# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S76
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

76 A Sample and Prospectus, etc.

...guides. That in doing so it did not direct its attention first of all to the relevant productions of more recent and the most recent Lutheran theology, no one will blame who shares our conviction that we by no means yet live and move in Scripture, are at home in wholesome doctrine on every side, and, as it were, breathe in a sound churchly consciousness, to the degree that was the case with the dear fathers of our beloved Lutheran Church. Now, to be sure, we can never sufficiently thank the Lord of the Church for the great treasure of excellent, instructive, truly edifying postils and books of sermons which He gave us in the good old days, and for having equipped their authors for such a godly work with a special anointing of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, upon careful consideration of the goal we had in view, we had to admit that the otherwise so commendable use of good old postils was by no means sufficient for achieving our purpose, and indeed, by the very nature of the case, could hardly suffice. Books of sermons — even were they the unsurpassed postils of the dear man of God, Luther — give us, after all, already finished sermons, which as a rule pursue a particular purpose, single out this or that doctrine for special emphasis, or, as is especially the case with Luther's sermons, revolve chiefly around the main thought laid down in the text. In short, in the case of our faithful fathers they are indeed the finished results of what we wanted, but they show the way to it either not at all or only rarely, and thus leave us at a loss at many points.

So our eyes turned, then, to a book once, and with full justice, highly renowned in the Lutheran Church, but in our days, alas, to great detriment, largely forgotten and unknown — to the excellent Gospel Harmony, written in Latin, of Chemnitz, Polykarp Leyser, and Johann Gerhard. And behold, in these dear authorities we found to the fullest satisfaction what we sought and wanted: a deep, comprehensive understanding of Scripture — indeed, a living and moving within it; a complete, living being permeated by the precious confession of the Church, which teaches and testifies through them; a clear, thorough setting forth of the truths of salvation; a sharp rejection and refutation of the false and the erroneous; and everywhere the richest application to life — a laying hold of the whole man in mind, disposition, and heart, free alike from one-sided abstract scholasticism and from sentimental gushiness, an ailment from which the more recent productions all too often suffer, and by which they become distasteful to trained minds, while merely stimulating, rather than strengthening, the untrained — indeed rather weakening and spoiling them.

So we joyfully set to work, translating the shorter pericopes from Part 1, which Chemnitz worked out masterfully in his precise manner, stringing the divine core thoughts together into a tightly wound, precious string of pearls, and doing so for the most part as literally as the German tongue allows; out of the longer pericopes in the Leyserian...