After the Augsburg conference further attempts were made to settle the Reformation controversy by a compromise, and Mel anchthon, from his conciliatory spirit and facility of access, appeared to the defenders of the old faith the fittest of the reform ers to deal with. His historical instinct led him ever to revert to the original unity of the church, and to regard subsequent errors as excrescences rather than proofs of an anti-Christian system.
The year after Luther's death, when the battle of Malberg (1547) had given a seemingly crushing blow to the Protestant cause, an attempt was made to weld together the Evangelical and the papal doctrines, which resulted in the compilation by Pflug, Sidonius and Agricola of the Augsburg "Interim." This was proposed to the two parties in Germany as a provisional ground of agreement pending the decision of the Council of Trent. Melanchthon, on being referred to, declared that, though the Interim was inadmissible, yet so far as matters of indifference (adiaphora) were concerned it might be received.
The fact is that Melanchthon sought, not to minimize differ ences, but to veil them under an intentional obscurity of expres sion. Thus he allowed the necessity of good works to salvation, but not in the old sense ; proposed to allow the seven sacra ments, but only as rites which had no inherent efficacy to salva tion, and so on. He afterwards retracted his compliance with the adiaphora, and never really swerved from the views set forth in the Loci communes. His later years were occupied with con troversies within the Evangelical church, and fruitless conferences with his Romanist adversaries. He died in his sixty-third year, on April 19, 156o, and his body was laid beside that of Martin Luther in the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg.
His ready pen, clear thought and elegant style, made him the scribe of the Reformation, most public documents on that side being drawn up by him. He never attained entire independence of Luther, though he gradually modified some of his positions from those of the pure Lutherism with which he set out. His develop ment is chiefly noteworthy in regard to these two leading points —the relation of the evangelium or doctrine of free grace (I) to free will and moral ability, and (2) to the law and poenitentia or the good works connected with repentance. At first Luther's cardinal doctrine of grace appeared to Melanchthon inconsistent with any view of free will; and, following Luther, he renounced Aristotle and philosophy in general, since "philosophers attribute everything to human power, while the sacred writings represent all moral power as lost by the fall." In the first edition of the Loci (1521) he held, to the length of fatalism, the Augustinian doctrine of irresistible grace, working according to God's im mutable decrees, and denied freedom of will in matters civil and religious alike.
In the Augsburg Confession (1530), which was largely due to him, freedom is claimed for the will in non-religious matters, and in the Loci of 1533 he calls the denial of freedom Stoicism, and holds that in justification there is a certain causality, though not worthiness, in the recipient, subordinate to the Divine caus ality. In 1535, combating Laurentius Valla, he did not deny the spiritual incapacity of the will per se, but held that this is strength ened by the word of God, to which it can cleave. The will co
operates with the word and the Holy Spirit. Finally, in 1543, he says that the cause of the difference of final destiny among men lies in the different method of treating grace which is possible to believers as to others. Man may pray for help and reject grace. This he calls free will, as the power of laying hold of grace. Melanchthon's doctrine of the three concurrent causes in conver sion, viz., the Holy Spirit, the word and the human will, sug gested the semi-Pelagian position called Synergism, which was held by some of his immediate followers.
In regard to the relation of grace to repentance and good works, Luther was disposed to make faith itself the principle of sanctifi cation. Melanchthon, however, for whom ethics possessed a spe cial interest, laid more stress on the law. He began to do this in 1527 in the Libellus visitatorius, which urges pastors to instruct their people in the necessity of repentance, and to bring the threat enings of the law to bear upon men in order to instil faith. This brought upon him the opposition of the Antinomian Johannes Agricola. In the Loci of 1535 Melanchthon sought to put the fact of the co-existence of justification and good works in the believer on a secure basis by declaring the latter necessary to eternal life, though the believer's destiny thereto is already fully guaranteed in his justification. In the Loci of 1543, he did not retain the doctrine of the necessity of good works in order to salvation, and to this he added, in the Leipzig Interim, "that this in no way countenances the error that eternal life is merited by the worthiness of our own works." Melanchthon was led to lay more and more stress upon the law and moral ideas; but the basis of the relation of faith and good works was never clearly brought out by him, and he at length fell back on his original posi tion, that we have justification and inheritance of bliss in and by Christ alone, and that good works are necessary by reason of immutable Divine command.
principal works of Melanchthon, with the bulk of his correspondence, are contained in the Corpus refortnatorum (vols. i.–xxviii.; Halle, 1834-50), edited by Bretschneider and Bindseil, to which must be added Clemens's Supplementa Melanchthoniana (Iwo seq.), and his Briefe (vol. i., 1926) (Halle, 1874). Melanchthon's earli est and best biographer was his friend Joachim Camerarius (1566), a new annotated edition of which is much needed. The best modern life is that by Georg Ellinger (Berlin, 1902) ; next is that of Karl Schmidt (Elberfeld, 1860. The celebration in 1897 of the 400th anniversary of Melanchthon's birth produced many short biographies and Festreden, among them works by J. W. Richard (New York and London, 1898) ; George Wilson (London, 1897) ; Karl Sell (Halle, 1897) ; Ferdinand Cohrs (Halle, 1897) ; Beyschlag and Harnack (1897). Richard Rothe's Festrede (186o) also is good. The most learned of modern Melanch thon scholars was probably Karl Hartfelder, who wrote Philipp Melanchthon als Praeceptor Germaniae (Berlin, 1899) ; Melanchthon iana paedagogica (Leipzig, 1892), giving in the first named two full bibliographies, one of all works written on Melanchthon, the other of all works written by him (in chronological order).