Page:The letters of Martin Luther.djvu/14

 On his arrival he wrote above the door of his room, “I shall not die, but live,” from his beloved 118th Psalm. Till his books arrived, he at once began writing to his friends, and in his first letter says: “We have reached our Sinai, which I shall turn into a Zion, and build three tabernacles — one to the Psalter, one to the Prophets, and one to Æsop.” Luther intended reconstructing and purifying Æsop’s Fables. For where can one, outside the Bible, find a finer book of old world wisdom, from which so much instruction and warning how to act in everyday life towards all can be found?” asks Luther.

Matthesius, in lecturing on Luther, quotes Jotham’s fable of the trees wishing to appoint a king over them as a proof that the fable had not its origin in Phrygia or Greece, but was known to the Jews 3000 years before Christ. “What,” he asks, “if Asaph, the writer of so many beautiful psalms, was the first to collect these fables, even as others did the Proverbs of Solomon; for the two names, Æsop and Asaph, exactly correspond.”

Strange to say, Luther’s MS. of Æsop now lies, without the beautiful Preface, in the Vatican library in Rome. This fragment is upon ten sheets of strong paper, along with the four letters.

But graver studies interrupted this pastime, although Æsop often formed the subject of his table-talk. “His Popish adversaries did not disturb him greatly then. The weal of Christendom, which was threatened by the Turks, lay much nearer his heart. In the preceding year Turkey’s tents were ranged before Vienna’s gates, so that the dome of St. Stephen’s ran a narrow chance of having her cross replaced by the crescent. Different Christian states looked with no unfriendly eye at the Porte’s success, and so it is all the more touching to see how nobly the German Reformer almost forgot the dangers which assailed his own cause in