To Johann Mantel, church servant at Wittenberg. Nov. 10, 1539.
Grace and peace in Christ! On several occasions, my dear Lord John, you have asked me through your intermediaries and requested that a letter be sent to you, from which, as they indicate to me and you also write, you may receive comfort and refreshment in your protracted, dangerous illness. But I also think and feel that it would be much more necessary for me to have a letter from you written to me, so that my spirit would be refreshed, which I do not only share with Lot, 2 Petr. 2, 8.I am not only tormented, afflicted and martyred with Lot, 2 Peter 2:8, you and other pious Christians in this horrible Sodoma by shameful ingratitude and terrible contempt for the blessed word of our dear Savior, when I see that Satan so powerfully occupies and possesses the hearts of those who make themselves believe that they want to be the first and foremost in the kingdom of Christ and God; but I am also challenged and afflicted with inner anguish and tribulations. For this reason, I have so far refrained from writing to you, and have also been partly prevented by various business matters.
Therefore, with right earnestness, ask that you always continue and persist in remembering me in your fervent prayer, which flows from right faith; as we also remember you.
But that you write and complain of temptation and sorrow because of death, you know from our faith that we speak and confess that the Son of God suffered under Pontius Pilate and was crucified.
and died, that by his death he might take away the power of the death of all who believe in him, even that he might utterly destroy it. Dear, what a great thing it is that we die, if we rightly consider that he, the dear Lord, died, and died for us. His death is the right, only death, which should take over and fill our hearts, minds and thoughts in such a way that we would not feel otherwise than if nothing were alive anymore, not even the dear sun, but if everything had died with the dear Lord; but in such a way that everything would rise again together with him on that blessed day. Into this his death and life shall our death and life sink, as those who are to live with him forever. He has preceded us with his death from the beginning of the world; he also waits for us until the end of the world, so that when we depart from this short, miserable life, of which the wicked alone know and yet are not sure of it for a moment, he may receive us and take us into his eternal kingdom.
But you know all this better and more clearly from the Scriptures than I, a sorrowful and afflicted man, not surrounded by the same kind of death, can write to you in this dreadful and gloomy time, when all ingratitude is to be seen and all kinds of wickedness are rampant. Greet your wife and children in undimmed love, and be strong, confident, and undaunted in the Lord, and wait for him through patience, who is now near and is about to come. Amen. On St. Martin's Eve, Anno 1539.