The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

Wieland.
Ernst Karl Wieland opens the last paragraph of his Characteristics of
Luther with the words: "Such was he, so great in whatever aspect we view
him, so worthy of admiration, so deserving of universal gratitude; alike
great as a man, a citizen, and a scholar."
Stang.
Stang, to whom we are indebted for one of the best lives of Luther,
thus closes his biography: "We stand before the image of the great
Reformer with the full conviction that between the first century, when
Christianity appeared in its youth, and the sixteenth, when it obtained the
maturity of its riper age, not one of our race has appeared, in whom the
ever-creative spirit of God, the spirit of light and of law, has found nobler
embodiment, or wrought with richer sequence."
Melanchthon.
But among all the tributes which the centuries have laid at the feet or
on the tomb of Luther, none are more touching than the words in which
Melanchthon showed that Luther's death had brought back, in all its
tenderness, the early, pure devotion. Melanchthon, the Hamlet of the
Reformation, shrinking from action into contemplation, with a dangerous
yearning for a peace which must have been hollow and transient, had
become more and more entangled in the complications of a specious but
miserable policy which he felt made him justly suspected by those whose
confidence in him had once been unlimited. Luther was saddened by
Melanchthon's feebleness, and Melanchthon was put under restraint by
Luther's firmness. Melanchthon was betrayed into writing weak, fretful,
unworthy words in regard to Luther, whose surpassing love to
Melanchthon had been sorely tested, but had never yielded. But death
makes or restores more bonds than it breaks. When the tidings of Luther's
death reached Wittenberg, Melanchthon cried out in anguish: “0 my
father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof"--tributary
words from one of the greatest, to the greatest. He was gone of whom
Melanchthon, cautious in praise, and measured in language, had said, from
a full heart: "Luther is too great, too wonderful for me to depict in words."-
-"If there be a man on earth I love with my whole heart, that man is
Luther."