Page:The letters of Martin Luther.djvu/11

 language, and his words, as Richter says, were half-battles; while according to Coleridge, his “miraculous and providential translation of the Bible was the fundamental act of the construction of literary German.”

This busiest of men was the most indefatigable of letter-writers; and in his letters all the events of those stormy times are mirrored, as well as the influences which developed his own religious life. His letters are specially valuable because of his allusions to his herculean labors in the field of Bible translation.

But his love for the Scriptures lightened the task. Referring specially to the Psalms, which occupied him so continuously through life, Luther said: “The Holy Scriptures were to believing souls what the meadow is to the animal, what the home is to man, the nest to the bird, the cleft of the rock to the sea-fowl, the stream to the fish.”

Busch, in prefacing Bismarck’s Life, claims for his hero a hundred years hence a place alongside of Luther, and asks who would not now be glad to have fuller details of the Reformer in the great days and hours of his life? His letters abundantly supply these details, while at the same time they throw light on many a disputed point of Reformation history.

In Luther’s lifetime collections of his letters began to appear. The first, in 1530, contained four letters. In 1546 Cruciger issued eight letters of consolation, and gradually these were increased. In 1556, Aurifaber, in Jena, with the Elector John Frederick, meditated issuing 2000.

One is struck, in reading Luther’s letters, by the great love which bound that Wittenberg circle together, extending to far-away Nürnberg, the home of Pirkheimer, Albrecht Dürer, Spengler, Link, and Osiander—to Strassburg, where Capito, Bücer, and Matthew Zell, with his