In Aug., 1536, when Melanchthon paid a visit to his home and also to Tübingen, he became more closely acquainted with the state of the Protestant Churches, both in the Palatinate and in Swabia. It was at that time that he wrote to his friend Myconius: “Had you travelled with us and seen the woeful devastation of the Churches in many localities you would undoubtedly long, with tears and groans, for the Princes and the learned to take steps for the welfare of the Churches. At Nuremberg the good attendance at public worship and the orderly arrangement of the ceremonies pleased me greatly; elsewhere, however, lack of order and general barbarism is wonderfully estranging the people [from religion; ‘[Greek: ataxia] et barbaries mirum in modum alienat animos’]. Oh, that the authorities would see to the remedying of this evil!”[956]
After he had reluctantly resumed the burden of his Wittenberg office he continued to fret about the dissensions in his own camp. “Look,” he wrote to Veit Dietrich in 1537, “how great is the danger to which the Churches are everywhere exposed and how difficult it is to govern them, when those in authority are at grips with one another and set up strife and confusion, whereas it is from them that we should look for help.... What we have to endure is worse than all the trials of Odysseus the sufferer.”[957]
In the following year he told the same friend the real evil was, that “we live like gipsies, no one being willing to obey another in any single thing.”[958]
In the name of Wittenberg University he wrote to Mohr, the Naumburg preacher, who was quarrelling with his brethren in the ministry, “What is to happen in future if, for so trivial a matter, such wild and angry broils break out amongst those who govern the Church?”[959]
The growing tendency to strife he describes in 1544 in these words: “There are at present many people whose quarrels are both countless and endless, and who everywhere find a pretext for them.”[960]
Many of his complaints concerning the morals of the time, as Döllinger remarks, sound very much like those of a “sworn Catholic criticising the state of affairs brought about by the Reformation.” Döllinger also calls attention to the saying of 1537: “The only glory remaining in this iron age is that of boldly breaking down the barriers of discipline (‘audacter dissipare vincula disciplinæ’) and of propounding to the people new opinions neatly cut and coloured.”[961] A similar dictum dates from 1538. “Our age, as you can see, is full of malice and madness, and more addicted to intrigue than any previous one. The man who is most shameless in his abuse is regarded as the best orator. Oh, that God would change this!”[962] The growing evils made him more and more downhearted. “People have become barbarians,” he exclaims twelve years later to his friend Camerarius, “and, accustomed as they are to hatred and contempt of law and order, fear lest any restraint be put on their licentiousness (‘metuunt frenari licentiam’). These are the evils decreed for the last age of the world.”[963]
Over and over again we can see how the timorous man endeavours to clear the religious innovations of any responsibility for the prevalent lawlessness, which, as he says, deserved to be bewailed with floods of tears; after all, the true Church had been revived; this edifice, this temple of God, still remained amidst all the chaos; even in Noe’s day it had been exposed to damage.[964] At times, though less frequently than Luther, he lays all the blame on Satan; the latter, by means of the scandals, was seeking to scare people away from the true Evangel now brought to light, and to vex the preachers into holding their tongues.
Pessimistic consideration of the “last age of the world” was quite in his line; the dark though not altogether unfriendly shadow of the approaching end of all was discernible in the moral disorders, in the unbelief and anti-christian spirit of the foe. He would not dwell, so he once said, on the state of things among the people towards whom he was willing to be indulgent, but it could not be gainsaid that, “among the learned open contempt for religion was on the increase; they lean either towards the Epicureans or towards universal scepticism. Forgetfulness of God, the wickedness of the times, the senseless fury of the Princes, all unite in proving that the world lies in the pains of travail and that the joyous coming of Christ is nigh.”[965] It was his hopelessness and the great solace he derived from the approaching end of all things that called forth this frame of mind. It is also plain that he saw no prospect of improvement. “In these last days,” he says, even a zealous preacher can no longer hope for success, though this does not give him the right to quit his post.[966] The poetic reference to the frenzied old age of the world (“delira mundi senecta”) is several times met with in his letters.
In 1537 he grumbled to Johann Brenz, the preacher, of the hostility of the theologians, especially of the Luther-zealots; he had seen what hatred the mitigations he had introduced in Luther’s doctrines had excited. “I conceal everything beneath the cloak of my moderation, but what shall I do eventually faced by the rage of so many (‘in tanta rabie multorum’)?”[967] “I seek for a creephole,” he continues, “may God but show me one, for I am worn out with illness, old age and sorrow.”
Of Amsdorf he learnt with pain that he had warned Luther against him as a serpent whom he was warming in his bosom.[968]