Luther’s violent and incautious manner of proceeding led him to surmise, to his great regret, that many had attached themselves to the cause of the innovations merely from a desire for the freedom of the flesh, and that the rising against the older Church had let loose a whole current of base elements.[1213] The virulence with which Luther attacked everything could, in Melanchthon’s opinion, only tend to alienate the better sort, i.e. the very people whose help was essential to the carrying out of any real reform. As early as 1525 he began to find fault with Luther’s too turbulent ways. In 1526, on the appearance of Erasmus’s “_Hyperaspistes_,” the scholar’s incisive and brilliant rejoinder to Luther’s “_De servo Arbitrio_,” Melanchthon feared some unhappy outbreak, and, accordingly, he urgently begged the latter to keep silence in the interests of truth and justice, which he thought to be more likely on the side of Erasmus. To Camerarius he wrote, on April 11, 1526: “Oh, that Luther would hold his tongue! I had hoped that advancing years and his experience of the prevailing evils would have quietened him, but now I see that he is growing even more violent (‘_subinde vehementiorem fieri_’) in every struggle into which he enters. This causes me great pain.”[1214] Erasmus himself he assured later by letter, that he had “never made any secret of this at Wittenberg,” i.e. of his displeasure at the tracts Luther had published against the great Humanist, for one reason “because they were not conducive to the public welfare.”[1215] It was inevitable that a certain coolness should spring up between them, for though Melanchthon was supple enough to be cautious in his personal dealings with Luther, yet there can be no doubt that many of his strictures duly reached the ears of his friend. The more determined Lutherans, such as Aquila and Amsdorf, even formed a party to thwart his plans.[1216] Melanchthon also complains of opponents at the Court. Those who had been dissatisfied with his doings at the Visitation “fanned the flames at Court,” and so much did he suffer through these intrigues that, according to a later statement of his, his “life was actually in danger” (“_ut vita mea in discrimen veniret_”).[1217] So greatly was he overwhelmed that, in 1527, he even declared he would rather his son should die than occupy a position of such sore anxiety as his own.[1218] In spite of the growing independence displayed by Melanchthon, Luther continued to show him the greatest consideration and forbearance, and even to heap literary praise on him, as he did, for instance, in his Preface to Melanchthon’s very mediocre Exposition of the Epistle to the Colossians.[1219] He was all the more set on attaching Melanchthon to himself and his cause by such eulogies, because he dreaded lest his comrade’s preference for his Humanistic labours should one day deprive the new faith of his so powerful support.