“It is not fitting,” writes the Protestant theologian Carl Sell, “to throw a veil over the sad close of Melanchthon’s life, for it was but the logical consequence of his own train of thought.” Luther’s theology, of the defects of which Melanchthon was acutely conscious, had, according to Sell, “already begun to break down as an adequate theory of life”;[955] of the forthcoming disintegration Luther’s colleague already had a premonition. In Aug., 1536, when Melanchthon paid a visit to his home and also to Tübingen, he became more closely acquainted with the state of the Protestant Churches, both in the Palatinate and in Swabia. It was at that time that he wrote to his friend Myconius: “Had you travelled with us and seen the woeful devastation of the Churches in many localities you would undoubtedly long, with tears and groans, for the Princes and the learned to take steps for the welfare of the Churches. At Nuremberg the good attendance at public worship and the orderly arrangement of the ceremonies pleased me greatly; elsewhere, however, lack of order and general barbarism is wonderfully estranging the people [from religion; ‘_[Greek: ataxia] et barbaries mirum in modum alienat animos_’]. Oh, that the authorities would see to the remedying of this evil!”[956] After he had reluctantly resumed the burden of his Wittenberg office he continued to fret about the dissensions in his own camp. “Look,” he wrote to Veit Dietrich in 1537, “how great is the danger to which the Churches are everywhere exposed and how difficult it is to govern them, when those in authority are at grips with one another and set up strife and confusion, whereas it is from them that we should look for help.... What we have to endure is worse than all the trials of Odysseus the sufferer.”[957] In the following year he told the same friend the real evil was, that “we live like gipsies, no one being willing to obey another in any single thing.”[958] In the name of Wittenberg University he wrote to Mohr, the Naumburg preacher, who was quarrelling with his brethren in the ministry, “What is to happen in future if, for so trivial a matter, such wild and angry broils break out amongst those who govern the Church?”[959] The growing tendency to strife he describes in 1544 in these words: “There are at present many people whose quarrels are both countless and endless, and who everywhere find a pretext for them.”[960]