The command of the Elector was afterwards to send the learned but timid man to the Diets, notwithstanding that he was quite unsuited for political labours on the great stage of the world. We know already what his feelings were at Spires and then again at Augsburg. His most recent biographer says of the earlier Diet: “The depression induced in him by the Protest of Spires and the growth of Zwinglianism, increased still more during his journey home and the first days after his return; he felt profoundly downcast and looked forward to the future with the utmost anxiety. From his standpoint he certainly had good reason for his fear.”[1220] At Augsburg he suffered so much that Luther wrote to him: “You torment yourself without respite.... It is not theology, however, which torments you but your philosophy, and therefore your fears are groundless.”[1221] And later: “I have been through greater inward torments than I trust you will ever experience, and such as I would not wish any man, not even our bitterest opponents there. And yet, amidst such troubles, I have often been cheered up by the words of a brother, for instance, Pomeranus, yourself, Jonas, or some other. Hence, why not listen to us, who speak to you, not according to the flesh or world, but undoubtedly according to God and the Holy Ghost?” But you prefer to lean on your philosophy; “Led away by your reason you act according to your own foolishness and are killing yourself ... whereas this matter is really beyond us and must be left to God.” Luther felt convinced that his “prayer for Melanchthon was most certainly being answered.”[1222] The hope that Melanchthon would get the better of his depression after the momentous Diet was over was only partially realised. The conviction that there was no chance of reunion with the existing Church, which he had reached at Augsburg, pierced him to the depths of his soul. “In his quality of theologian,” says Kawerau, “the thought of the Church’s oneness caused him to endure the bitterest agonies, particularly between 1530 and 1532”; if certain of the Catholic leaders sought to draw him over to their side, there was “some justification for their attempts,” to be accounted for by the impression he had given at Augsburg, viz. of not being quite at home among the Evangelicals.[1223] What seemed to confirm this impression, adds Kawerau, was “that Melanchthon in his printed, and still more in his epistolary communications, repeatedly gave occasion to people to think that it might be worth while approaching him with fresh proposals of conciliation.”[1224] Of the psychological struggle hinted at by Kawerau, through which he, who, after Luther, was the chief promoter of the innovations, had to pass, it is possible to gain many a glimpse from contemporary documents.