to give it. Who am I to judge what should either please or profit the public, since it lies entirely within God's grace that anything should do either? Or do you not know that some- times the more wholesome a thing is the less it pleases? What is more wholesome than the gospel and Christ? And yet to most they seem poor and are an odor of death unto death, to very few an odor of life unto life. Perhaps you will say that you at least hope to please those who like good things. Here you have no need of my judgment; the sheep hear every call of the shepherd, and flee only from the voice of a stranger. Be assured, therefore, that whatever you do, if it is only good and the voice of Christ, will please and profit, though only a few, for sheep are few in this land of wolves.
... Do not follow your own wishes, however good and pious (for the common monk and priest err often and badly), but ask permission, or rather wait for a command to do this or anything unless you wish your work to be straw. I will add a piece of advice. If you delight in reading pure, sound theology, like that of the earliest age, and in German, read the sermons of John Tauler, the Dominican, of which I send you, as it were, the quintessence.^ I have never read either in Latin or in our own tongue theology more wholesome or more agreeable to the gospel. Taste and see, therefore, how sweet is the Lord, as you have first tasted and seen how bitter is everything in us. Farewell, and pray for me.
Brother Martin Luther, Augustinian.
24. LUTHER TO SPALATIN. Enders, i. 26. Wittenberg, December 26, 1516."
manigfSltigen schSden des Kriegs und was uhels, nachteyls und unwtsens usm den Kriegen erwechsxt. Printed in quarto without place, date or name of printer. Mr. P. S. Allen {Opus episiolarum Erasmi, i. 551) puts this translation in 1514, but the fact that the letter would hardly circulate so briskly and the passage in the letter here translated, would indicate 15 16 or 1517 as a more probable date. There is evidence in a letter from Luther to Spalatin, December 21, 1518, to show that he knew this translation.
On Tauler see above no. 20. Luther owned a copy of his sermons in the edition of Augsburg 1508 and his marginal notes are printed Weimar ix. 95. The "quintessence" is the German Theology, a tract by one of Tauler's school, which Luther perhaps attributed to Tauler, and which he first edited in this 3rear. His preface, Weimar, i. 152.
'This letter is put by Enders in 1515 on the ground that Luther and the Germans of his time dated the new year from Christmas. The same statement is made by Knaake (Weimar, i. 19) and by Bretschneider of Melanchthon. iCorpua
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