PREFACE
I
About a hundred years ago Coleridge wrote: "I can scarcely conceive a more delightful volume than might be made from Luther's letters, especially those from the Wartburg, if translated in the simple, idiomatic, hearty mother-tongue of the original." One's first impulse on reading those words is to search for this "delightful volume," but, though nearly a century has elapsed since Coleridge thus wrote, no such volume is to be found in present-day German, even in Germany. This treasure ought to be accessible to all classes. The reason why all classes have not had access to Luther's letters long ago is, that they have lain embedded, many of them in Latin, in the volumes of De Wette; also in Old German, in the twenty-four huge volumes of Walch's edition of Luther's Works, published about 170 years ago; and in the three volumes of Dr. Gottfried Schütze's German edition of Luther's hitherto unpublished letters, translated from the Latin in 1784.
From the two latter sources De Wette culled most of the 2,324 letters published in 1826, in his first five volumes, which he dedicated to the Grand Duke Karl August, of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe's friend, in grateful remembrance of the services rendered by the princes of the Saxon Ernestine line to the Reformation, and of the use
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