# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S151
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library. 151

truth far more fittingly than the great rhetor of Constantinople and
author of the περὶ ἱερωσύνης. Heinrich Müller's German style is
classic and will remain a model as long as there is a German language.
The one thing that one might, not entirely without justice, find fault
with in Müller's manner of preaching is a so frequently recurring
allegorical interpretation or application of individual words of the
text alongside the development of the proper sense. This objection is,
however, to be made not so much against the epistle postil as against
the gospel postil, and for that reason the former deserves the
preference over the latter in our humble judgment, just as, in turn, we
prefer the "Evangelical Concluding Chain" to the "Evangelical Mirror of
the Heart," another postil of Müller's on the Gospels, which has been
excellently produced in a new edition by the "Rauhes Haus." If a pastor
now possesses, besides the postils named, also 2. the "Genuinely
Evangelical Exposition of the Sunday and Festival Gospels of the Church
Year, translated and extracted from the Gospel harmony of the Lutheran
theologians M. Chemnitz, Polyk. Leyser, and Johann Gerhard," published
by the monthly Preachers' Conference at Fort Wayne, Ind. (Vol. I.
Exposition of the Gospel pericopes from the 1st Sunday in Advent to the
4th Sunday after Epiphany*), St. Louis, Mo., by Wiebusch and Son. 1858.
8vo.), then he has, in our humble opinion, everything belonging to the
department of first-rate direct aids for the composition of the sermon.
Alas! the demand for the last-named work has so far been so weak that
not only could the price of the first volume ($1.50) not be set any
lower, but obstacles nearly insurmountable for the present have thereby
also been placed in the way of the work's continuation. Would that the
American Lutheran ministerium might awaken yet more generally from that
lethargy in which it has hitherto all too often demanded nothing of a
preacher except that he underwent a kind of awakening that loosed his
tongue to speak fluently about the emotional excitement on whose
account he supposes himself to have become a different person, or to
have been born again. For it is becoming ever clearer in our own days
to nearly all the fanatical sects around us that they can no longer
hold their own in the long run without a theologically educated
ministry, and they are therefore already making commendable efforts to
make up for what has been neglected: how much more, then, should it
befit the servants of the Lutheran Church not to wait for direct
inspirations toward a rightly edifying and well-grounded sermon, but
rather to make use of every means which, under God's gracious blessing,
can render them fit for this task!

C. Among the indispensable homiletical aids belong without doubt the
real and verbal concordances. Thus

*) See "Lehre und Wehre," 1st vol., pp. 208–211, and 4th vol., pp. 94, 95.