# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S297
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Theological Pastor's Library. 297

...-hard's surviving works are a witness louder and more eloquent than anything else, that in this too he was perhaps surpassed by no scholar. Not only after his death, therefore, did he receive such universal and such great eulogies as no other theologian after Luther has received, but already in his lifetime his contemporaries could not help but acknowledge and praise, in the strongest terms, publicly and privately, the incomparable gifts which God had, as it were, poured out upon him. Hoe von Hoenegg, in his letters to him, calls him by no other name than: "the eye, the standard-bearer and light-bearer of the theologians, the archtheologian, the light and pillar of the Christian commonwealth." Michael Walther writes in the year 1635 to Glassius: "The heavenly David, Christ JEsus, has indeed, since the time of the so necessary Reformation, seen and given the orthodox church several truly fearless and exceedingly learned theologians thus far; three, however, have without any doubt carried off the palm from all the rest, whose quite extraordinary gifts and deeds not easily anyone could match, namely the Megalander (the Great Man) — Luther, Chemnitz, and Gerhard. 2 Samuel 23:16. As I therefore, with God's help, strive to plow with their heifer, so I count this to my own credit." Dilher writes; "Gerhard's house was the museum of the Christian world, and in a sense a temple of the Holy Spirit, where men of every rank and every age could receive instruction." Almost all the theologians of note from that period honored in Gerhard their spiritual father and teacher. When he died, the university, through its rector and its professors, invited people to his funeral in a Latin program with these words: "Come hastily together; come hastily together, you citizens of the Academy! The very foundations of the Academy are shaken. Appear! Mourn! Take up Gerhard's coffin upon your shoulders! In throngs, in throngs, pay him the last honor! A greater theologian's burial Jena has never seen (or ever will see?). Mourn, lament, all you good people! ... Our Gerhard is exalted above all praise, a man whose services to the whole Christian church no tongue can adequately express." The University of Wittenberg, too, held a memorial observance; in the program issued for this purpose it says: "No one can ever sufficiently mourn the passing of that greatest and incomparable theologian, nor sufficiently sing his praise and hand it down to posterity in a worthy address. For he was a man of such outstanding spirit and such great natural goodness, of such extraordinary learning, and finally of such virtue and holiness of character, that whoever considers all this in turn will readily confess that it far exceeds the measure allotted to mankind and breathes something divine and heavenly, which can more easily be admired than expressed in words." The excellent Justus Feuerborn of Gießen likewise delivered a memorial address here for Gerhard, in which he said, among other things: "Fallen is the evangelical trumpet;