To this prosperity of the university Melancthon especially contributed. He had been appointed, as we have already mentioned, first professor of Greek by the Elector, and in addition to the young theologians, he attracted a number of other students to his lectures. Of still greater importance for Luther and his work, was the personal friendship and community of ideas, convictions, and aspirations which had bound the two men together in close intimacy from their first acquaintance. Their paths in life had hitherto been very different. Philip Schwarzerd, surnamed Melancthon, born in 1497 of a burgher's family of the little town of Bretten in the Palatinate, had passed a happy youth, and harmoniously and peacefully developed into manhood. He had had from early life capable teachers for his education, and was under the protection of the great philologist Reuchlin, who was a brother of his grandmother. He then showed gifts of mind wonderfully rich and early ripening. Besides the classics, he learnt mathematics, astronomy, and law. He also studied the Scriptures, grew to love them, and even when a youth had made himself familiar with their contents, without having had first to learn to know their worth by a heavy sense of inward need, by inward struggles or a long unsatisfied hunger of the soul. Thus, at seventeen he was already master of arts, and at twenty-one was appointed professor at Wittenberg. The young man, with an insignificant, delicate frame, and a shy, awkward demeanour, yet with a handsome, powerful forehead, an intellectual eye, and refined, thoughtful features, effaced at once, by his inaugural address, any doubts arising from his youthful appearance. [Illustration: FIG. 17.--MELANCTHON. (From a Portrait by Dürer.)] In this speech, however, he already declared that the chief object of classical studies was to teach theologians to draw from the original fount of Holy Scripture. He himself delivered a lecture on the New Testament immediately after one on Homer. And it was the Lutheran conception of the doctrine of salvation which he adopted in his own continued study of the Bible.