Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1507-1521.djvu/49

 44 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND Let. 2a

great and famous, so I fear lest through it some will be led to defend the literal, that is the killing, sense of Scripture of which Lyra and almost all the commentators after Augustine are full. For even Lefevre d'fitaples^ a man otherwise, Heaven knows, spiritual and sincere, lacks this proper under- standing of the Scriptures when he interprets them, although he has it abundantly in his own life and in exhorting others.

You would say that I am rash to bring such men under the rod of Aristarchus ;* did you not know that I do it for the sake of theology and the salvation of my brothers. Farewell, my Spalatin, and pray for me. In haste, from a corner of our monastery, on the day after St. Luke's feast, 1516.

Brother Martin Luder, Augustinian.

22. SPALATIN TO ERASMUS AT BRUSSELS.

P. S. Allen: Opus epistolarum Erasmi (Oxford, 1906- ), ii. 415. Lochau/ December 11, 1516.

On the occasion of this letter, cf. supra, no. 21. Erasmus received, but did not answer it, and Spalatin wrote again, in November, com- plaining of his silence, but received no immediate answer to this, either. Cf. Allen, he, cit.

... I have recently been asked by an Augustinian priest, not less famous for the sanctity of his life than for his the- ological erudition, and at the same time a sincere admirer of yours, to salute you, and I thought I would do wrong not to seize the present occasion and write to you, busy as I am, the more so because we hope that the business which now* com- pells me to write will be of public interest both to contempo- raries and to posterity. Therefore, although the Augustinian monk, a man, believe me, of the most candid mind and the

ijames Lef^re, of Staples in Picardy, "the little Luther,*' as Michelet called at St Germain-des-Pres (a church now on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris) and devoted himself to Biblical studies. In 1509 he published a Quintuptex Psalterium, or Psalter in five languages, of which Luther owned and annotated a copy (his notes in Weimar, iv. 463) in 1513-16. He published the first complete trans- lation of the Bible in French 1530. In 1521 and 1533 he was attacked by the Sorbonne for Lutheranism, and during Francis I's captivity in 1525 fled to Strassburg, but later returned and finished his life at Paris. On his doctrine of justification by faith, cf, Humbert, op, cit., 283, and Harvard Theological Review, October, 1913.

SA proverbially captious critic of the second century B. C.


 * A castle fifteen miles southeast of Wittenberg.


 * In praesenHarum, as in text, is ungrammaticai ; I suggest: in praeeeniarium.

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