However, with time,it appears inclined to run.
I thank you warmly for it,but, being a poor man, can make no return.
For the books which came out latelyyou must alreadyhave, and they are of such a nature that they cannot be called gifts.They are only old thingsbrought out afresh.
God has given me a littledaughterMagdalena,and the mother is very well.
Diet is at an end, and almost without result, except that the persecutors of Christ,the tyrants of souls, could not vent their furyon us as they desired,and we could expect no more from Council, but it will be fruitless.
Venetian here justnow, and he says that in the last French war against the Pope there were eighthundred Turks, of whom three hundred were uninjured, and being tired of the war returned home.
I thought you did not know these dreadful things,as you took no notice of them.
Soon midnightwill come, when the cry will be heard, '* Behold, the Bridegroom cometh Elector to recallBugenhagenfrom Pommer has written from Hamburg that he has arrangedto return, but the peopleare holdinghim so fast that he cannot get away, and he says they intend writing your
Grace to let him remain always. I have written him to resist such action, and hope they will not thus requite our goodnessin lendinghim to them.
So he now writes, begging that your Grace would write demanding his presence in Wittenberg,to prove his hurrying home is not his own wish.
Therefore we humbly request your Grace would furnish us with such a document to forward, with those from the University, ordering his return, for the classes have lain long enough waste, especially as,
God be praised, students are daily arriving, principally from Bugenhagen cannot be longerspared. Your Grace will know how to act in the matter.
I commend to you this Scotchman, my Wenzel, who has been banished from his fatherland because of the gospel. He begged me to write you, hoping he might get some assistance.
He seems of good family, and well groundedin scholastic theology.
Could he speakGerman we could find plentyfor him to do, and, despiteour poverty, have kept him with us, but he has reasons for wishingto try his fortune elsewhere.
In Philip's absence,and during my illness, I translated the book of Wisdom Philiphad taken in hand.
Zurich has translated is miserable in the extreme.^ Farewell, and pray for me.
Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Jacob,of all you tell me of Erasmus, who rages against us.
I gathered as much from his writings, for in them he displaysthe soreness of the wound he has received.
I despisehim, and do not consider the creature worthy of any other reply,and should I write shall only refer to Erasmus in the third person, and doing this more to condemn his opinionsthan to refute them, for he is a thoughtZwingli'ssupervision.