A letter of pardon was sent to him by the emperor, Ferdinand, saying that if he would recall his opinion, and act differently, he should receive his knightly possessions; but, as already stated, he never returned to Silesia.
During his life he published ninety-two treatises, and after his death many of his books were published by his fellow-believers. All his writings were forbidden to be printed by the Papists and Lutherans, and in different places his writings were burnt, “nevertheless God has given means for several of these books to be published four or five times.”[129]
Many years after the publication of his little work, before spoken of, upon the misuse of the sacraments, Schwenkfeld sent to Luther a number of his own works, and called Luther’s attention to one of his favorite doctrines, “the glory of the manhood of Jesus Christ.” To the noble messenger who bore the letter, etc., Luther returned an answer, speaking in severe and ignominious terms of the author, reproaching him with having kindled a fire in Silesia against the holy sacrament, and with his Eutychianism, as Luther calls Schwenkfeld’s doctrine that the manhood of Jesus Christ is no creature.[130]
It was not the desire of Schwenkfeld to build up a sect of his own, nor did he judge any congregation already collected, but he exhorted all to pray in spirit and in truth in all places. He is said to have directed men only to Christ and his power, and to have filled, until his death, the office of a true evangelical preacher.
Before he departed, we read that he heard a voice, “Up, up into heaven!” which voice he had heard also before he rode out of his fatherland, saying, “Up, up out of the fire!” (His hearing had failed nearly forty years before his death.)
Not long before dying he said, “Now home; home into the true fatherland.”
“He died in God, and went home to his rest,” in the city of Ulm, in 1562.[131]
He was buried in a cellar. (It may be remembered that Menno was buried in a garden.)
Nearly three hundred years after the birth of Caspar Schwenkfeld von Ossing, the first Schwenkfeld congregation was organized; he was born in 1490, it was formed in 1782. It was upon the new continent discovered by Columbus, in the English colony of Pennsylvania, that a little band of exiled Schwenkfelders formed this society after they had sojourned here nearly fifty years. How were they able to continue Schwenkfelders, during the period of more than two hundred years between the death of their founder and their organization here?[132]