Grace, he
should justly have refrained from, since the Confession belongs
primarily to Your Electoral Grace and the other estates; and from it
[the alterations made] Your Electoral Grace and the other related
estates might be charged that they are not certain of their doctrine and
are also unstable. Besides, it is giving an offense to the people." (_C.
R._ 3, 365.) Luther, too, is said to have remonstrated with Melanchthon
for having altered the Confession. In his Introduction to the Augsburg
Confession (Koenigsberg, 1577) Wigand reports: "I heard from Mr. George
Rorarius that Dr. Luther said to Philip, 'Philip, Philip, you are not
doing right in changing Augustanam Confessionem so often for it is not
your, but the Church's book.'" Yet it is improbable that this should
have occurred between 1537 and 1542, for in 1540 the Variata followed,
which was changed still more in 1542, without arousing any public
protest whatever.

After Luther's death, however, when Melanchthon's doctrinal deviations
became apparent, and the Melanchthonians and the loyal Lutherans became
more and more opposed to one another, the Variata was rejected with
increasing determination by the latter as the party-symbol of the
Philippists. In 1560 Flacius asserted at Weimar that the Variata
differed essentially from the Augustana. In the Reuss-Schoenburg
Confession of 1567 the Variata was unqualifiedly condemned; for here we
read: We confess "the old, true, unaltered Augsburg Confession, which
later was changed, mutilated, misinterpreted, and falsified ... by the
Adiaphorists in many places both as regards the words and the substance
(_nach den Worten und sonst in den Haendeln_), which thus became a
buskin, _Bundschuh,_ pantoffle, and a Polish boot, fitting both legs
equally well [suiting Lutherans as well as Reformed] or a cloak and a
changeling (_Wechselbalg_), by means of which Adiaphorists,
Sacramentarians, Antinomians, new teachers of works, and the like hide,
adorn, defend, and establish their errors and falsifications under the
cover and name of the Augsburg Confession, pretending to be likewise
confessors of the Augsburg Confession, for the sole purpose of enjoying
with us under its shadow, against rain and hail, the common peace of the
Empire, and selling, furthering, and spreading their errors under the
semblance of friends so much the more easily and safely." (Kolde,
_Einleitung,_ 30.) In a sermon delivered at Wittenberg, Jacob Andreae
also