On the Life and Missions of Jacobus Andreae for the Reformation of the Lutheran Church, Part I

he would report to Carolus V Charles V, whom he knew felt differently about the Lutherans. l Jacobus had soothed the Spaniard with such charming manners that the man testified to his goodwill toward Jacobus with an ample expression of words, and even invited him to a meal prepared by the magistrate. There, having chatted familiarly with him about many things, he revealed that if Carolus V’s affairs succeeded according to his wishes, it would undoubtedly come to pass that Carolus V would destroy the Lutheran rites, for which he had the worst regard. For this reason, he suggested to Jacobus with the best intentions that if he had any books by Luther, Brentius, Melanchthon, or Urbanus Rhegius, he should hide them and replace them with books by Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, and others of that kind, for thus he ensured he was certain the Spaniards would not take the books from him. Of his colleagues, when they noticed that absolutely nothing bad had happened to Jacobus, one returned to Stuttgart and offered himself as an assistant to Jacobus, who showed himself undaunted in any fortune and did not fail in his duty in any respect.

Thus, preserved through this period of life by the singular divine power of God, he bore nothing more painfully than the exile of that excellent man, D. Erhardus Snepfius. Because of the disturbances of the so-called Interimistic formula, he went into exile from Tübingen and, having been received with benevolent hospitality by the noble Eberhardus Gemmingen, m he was later called to Jena, where he died among the theologians of the then-new Academy. Jacobus could scarcely bear the absence of a man whom he regarded as a father and to whom he owed almost all his education in literature. n Very many pastors were dismissed from their office in Stuttgart, but Jacobus, a deacon and Snepfius’s disciple, was dismissed with his wife to Tübingen in the year 1548.

l) Ibid. p. 17. 18. 19.

m) Concerning the merits of the Gemmingen family in the reformation, cf. our learned Schnurrerus in Explanations of the Wirtemberg Church, Reformation, and Scholarly History, pp. 22 and 23, note 3.

n) The same author brings forward more memorabilia concerning Snepfius’s first beginnings and merits in Lutheranism on p. 22, and more explicitly on pp. 100–102; cf. p. 173.