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The Letters of Martin Luther
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General SummaryMARTIN LUTHER, despite his busy life as professor, preacher, translator of the Bible, and leader of the Reformation, was so voluminous a correspondent that the complete collection of those of his letters which have been preserved fills no less than ten volumes. He could never have imagined that his private letters would sometime see the light of day, else we should not have had in them so frank a revelation of his personality. Luther’s correspondence mirrors the man — his faults and petty weaknesses, as well as his fine spiritual nature, his intrepid will, and his devotion to truth as he saw the truth. Luther had many friends, among them John Lang and George Spalatin, who had been his fellow-students in the University of Erfurt, and Philip Melanchthon. Some of his letters to these men, together with the letters which he addressed to the archbishop of Mayence, Pope Leo X, and the emperor Charles V, present a fascinating account of the early days of the Reformation.
Chapter XLVI
Martin Luther and the Beginning of the
Reformation1
229. To John Lang2
. . . I am at present reading our Erasmus, but my heart recoils more and more from him. But one thing I admire is, that he constantly and learnedly accuses not only the monks, but also the priests, of a lazy, deep-rooted ignorance. Only, I fear that
he does not spread Christ and God’s grace sufficiently abroad, of which he knows very little. The human is to him of more importance than the divine.
Although unwilling to judge him, I warn you not to read blindly what he writes. For we live in perilous times, and every one who is a good Hebrew and Greek scholar is not a true Christian; even St. Jerome, with his five languages, cannot approach St. Augustine with his one language. Erasmus, of course, views all this from a different standpoint. Those who ascribe something to man’s freedom of will regard such things differently from those who know only God’s free grace.1 . . .
1 , translated by Margaret A. Currie. London, 1908. Macmillan and Company.
2 Currie, Letters, No. xi.
1 Written from Wittenberg, March 1, 1517.
Chicago: Margaret A. Currie, trans., The Letters of Martin Luther in Readings in Early European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1926), 495. Original Sources, accessed November 21, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=YCCB4ZBXMRKA3B9.
MLA: . The Letters of Martin Luther, translted by Margaret A. Currie, in Readings in Early European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, Ginn and Company, 1926, page 495. Original Sources. 21 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=YCCB4ZBXMRKA3B9.
Harvard: (trans.), The Letters of Martin Luther. cited in 1926, Readings in Early European History, ed. , Ginn and Company, Boston, pp.495. Original Sources, retrieved 21 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=YCCB4ZBXMRKA3B9.
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