# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S206
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

206 Lutheran-theological Pastors' Library.

preachers who think they need no instruction in catechizing, and who,
because this function is performed on dear little children, regard it as
easy as a child's game. Luther already complains of such spirits,
among others, in the preface to his Large Catechism. But only he who
understands it least will consider catechizing an easy matter, and the
more wretchedly he himself performs this office of his, the less notion
he will have of the incomparable importance good catechetical
instruction has for the true building up of a congregation. So writes
the old Coburg general superintendent Joh. Gerh. Meuschen in his
Reflections on the Reformation of the Academies and Schools: "the
proper methodus catechisandi must be taught to the theologiae studiosis,
in particular, in the collegio catechetico. For more depends on this
than almost on the methodo concionandi. And I can testify from my own
experience that a beginning preacher finds it harder to conduct a
proper catechization than to deliver a good sermon; I am also entirely
of the opinion that a proper catechization can accomplish more than the
finest sermon, and I wish that many of our oratorical and artful
sermons might be turned into catechizations; that would bring more
attention, more edification, more godliness, and more knowledge of God
into the people than other fashionable sermons do." Here too, however,
the question of which guide to catechizing we consider the best and
most useful puts us in an embarrassment. Since the catechetical
discipline received a separate and systematic treatment only after the
flowering age of our Church, we cannot name any pertinent work which,
like many exegetical, dogmatic, and historical writings, could be
regarded as the chief work among all those treating the same subject,
one that would make every other work of the same kind more or less
dispensable. Among the more recent guides to catechizing, the
foremost rank unquestionably belongs to the following: "Catechetics, by
Lorenz Kraußold. Erlangen, 1843. Published by Ferd. Enke." Octavo. The
distinguished author, now, unless we are mistaken, a consistorial
councilor in Bavaria, was, when he wrote the work, still a pastor and
district school inspector in Fürth. The reason we scarcely dare to
designate this Catechetics as the one work with which every Lutheran
pastor's library ought in any case to be furnished lies chiefly, first,
in its extensive — though certainly, for its purpose, most necessary —
critical attention to the false views that have become current through
German rationalism, and second, in the learned and abstract manner of
treatment and expression that prevails in it, which certainly earns
little thanks precisely in catechetics. Nonetheless, Kraußold's
Catechetics is a work worthy of every recommendation. The introduction
deals with the concept and the division of catechetics and gives a
history of it. Catechetics itself falls into two parts. The subject of
the first is the catechetical material, namely