# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S364
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

364   Dr. Martin Luther's Instruction in the Right Study of Theology.

the composition of many splendid writings.*) What Luther had won, as it were, with the sword, Weller cultivated in quiet peace and rest; or, what had gushed forth in the one like a foaming, deep mountain torrent, flowed in the other like a lovely clear brook and made the meadows green and fruitful. God tried our Weller almost without interruption in the crucible of hot inward temptation, and thus made him a theologian as humble as he was especially rich in experience and comforting to the tempted — such as there have surely been few in the world. His life fell in the time when at last almost all the pillars of the church were tottering; but he only rooted himself the deeper under all the storms and faithfully preserved, and testified aloud again and again, what God had opened to him through "his dear father Luther," until his death, which occurred in 1572 in the seventy-third year of his age. He died of a stroke. On the evening before his death he had still delivered a long, comforting sermon on the exceedingly great benefits of Christ and on the joy of eternal life, had prayed fervently with his household, and had betaken himself to rest with a cheerful spirit. In the morning he was found dead in his bed, after there had been seen, as Jöcher relates, "a great light shining all around his bed, as though the whole chamber were full of fire"; of which Weller himself said: It is the dear angels. Already in his lifetime the dear man stood far and wide in the repute of a holy man of God. Dr. Zacharias Rivander, superintendent at Bieberstein, writes in his Festchronik (Eisleben, 1602): "There was a pious, holy, and God-fearing man at Freiberg in Meissen, Hier. Weller, whom I myself also saw and heard. Of him, when I was still a boy and went to school there, I heard it said that the angels of God were wont to come to him and hold converse with him; for that was known, and was the common talk among the people." Basilius Faber writes in the dedication which he prefixed to the German edition, prepared by him, of Weller's exposition of the Gospel and Epistle pericopes (Nuremberg, 1559): "Weller truly teaches as a practiced and well-tried theologus and shows us a thoroughly masterly praxis and use of the divine Word, on which after all everything depends — namely, what power it has, when and how it is to be used, so that it may become living in the heart and bring with it sure comfort and help, and how it may be so applied and held before each individual person that he is thereby helped." Selneccer writes of Weller: "He was indeed truly pious, God-fearing, constant in prayer, of great patience, without guile, zealous in the true doctrine of the faith, not cold but earnest in his calling, comforting to poor consciences, and was from the heart an enemy of the proud, puffed-up spirits, the enthusiasts, the Calvinists, and such adventurers; and in sum, a

*) He had had a "museum" built for himself in his little garden, in which he spent most of his time in holy meditations and in prayer for every need, common and particular.