with us and never could endure my saying: 'You have another spirit than we. As often as they heard it they were inflamed.
Melancthon, indeed, had brought with him from Spires, where he had been staying with Philip, a suspicion that the latter inclined to the Zwinglians, and was right in his conjecture at least so far, that their doctrine did not appear to him nearly so questionable as to the Wittenbergers.
And in a number of congregations, indeed, among the great mass of the country people, there prevailed to a peculiar degree, that want of understanding, of ripe thought, and of inward sympathy, which Luther noticed even among many of his Wittenbergers.
Amen." In conclusion, the landgrave exhorted them to part as brethren. "Then Zwingli said," as Bullinger narrates, "there were no people on earth, with whom he would rather be united than the Wittenbergers, and he would cheerfully acknowledge Luther and his friends as brethren.
A secret commissioner of the former 'Protector of the Faith' was then sent to the Wittenbergers, and to Luther, whom he had so grossly insulted. The political side of the question he disregarded altogether.
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