book against the Turk^ is now in press and will be finished before Judica' Sunday, Christ willing. Though I am well, I am compelled to be a sick man almost all the time, for Satan is harassing me, and that keeps me from writing and doing other things, for I must seek society so that I may not run the risk of solitude. Do you pray for me. . . .
Martin Luther.
821. LUTHER TO WENZEL UNK AT NUREMBERG. Enders, vii, 62. (Wittenbebg), March 7, 1529^
Grace and peace in Christ. I have received your two newsy letters, my dear Wenzel. But I have begun to despise my Moab,* and shall make no further reply to his maledic- tions. It is like Erasmus thus to persecute the Lutheran name* when he cannot live in safety except under its pro- tection. Why does he not go to his own Hollanders or French- men or Italians or Englishmen? He smells a rat. By these flatteries he is trying to prepare a place for himself, but he will not find it; he will fall between the two chairs. If the Lutherans had hated him as he hates them, he would, indeed, be in peril of his life at Basle.* But Christ will judge this atheist and Epicurean Lucian.
- Cf. supra, no. 808.
'Two Sundays before Easter; in this year March 14.
- Duke George of Saxony.
- The suggestion that Luther refers to Erasmus's epistle. Contra Quosdam qui st
faUo f'actant rvangtlicos, made by De Wette and adopted by Enders and the St. Louis editors, is impossible, for this is dated November 4, 1529, Optra, x, i573> A°<i was published in that year still later, BibUotheca BrasnUana, It is certain that Luther alludes to a letter of Erasmus to Pirckheimer, a» is shown both by the resemblances of the present lettter to it, and because he says he saw that Erasmus was attacking him in the latter's (private) letters, cf, infra, to Montanus, no. 834. The letter to Pirckheimer, Erasmi Bpistoiat, 1642, adx, 50, and Opera, X703, iii, coL xiaSff., has simply the year date 1528, but states that it was written in answer to a letter of Pirckheimer's of February 14. In all probability the year xs^Q is meant (whether by a misprint or by reckoning the beginning of the year March 25) both here and in the letter to Duke George, evidently abont the same time, dated February 5, 1528. Erasmus's epistle to Pirckheimer I believe to have been written about February 21, 1529, sent at once to Nurem- berg, and there shown by Pirckheimer to his friend Link, and by him reported to Luther. In this letter Erasmus speaks of his plan to leave Basle, and says: "Where Lutheranism reigns, learning dies. And yet this sort of men is chiefly nourished by learning. They seek only two things: good pay and a wife. The gospel offers them the nest — that is, the power of living as they please."
- Basle had by this time become too Protestant for Erasmus, and in the letter
just cited he wrote Pirckheimer that he mediUted flight. He actually left, in April,
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