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 conference further attempts were made to settle the Reformation controversy by a compromise, and Melanchthon, from his conciliatory spirit and facility of access, appeared to the defenders of the old faith the fittest of the reformers to deal with. His historical instinct led him ever to revert to the original unity of the church, and to regard subsequent errors as excrescences rather than proofs of an essentially anti-Christian system. He was weary of the rabies theologorum, and dreamed that the evangelical leaven, if tolerated, would purify the church’s life and doctrine. In 1537, when the Protestant divines signed the Lutheran Articles of Schmalkalden, Melanchthon appended to his signature the reservation that he would admit of a pope provided he allowed the gospel and did not claim to rule by divine right.

The year after Luther’s death, when the battle of Mühlberg (1547) had given a seemingly crushing blow to the Protestant cause, an attempt was made to weld together the evangelical and the papal doctrines, which resulted in the compilation by Pflug, Sidonius and Agricola of the Augsburg “Interim.” This was proposed to the two parties in Germany as a provisional ground of agreement till the decision of the Council of Trent. Melanchthon, on being referred to, declared that, though the Interim was inadmissible, yet so far as matters of indifference (adiaphora) were concerned it might be received. Hence arose that “adiaphoristic” controversy in connexion with which he has been misrepresented as holding among matters of indifference such cardinal doctrines as justification by faith, the number of the sacraments, as well as the dominion of the pope, feast-days, and so on. The fact is that Melanchthon sought, not to minimize differences, but to veil them under an intentional obscurity of expression. Thus he allowed the necessity of good works to salvation, but not in the old sense; proposed to allow the seven sacraments, but only as rites which had no inherent efficacy to salvation, and so on. He afterwards retracted his compliance with the adiaphora, and never really swerved from the views set forth in the Loci communes; but he regarded the surrender of more perfect for less perfect forms of truth or of expression as a painful sacrifice rendered to the weakness of erring brethren. Luther, though he had probably uttered in private certain expressions of dissatisfaction with Melanchthon, maintained unbroken friendship with him; but after Luther’s death certain smaller men formed a party emphasizing the extremest points of his doctrine. Hence the later years of Melanchthon were occupied with controversies within the Evangelical church, and fruitless conferences with his Romanist adversaries. He died in his sixty-third year, on the 19th of April 1560, and his body was laid beside that of Martin Luther in the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg.

MELANESIA, one of the three great divisions of the oceanic islands in the central and western Pacific. It embraces the Bismarck Archipelago, N.E. of New Guinea, the Louisiade, Solomon, Santa Cruz, New Hebrides and Loyalty islands, New Caledonia, Fiji and intervening small groups. The name (Gr. , black, and  , island) is derived from the black colour of the prevailing native race, the Papuan and its allied tribes. Many of these differ widely from the parent race, but all the Melanesian peoples have certain common characteristics which distinguish them sharply from the inhabitants of Polynesia and Micronesia. Their civilization is lower. The Melanesians are mostly “negroid,” nearly black, with crisp, curly hair elaborately dressed; their women hold a much lower position than among the Polynesians; their institutions, social, political and religious, are simpler, their manners ruder; they have few or no traditions; cannibalism, in different degrees, is almost universal; but their artistic skill and taste, as with some of the lower African negroes, are remarkable, and they are amenable to discipline and fair treatment. Their languages, which exhibit considerable difference among themselves, have features which mark them off clearly from the Polynesian, notwithstanding certain fundamental relations with the latter.