# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S300
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.                    300

-intendent at Jüterbock, entered the same office at Delitzsch in 1702,
became, after Deutschmann's death in 1707, professor of theology at
Wittenberg (and thus colleague of his own father, who did not die until
1718, at an advanced age), in 1709 superintendent and consistorial
assessor at Dresden, and later there at the same time councillor of the
church and of the upper consistory, and died on February 12, 1749. —
Löscher undeniably deserves the name of a polyhistor. His learning was
so many-sided, his knowledge, especially of antiquities and of ancient
literature, so eminent, that few among Lutheran theologians could well
be set beside him in this. It is true that his interest in everything
touching the field of learning led him astray into beginning a countless
number of learned works which he did not complete, but often quickly
abandoned again in order to pass on to the solution of some other
learned task*); yet most of the larger works he did complete are ripe
fruits of knowledge as thorough as his industry was untiring. That he
was a sincerely pious man**), and that in his struggle against Pietism
and the Pietists he was for the most part in the right, we do not indeed
deny; but that he always met an August Hermann Francke and his
friends in the right manner, and that he himself, over against the
Pietists, always represented the pure, unadulterated evangelical doctrine
of Luther in living knowledge and power of faith — this we must,
on the basis of diligent study in Löscher's writings, deny. It is true that
the newer work, "Moritz von Engelhardt (professor at Dorpat): V. E.
Löscher. Dorpat, 1853," is known to us only from a review found in the
Erlangen "Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche" (November issue,
1853); but judging by this review, we cannot share von Engelhardt's
view of the position which Löscher holds in our Church, nor join in the
reviewer's closing words: "We would ask God to guide the peoples, that
they may follow this banner (which Löscher defended) with such
soundness and simplicity as Löscher did, and that he would give them
theologians of as sound a mind as Löscher was." However highly we
regard Löscher, there are yet other theologians whose resurrection we
would wish for our own time —

*) Doubtless this was at the same time the consequence of a piece of advice which
Löscher, while still a schoolboy at Zwickau, had received from his teacher Daumius. Of
the latter it is said in Heinsius's Kirchengeschichte: "In particular, he was accustomed to
lead and encourage his pupils to this, that, besides the ordinary loci communibus, they
should from their youth up gather materials, after the manner of bees, for all sorts of
works to be worked out at some future time, and set them down in their proper places."
However important it is that students begin early to make excerpts of everything they
read, it is nevertheless dangerous when they are guided to do this for the purpose of
gathering contributions toward works to be published in the future.

**) In addition to Löscher's exemplary godly private life and his exemplary faithfulness
in office, his devout, prayerful hymns also speak for this — which, however, for all their
prosodic flow, admittedly lack true poetic vision.