it may be impregnable; meanwhile we are cold toward the Gospel of God and almost satiated with it. I am putting on my armor for a battle with the fanatical spirits ; * pray God for me that He may tread Satan under His feet. There is no other news here, except what I think has already reached you. Farewell to you and yours in Christ ; greet all our friends.
Martin Luther.
748. LUTHER TO SPALATIN IN ALTENBURG. Enders, vi, 2. (Wittenbebg), January i, 1527.
Grace and peace in the Lord. That it is not my fault that I write you so seldom, my dear Spalatin, I wish these en- closures to testify, for they were waiting for a messenger and were always before my eyes. You will learn by the month, the day and the subject when they were written. I myself forgot what was in them and opened them at last in disgust to see what I had written. . . .
But to the matter in hand. Tell our very dear Dolzig, if he can bear a friendly disagreement (as he can), that we have good reason for maintaining that darumb should be written sometimes darumb, sometimes drumb. For why should not we Germans imitate the Greeks, Latins and Hebrews in the matter of contractions and syncopes, since no other language is more syncopated than German? We say by syncope, Du sollts tnirs thun; Dolzig's severity would make us say, Du solltest mir es thun. See what grace there is in the syncope and what nausea in the rule. If you ask, Warumb thust du das? we say according to rule, Darumb, because the word stands alone. But if other words are added, we say in an elegant syncope, Ich wills drumb nicht lassen. It would be disgusting to say, Ich will es darumb nicht lassen. Away with these barbarous Germanisms! You see how clever we, too, can be. Therefore let Dolzig beware of a battle about words, especially if he tries to exasperate us, for we think ourselves twice, thrice, four times the man that Aristarchus * was. This in jest.
The plundering of the monasteries is a serious matter, my
- Preparing the treatise, Doss diese Worte . . . feststeken. Cf, supra, no. 739.
- The great Alexandrian Homer-scholar, whose critical tldll was proverbial.
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