Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/128

 time will come when he will think differently; meanwhile we must bear with the weakness of a good man. Farewell in the Lord.

550. LUTHER TO PAUL SPERATUS AT IGLAU.

Enders, iii, z^, (Wittenberg), June 13, 1522.

Paul Speratus (Spret) was born 1484 at Rotlen in Swabia. He studied at Freiburg and Paris, probably at Vienna and in Italy. He was ordained to the priesthood 1506. He received a prebend in Wiirz- burg (July, 1520), but was obliged to leave the city (November, 1521) because of his Lutheran views, which also cost him his next position in Salzburg. He was excommunicated at Vienna (January, 1522), but became pastor at Iglau in Moravia, where he was arrested and con- demned to death, but was pardoned on promising to leave the coun- try. His next home was Wittenberg (1523-24), but in 1524 he be- came, on Luther's recommendation, court preacher to Albert of Bran- denburg. From 1530 to his death (1551), he was Bishop of Pomerania, one of the two bishoprics of East Prussia. He was the organizer of the Lutheran Church in Prussia and was well known as a hymn writer, collaborating with Luther on the first evangelical hymnal (the VIII Lieder Gesangbuch, 1524). His life by Tschackert (Halle, 1891). Realency,, ADB., Julian, Diet of Hymolog^y I073f.

Grace and peace in Christ. I received your letter with the questions, and one at the same time from Madam Julia von StauflFen,* and learned from them with the greatest pleasure that the CJospel is bearing fruit in your land, because the Em- peror's satellites, the sophists, are persecuting it with incredi- ble fury in the Low Countries. But Cxod has given them an omen of death, if perchance they may come to themselves and repent ; for a sea-monster has been cast ashore at Haarlem. It is called a whale, and is seventy feet long and thirty-five wide. By all the precedents of antiquity this prodigy is a sure sign of God's wrath. The Lord have mercy on them and us.

To the questions of the Waldensians,* which you have put

^ Argula (not "Julia*') von Stauff, the first woman to write in behalf of the Reformation. She was the wife (married 1515) of Frederic of Grumbach, a Franconian noble, who seems to have been a nonentity. Her literary activity wa» provoked by the condemnation (1522) of Arsacius Seehofer by the University of Ingolstadt Her defence of Seehofer was followed by a series of writings (1522- 24), but her literary work ceased in 1524. She died 1554. Cf. Kolde, Arsacius Sefhofer und Argula von Grumbach {Beitrage Mur bayer. KG. 1905, and Reotency.)

Speratus, May 16 (Enders iii, 363). On Luther's relation, with them vide Kostlin- Kawerati i, 63aff.
 * !.€., the Bohemian Brethren, also known as the "Picards.** Cf. Luther to

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