# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S150
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

150 Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

should and must be, but as it now is among the so-called believers,
abstracted from the new sermon literature available.

6. That a young preacher cannot learn from Rambach's Homiletics either
that which matters above all in preaching needs no proof*). How the
true sense of the evangelical and apostolic Church is to be found and
developed, how Law and Gospel are rightly to be divided, how divine
truth is rightly to be applied and the right measure struck in the
didactic, elenctic, paedeutic, epanorthotic, and paracletic use of
Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16, Rom. 15:4) — this can be learned (if, apart from
Scripture itself and in the school of the Holy Spirit, at all from any
human book) solely from Luther's Church and House Postil. The
possession, at the very least, of these latter writings of Luther's is
therefore in any case the conditio sine qua non of a Lutheran pastor's
library so far as the homiletical department is concerned. Besides
Luther's postils, we think a Lutheran pastor should at the least also
possess the following writings belonging to sermon literature. I.
"Evangelical and Epistolary Concluding Chain, by Dr. Heinrich Müller."
The author of this complete postil on the Gospel and Epistle pericopes
of the church year was born in 1631, on the 18th of October, at Lübeck.
Endowed with the most distinguished gifts, he made such rapid progress
even as a boy that, despite a very weak bodily constitution, he was
able to enter the University of Rostock already in his thirteenth year,
where he became Magister at seventeen, Archdeacon at the Marienkirche
there at twenty-one, and Professor of the Greek language at twenty-
three, and also received the degree of Doctor of Theology from the
University of Helmstädt. In the year 1662 he became superintendent and
professor of theology at Hamburg, but in the year 1671 was called back
to Rostock, where he administered the office of a professor of
theology, as well as a pastorate and the superintendency, until his
death, which occurred already in the year 1675, on the 17th of
September.

Whether it is Heinrich Müller's learning, or the wealth of thought in
all his writings, or his originality and vivacity as regards both
content and form, or his zeal in and for godliness, that is most to be
admired, is hard to say. As regards his eloquence he takes, without
doubt, the second place in our Church, after Luther, to whom the first
place here is uncontestedly due. With full justice Dr. Rudelbach calls
him the "Lutheran Chrysostom," and he bears the name "Goldmouth"
certainly in a far higher sense, and with far

*) Even Gustav Baur attests: "Experience shows that practical clergy
concern themselves with scarcely any theological discipline so little
as with the theory of homiletics precisely, although this bears on the
most essential activity of the Protestant clergyman: clergy who have
become capable preachers through homiletics manuals would seem to be
hardly less rare than artists who owe their fame to the study of
aesthetics." (Grundzüge der Homiletik. Preface, p. VII).