# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S272
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

272   Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

...the regenerate; 10. of the growth of the spiritual life; 11. of the marks of the spiritual life; 12. of the means by which such growth may be furthered. In any case this "Sittenlehre" is distinguished above all other older writings of this kind by its purely practical content and by its lively presentation; there is laid down in it a great treasure of Christian experience and of knowledge of the human heart. Whether, indeed, any advantage at all has accrued to the treatment of the so-called moral truths — this we remark here in conclusion — from the fact that since Georg Calixt they have been systematically brought together and treated as a discipline separate from dogmatics, is a question which we scarcely venture to answer in the affirmative. But we certainly do not doubt that whoever rightly studies, in the larger dogmatic works of our older theological leaders, the loci de lege, de peccato, de libero arbitrio, de bonis operibus, de sanctificatione et renovatione, de nova obedientia, de cruce, de paupertate, and the like, will hardly feel the need of a system of ethics. Above all, however, we call to mind that Luther's exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, his great sermon on love upon 1 John 4:16–21 (IX, 1253), his sermons on usury, his various expositions of the holy Ten Commandments, and other writings that treat and set forth the Christian life, contain a Christian morality such as no single work offers. Indeed, there is found in them a great sum of sun-clear truths from the ethical field, of which scarcely a trace is to be found in other writings, and which contain an indispensable corrective for all the existing systems of morals. And how could it be otherwise than that a man who, as no other, recognized and again unlocked to Christendom the heart-doctrine of true Christianity, the doctrine of justification by faith alone, out of which alone true Christian life flows and can flow — should also, as no other, have recognized and set forth the right ethical principles and given the right development of them? —

IV. Passing now to the fourth field of a Lutheran-theological pastor's library, in which are found the works for historical theology in the narrower sense, we come

1. to the series of historical works in which church history in general is contained. Without hesitation we name here, as the one most indispensable to a Lutheran pastor of the present day, the following: "Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte. Von Heinrich Ernst Ferd. Guericke, Doctor and Professor of Theology. Eighth, substantially improved and in many places recast edition. Berlin 1854. Gebauer's Bookshop." 3 volumes in octavo. We list this work here only for the sake of completeness, since there are without doubt few Lutheran pastors who ought not to have it already, and those few do without it in any case only because they lack the necessary means to procure it. Guericke's church