# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S267
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library. 267

to stand in league with the papists; small wonder that even a Schiller, in his History of the Thirty Years' War, repeated the old fable that Hoe had been bought by Austria. But the "Evangelical Handbook" is the best refutation of all such worthless accusations.*) Löscher writes of it in the "Unschuldige Nachrichten": "The Lord has bestowed a great blessing on the blessed Dr. Hoe's Handbook, in that it has had to be reprinted many times, and has been highly esteemed and read by friends and enemies alike. Many have thereby been brought from the papacy to the evangelical truth, just as the evangelicals were guarded against it beforehand and strengthened in their faith, so that they could afterward meet the cunning assaults of the enemy all the better and defend themselves sufficiently against them. It is written so thoroughly that for a long time none among the papists attempted a refutation of it, so that even in the sixth edition the worthy teacher could state in the preface that it had thus far remained unrefuted. Some of the papists afterward began, and raised something of an outcry about it from the pulpit, but did not venture to come forward with a refutation in writing. At last the Jesuit Jacob Reihing undertook it (who was the chief instrument by which the evangelicals were driven out of the Neuburg Palatinate) and sought to refute it in his own "Handbook," whereby, however, he received such light, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, concerning the evangelical truth, that he afterward embraced it himself, and so from a raging Saul became a converted Paul!**) In the year 1620 he wrote a "Retraction of his Catholic Handbook," in which he himself openly points out and refutes the fencing-tricks formerly used in the refutation of the blessed Dr. Hoe's Handbook." (Loc. cit., vol. 1718, p. 605 ff.) Some twenty to thirty years ago, Hoe's Handbook was reprinted again in Weimar, unaltered at least to the extent that nothing has been omitted from it, though the new editor has added various stale, rationalistically sounding remarks.

Finally, we cannot suppress the remark that, if in this as in other particular fields we do not cite and review the relevant writings of Luther, we do so on the assumption that a Lutheran pastor who is in earnest about assembling for himself a select library for every field of theology will, before all others, gather Luther's own

*) Moreover, Hoe's whole life also refutes what his enemies spread abroad against him. This is not the place to demonstrate this, easy as it would be. His whole life corresponded to the motto he had chosen: Inter brachia Salvatoris mei et vivere volo, et mori cupio, that is, In the arms of my Savior I wish to live, and I desire to die.

**) Already in the 15th number of the 1st volume of the "Lutheraner" we related the remarkable conversion of this Jesuit, who in the year 1628 fell blessedly asleep as a Lutheran professor of theology and superintendent.