Page:The letters of Martin Luther.djvu/18

 gifted with greater natural talents and a more finished education, had less insight and self-reliance than Luther, and was therefore glad to follow his guidance. As he sat in the Council of Princes between Frederick and Luther, and understood both men, it is difficult to overestimate his services to the Reformation. Spalatin died in 1545.

Justus Jonas may be placed next. He was born in 1593. He took his doctor’s degree in Erfurt, then studied law in Wittenberg, and was professor and provost there. Jonas translated and defended Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. This was his first service to the Reformation. Jonas was an eloquent preacher, and on Sabbaths and Fast-days preached in the Stift’s and Schloss churches. “What learning Wittenberg contains, Erfurt is frosty in comparison,” he wrote to Coban Hesse. Jonas was at the head of the second Visitation; and in 1533 presided over the creation of the first Evangelical doctors, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, etc., at which the Elector John Frederick, with his wife Sibylla, our Anne of Cleve’s sister, were present. Later Jonas became superintendent in Halle. It was in Jonas’s church (in whose arms Luther may be said to have died) that Luther’s body lay over the Sabbath on the way from Eisleben. When announcing his death to the Elector, Jonas begged him to write a letter of consolation to Bugenhagen, for a great love bound all of them together. Melanchthon said: “Bugenhagen is a grammatiker, I am a dialectician, Jonas is an orator, only Luther surpasses us all.” After Luther’s death Jonas was exiled, and died at Eisfeld, 1555.

Bugenhagen comes next. Born 1485, he studied in Greifswald, and was won to the truth by Luther’s Babylonian Captivity, and came to Wittenberg in 1521 to be near his master. He became pastor of the Stadt Kirche, where Luther often preached for him when he was absent