Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/307

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some additions. I should have liked it to be given to Lucas's ^ printers, who are idle just now, so that I might get a little vacation. Why do you not go on and get married? I urge matrimony on others with so many alignments that I am myself almost moved to marry, though our enemies do not cease to condemn that manner of life, and our wiseacres laugh at it all the time.

I rejoice that Christ is helping Kern.' Carlstadt is raging at Rothenburg on the Tauber,' and is persecuting us every- where, though he himself a fugitive. H^ had intended to make himself a nest in Schweinfurt, but Count von Henne- berg* forbade it in a letter which he sent to the city council. I wish that the princes would also put an end to Dr. Strauss's seeking after a kingdom of his own.' The man is mad enough, but has not found a suitable time and place for letting it out. For a long while, though secretly, he has had a poor opinion of us, and prefers that seditious peasant,* altogether a Carl- stadtian, whom you admired at Nuremberg. It has been dis- covered, however, that this man is a knave, and it is said that he is a monk disguised as a peasant. Farewell, and pray for me. Martin Luther.

672. LUTHER TO SPALATIN. Enders, v, 157. (Wfttenberg), April x6, 1525.

Grace and peace. I have put everything, into the hands of

^ Cranach.

'In Allstedt Cf, supra, no. 655, p. 2%a, n. a. • On Carl8tadt*8 captiTity in Rothenburg, vide Barge, ii, agSfS. ^ Count William of Henneberg-Schleusingen. His interference would seem to have been in contravention of the rights of the city of Schweinfttrt Cf, Barge,

ii. a97.

■Jacob Strauss (1480^5 — 1533O was at this time preaching in Eisenach, and he had been entrusted by the Elector with the risitation of the churches in that neighborhood. He had preriously had rather a stormy career and had been ex- pelled (issa) from the territories of the Archduke Ferdinand. Later he was su&pected of complicity in the Peasants' Rerolt (1525) and forced to leave Saxony, going to Baden, where he was almost immediately involved in the aacramentarian controversy. Realencykl.

  • "Thc Peasant of Wohrd,** who went under the assumed name of Diepold Per-

inger. Claiming to be merely a peasant, unable to read or write, he appeared in 1534 as a preacher in the neighborhood of Nuremberg. When driven out of that city he went to Kitsingen, afterwards to Rothenburg. He was involved in the Peasants* War in 1525, and is said to have been captured and punished by drowning. Cf. O. Clemen, BeitrSge, ii, 1902, Ssff.

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