# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S147
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library. 147

we confess it, in greater perplexity than with the question of which
systematic guide to preaching, among all those available, we should
recommend. All the relevant writings of our theologians from the best
period do indeed contain exceedingly precious hints drawn from Scripture
and from experience, but hints only. Melanchthon said: "Preaching is no
art, otherwise I too could do it." In this golden saying is doubtless
found the solution to the riddle of why the field of the homiletical
discipline was less cultivated precisely in those times in which our
Church was most fruitful in productions in every branch of theology and
brought forth classic standard works in each of them. One proceeded,
doubtless, from the principle that the right way of preaching presupposes,
is conditioned by, and is the result of, not merely the right study of
all the other disciplines of theology and the mastery of them; and that
therefore no one could become a good preacher merely through the study
of a homiletical system, but rather that the prescribing and attempted
following of all sorts of homiletical rules could easily have the very
opposite of the intended effect. If, however, a homiletics can
nevertheless be conceived which, while granting the premise that
"preaching is no art," is nonetheless able to render the inexperienced
essential service, to preserve him from many false paths, and to show
him the way out of manifold difficulties, then we do not hesitate to
recommend, among all the complete homiletical guides available, the
following in particular: "Dr. Johann Jacob Rambach's Explanations of
the Praecepta homiletica, published by Joh. Phil. Fresenius. Other
Edition, Gießen, 1746." Concerning the author of these works we have
already communicated some notes in the third volume of this periodical,
p. 271. This work too, like the ethics already noticed, is an opus
posthumum of the late Rambach, and, as the title states, was taken by
J. Ph. Fresenius — who was afterward so distinguished as preacher and
pastor, and later Senior of the Ministerium at Frankfurt am Main — from
a set of lecture notes left behind by Rambach, and published through the
press. In what spirit this work was composed may best be gathered from
the words with which Rambach introduced these his homiletical lectures:
"I have this time," he writes in the year 1726, "let myself be
persuaded to undertake such a task, which for many years now, while I
was still lecturing at Jena, I constantly declined. For I myself have
never bound myself in my own sermons to fixed regulas artis, but have
used now this method, now that, whichever was at the time best suited
to the matter under treatment; so it has always seemed to me somewhat
harsh and unfair to prescribe to others certain rules according to
which they would have to arrange their sermons, and thereby to
restrict their freedom. I have always been afraid that, were I to
deliver a Collegium homileticum, those