Melancthon's arrival at Wittenberg was, in this respect, an event of the first importance. This highly-gifted young man, who had united in his person all the learning and culture of his time, whose mind had unfolded in such beauty and richness, and whose personal urbanity had so endeared him to men of culture wherever he went, now found his true happiness in that gospel and in that path of grace which Luther had been the first to make known. And whilst offering the right hand of fellowship to Luther, he continued working with energy in his own particular sphere, kept up his intimacy with his fellow-labourers therein, and won their respect and admiration. Humanists at a distance, meanwhile, must have noticed the fact, that the most violent attacks against Luther proceeded from those very quarters, as for instance, from Hoogstraten, and afterwards from the theological faculty at Cologne, where Reuchlin had been the most bitterly persecuted. At length the actual details of the disputation between Luther and Eck opened men's eyes to the magnitude of the contest there waged for the highest interests of Christian life and true Christian knowledge, and to the greatness of the man who had ventured single-handed to wage it. At Erfurt Luther had found already in the spring of 1518, on his return from the meeting of his Order at Heidelberg, in pleasing contrast to the displeasure he had aroused among his old teachers there, a spirit prevailing among the students of the university, which gave him hope that true theology would pass from the old to the young, just as once Christianity, rejected by the Jews, passed from them to the heathen. Those well-wishers and advisers who took his part at Augsburg, when he had to go thither to meet Caietan, were friends of Humanistic learning. Among the earliest of those, outside Wittenberg, who united that learning with the new tendency of religious teaching, we find some prominent citizens of the flourishing town of Nüremberg, where, as we have seen, Luther's old friend Link was also actively engaged. Already before the contest about indulgences broke out, the learned jurist Scheuerl of that place had made friends with Luther, whom the next year he speaks of as the most celebrated man in Germany. The most important of the Humanists there, Willibald Pirkheimer, a patrician of high esteem and an influential counsellor, and who had once held local military command, corresponded with Luther, and after learning from him the progress of his views and studies concerning the Papal power, made his Leipzig opponent the object of a bitter anonymous satire, 'The Polished Corner' (Eck). Another learned Nüremberger, the Secretary of the Senate, Lazarus Spengler, was on terms of close Christian fellowship with Luther: he published in 1519 a 'Defence and Christian Answer,' which contained a powerful and worthy vindication of Luther's popular tracts. Albert Dürer also, the famous painter,