# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S148
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

148 Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

hearers of it might reproach me: Rambach himself does not do what he
teaches us. He says an Exordium must be constituted thus and so, it
must have these and these partes, etc., and yet in his own Exordia we
cannot find these partes. He says the explicatio and applicatio textus
must be constituted thus and so, and his own explicationes and
applicationes are not always so constituted as he requires. That is
what has always kept me, until now, from delivering a Collegium
homileticum. Since, however, I am now to hold a Collegium homileticum
after all — not by my own choice, but at others' good pleasure — I see
clearly that this difficulty, which I had imagined for myself, is not
after all of such weight that it could deter me ab hoc instituto. For
the Regulae et Praecepta homiletica are no iron yoke, by which one
would be placed into a kind of slavery and robbed of all his freedom in
the delivery of the Word; rather they are wholesome leges, by which
only unruly license is restrained, so that beginners especially, who
have as yet no practice in preaching, may be habituated to good order.
They are like a baby-walker, in which children walk and learn to carry
forward their weak legs. And just as grown persons no longer make use
of such a thing, yet still carry their feet forward, step by step, in
proper order, so too those who have attained to greater practice in the
delivery of the Word have no reason to bind themselves to every
homiletical trifle, so long as they observe only the general
arrangements of sermons, ut hodie receptae sunt. My chief task will be
this: that, for all the parts belonging to a sermon, I give all manner
of good Consilia, Cautelen, and regulas prudentiae, through the
observance of which one may be enabled to arrange his delivery in a way
that gives no offense and is edifying."

The work is arranged as follows. At the front stand Prolegomena, in
which the author first establishes and develops the concept of a
homiletics, and then shows in what the natural as well as the spiritual
fitness required for preaching consists. Thereupon the author treats,
1, of the introduction of the sermon; 2, of the choice of the text; 3,
of meditation upon the chosen text; 4, of the disposition of the
meditated text; 5, of the exposition of the disposed text; 6, of the
application of the exposed text; 7, of the conclusion of the sermon; 8,
of the style to be employed in the sermon; 9, of the action of the
preacher, in connection with which various rules are given concerning
memorizing, delivery, and gestures, and the manifold faults and bad
habits occurring here are censured. Each chapter is divided into short
paragraphs written in Latin, under which follows the extended
explanation in German. The work comprises about 350 pages in quarto.
The first edition appeared in the year 1736. To be sure, whoever wishes
to make use of this homiletics must