The stand which Luther had taken against the rebellion preserved the friendship of those princes who were well-disposed towards him, but he took no part in the measures of defence against the Imperial and Papal power, which they were soon compelled to adopt. He devoted himself to the completion of his translation of the Bible, in which he was faithfully assisted by Melanchthon and others. In this great work he accomplished even more than a service to Christianity; he created the modern German language. Before his time, there had been no tongue which was known and accepted throughout the whole Empire. The poets and minstrels of the Middle Ages wrote in Suabian; other popular works were in low-Saxon, Franconian or Alsatian. The dialect of Holland and Flanders had so changed that it was hardly understood in Germany; that of Brandenburg and the Baltic provinces had no literature as yet, and the learned or scientific works of the time were written in Latin. No one before Luther saw that the simplest and most expressive qualities of the German language must be sought for in the mouths of the people. With all his scholarship, he never used the theological style of writing, but endeavored to express himself so that he could be clearly understood by all men. In translating the Old Testament, he took extraordinary pains to find words and phrases as simple and strong as those of the Hebrew writers. He frequented the market-place, the merry-making, the house of birth, marriage or death, to learn how the common people expressed themselves in all the circumstances of life. He enlisted his friends in the same service, begging them to note down for him any peculiar, characteristic phrase; "for," said he, "I cannot use the words heard in castles and courts." Not a sentence of the Bible was translated until he had found the best and clearest German expression for it. He wrote, in 1530: "I have exerted myself, in translating, to give pure and clear German. And it has verily happened, that we have sought and questioned a fortnight, three, four weeks, for a single word, and yet it was not always found. In Job, we so labored, Philip Melanchthon, Aurogallus and I, that in four days we sometimes barely finished three lines." [Sidenote: 1525. LUTHER'S MARRIAGE.]