# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S188
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

188 Literature.

subscribe wholeheartedly, we likewise share with our esteemed readers, in
the hope that it may awaken the desire for an excellent work for a
pastor's library.

W. Beste (pastor at Wolfenbüttel), The Most Significant Pulpit Orators
of the Lutheran Church of the Reformation Era, in Biographies and a
Selection of Their Sermons. (As Vol. 1 of the larger work: The Most
Significant Pulpit Orators of the Older Lutheran Church from Luther to
Spener.) Leipzig (Mayer). 1856. X and 466 pp. large 8vo.

The author, in the introduction to his rich work, sets out from a
glance at the immediately pre-Reformation state of preaching, which he
depicts attractively both in the remnants of genuinely Christian content
and in the overflowing un-Christian and anti-Christian tendencies. Thus
he clears the way for a portrayal of the overwhelming divine power with
which the preaching of the Reformers pressed into the hearts of the
people, in that with warm love he looks into the source and the
expression of this rebirth of Christian preaching, as it took place along
with the restoration of the true Church, whereby he then at the same
time also assesses, in fine and clear strokes and with a keen eye, the
difference between Lutheran and Reformed preaching. By this he has
secured interest for the undertaking to which he wishes to devote this
independent volume on the preaching of the Reformation era. Eighteen
preachers of that great age (Luther, Wenceslaus Linck, Caspar Aquila,
Urbanus Rhegius, Johann Spangenberg, Justus Jonas, Johann
Bugenhagen, Johann Brenz, Mechior Cölius, Sebastian Fröschel, Nikolaus
von Amsdorff, Antonius Corvinus, Veit Dietrich, Georg Major, Johann
Mathesius, Erasmus Sarcerius, Joachim Mörlin, George, Prince of
Anhalt), to whom at the end he adds Melanchthon as well, for the sake of
his Postil, he presents — not skeleton-fashion, but with full historical
fidelity (clouded only rarely by his own irenic bent), full of sap and life
— in accounts, rich in original sources and engaging details, of their
whole lives, in that he then communicates, for each, in extenso 1, 2, 3, or
4 sermons as homiletical specimens. The sermons communicated are
throughout based on the oldest printed texts, reproduced unaltered
(except for orthography and punctuation), drawn for the most part from
very rare surviving copies, chiefly from the famous Guelpherbytana so
close at hand to the author, and it is a genuine merit of the author's that
he has thereby made the nearly forgotten sermons of significant
Reformation-era witnesses better known and more accessible again.
Whether he has, with full right, chosen precisely this or that sermon is
admittedly a difficult question to answer. Preachers of the second rank
the editor did not wish to consider; and here too, indeed, one might well
ask whether all those named were preachers of the first rank. In any
case there were, besides them, many another, of whom, however, no
printed sermons survive. That the editor has, moreover, dealt
exclusively with Lutheran preachers is something to which, besides the
necessity of limiting his material,