Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/307

 some additions. I should have liked it to be given to Lucas's ^ printers, who are idle just now, so that I might get a little vacation. Why do you not go on and get married? I urge matrimony on others with so many alignments that I am myself almost moved to marry, though our enemies do not cease to condemn that manner of life, and our wiseacres laugh at it all the time.

I rejoice that Christ is helping Kern.' Carlstadt is raging at Rothenburg on the Tauber,' and is persecuting us every- where, though he himself a fugitive. H^ had intended to make himself a nest in Schweinfurt, but Count von Henne- berg* forbade it in a letter which he sent to the city council. I wish that the princes would also put an end to Dr. Strauss's seeking after a kingdom of his own.' The man is mad enough, but has not found a suitable time and place for letting it out. For a long while, though secretly, he has had a poor opinion of us, and prefers that seditious peasant,* altogether a Carl- stadtian, whom you admired at Nuremberg. It has been dis- covered, however, that this man is a knave, and it is said that he is a monk disguised as a peasant. Farewell, and pray for me. Martin Luther.

672. LUTHER TO SPALATIN. Enders, v, 157. (Wfttenberg), April x6, 1525.

Grace and peace. I have put everything, into the hands of

^ Cranach.

'In Allstedt Cf, supra, no. 655, p. 2%a, n. a. • On Carl8tadt*8 captiTity in Rothenburg, vide Barge, ii, agSfS. ^ Count William of Henneberg-Schleusingen. His interference would seem to have been in contravention of the rights of the city of Schweinfttrt Cf, Barge,

ii. a97.

■Jacob Strauss (1480^5 — 1533O was at this time preaching in Eisenach, and he had been entrusted by the Elector with the risitation of the churches in that neighborhood. He had preriously had rather a stormy career and had been ex- pelled (issa) from the territories of the Archduke Ferdinand. Later he was su&pected of complicity in the Peasants' Rerolt (1525) and forced to leave Saxony, going to Baden, where he was almost immediately involved in the aacramentarian controversy. Realencykl.

inger. Claiming to be merely a peasant, unable to read or write, he appeared in 1534 as a preacher in the neighborhood of Nuremberg. When driven out of that city he went to Kitsingen, afterwards to Rothenburg. He was involved in the Peasants* War in 1525, and is said to have been captured and punished by drowning. Cf. O. Clemen, BeitrSge, ii, 1902, Ssff.
 * "Thc Peasant of Wohrd,** who went under the assumed name of Diepold Per-

�� �