# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S368
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

368 The Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

fication; 13. of renewal and good works; 14. of the church; 15. of the holy office of the ministry; 16. of the sacraments; 17. of holy baptism; 18. of the holy Supper; 19. of the temporal government; 20. of marriage, and 21. of the last things. The pure doctrine is in every case set forth in brief theses, then first briefly developed out of Scripture, and thereupon its preservation through all the centuries demonstrated with supporting passages from the relevant churchly writers, while at the same time the antithesis of the heretics as it arose is refuted, with an account of the historical occasions.

b. The aforementioned Baier Compendium does indeed already contain a patristics in nuce; yet for the purpose of completing the necessary knowledge in this discipline we further recommend the following precious little book: „Compendium theologiae Patrum; editum ab Henrico Eckhardi. Lipsiæ 1617.“ The author was born at Wetter, a small Hessian town, in 1582; when he first published his patristics (1605) he was pastor in Singen in the Schwarzburg territory; he thereupon became Doctor and Professor of Theology at Gießen, afterwards superintendent in Frankenhausen, and finally, from 1616, general superintendent at Altenburg, where he died in 1624. Our writing contains no aimless heaping together of all sorts of remarkable and important sayings of the church fathers, but a strict, precisely articulated system of the whole of Christian dogmatics, supported by short, telling testimonies from patristic literature, in an altogether excellent selection. At the head stands a tabular survey of the doctrinal system followed in the work. It falls into two parts. The first contains: 1. the doctrine of God; 2. of creation; 3. of preservation; 4. of the end of the world; 5. of redemption through Christ; 6. of the call; 7. of the proclamation of the divine will in the Law; 8. of the offering of divine grace in the Gospel and the sacraments; 9. of the estates; 10. of the resurrection; 11. of the last judgment. The second part comprises the doctrines: 1. of predestination; 2. of the Holy Spirit; 3. of regeneration; 4. of renewal; 5. of the church; 6. of prayer and its hearing; 7. of the cross and of deliverance from it; 8. of the translation of believers into eternal life; 9. of reprobation; 10. of the casting of the godless into hell. By no means, however, do these titles directly name all the articles of faith which are taken into account in the book; they are rather only the knots of the thread on which all the Christian dogmas are strung. In particular, those doctrines are documented at length which have become controverted between us and the papists and the Reformed. Hence it is said in the full title of the Compendium: „In which the consensus of godly antiquity with the doctrine and confession of our churches is shown, and the charge of novelty is refuted and proved to be void.“ A great excellence which the work possesses consists among other things in this, that the patristic passages are set out as answers to