waiting with the greatest eagerness and anxiety to know what you think of these paradoxes. Truly I fear that they will seem not only paradox, but heterodox, to your teachers, which can be only orthodox to us. Please let me know this as soon as possible, and assure my truly reverend masters in the the- ological faculty and in the other departments, that I am most ready to come and defend the theses publicly, either in the imiversity or in the monastery, so that they may not think I am whispering in a corner, if, indeed, they esteem our university so meanly as to think it a comer.
I am sending you the Ten Commandments in both Latin and German,^ so that if you wish you may preach them to the people, for it is that I did according to the gospel precept as I understand it. . . . Farewell.
Brother Martin Luder.
P. S. — Please send back as soon as possible my lectures on Galatians,' for the copy belongs to Brother Augustine Himmel,* of Cologne.
40. LUTHER TO CHRISTOPHER SCHEURL AT NUREMBERG. Endcrs, i. 108. Wittenberg, September 11, 1517.
Greeting. Sweet Christopher, even if this letter has no occasion worthy of a man so great as you, yet I thought I had sufficient reason to write only in our friendship, not regarding the titles with which you are worthily adorned, but only your pure, upright, kind and recent affection for me. For, if ever silence is a fault, it is silence between friends, for a little nonsense now and then fosters and 'even perfects friendship as much as gravity docs. . . . Wherefore I pre- ferred to write nonsense, rather than not to write at all. And
^Lttther's text is known only in Latin; when a German version appeared at Basle in ts^o it was made by Sebastian Munster.
These were the lectures on Galatians begun October 27, 15 16 (r/. supra, p. 49), but not printed until isipt And then in a rerised form. A copy of the original lectures by an unknown student is still in existence. Kostlin-Kawerau, i. 107, note 2. According to this the lectures were finished March 17, 15 17. to Cologne, where his lectures were forbidden, then to Wittenberg again. He was at Luther's recommendation made pastor first of Neustadt-am-Odor and then of Colditx is»9. He succeeded Spalatin (1545) >t Altenburg and died there 15S3. Endcrs, W. 14a.
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