# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S252
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

252 Literature.

[Erlangen] edition. By this alone, access to them was blocked to the evangelical people, indeed even to a not-small portion of the clergy, to which, admittedly, the Lutheran form and manner of speech and scriptural exposition also contributed no small amount of what many found off-putting. To raise that treasure for the benefit of the whole congregation, teachers and hearers alike, was the purpose of the author. For years he had devoted the most strenuous diligence, in preparing his sermons, to studying through, pen in hand, the writings of tried scriptural scholars of older and more recent times. His path led him thereby also to Luther, whose writings had until then remained unknown to him. What Luther wrote has come forth as pure gold of faith out of the fire of trial, and in trial the meaning of Luther's writings likewise opened itself to the author. This understanding became so precious and important to him that he wanted to open it to others as well. Thus the present work came into being. He has given in it a complete commentary on the Gospels drawn from Luther, on the basis of everything that Luther's writings offer in any way as a contribution to the exposition of the Gospels: a Lutheran exposition of the Gospels for the whole evangelical people, for the learned as for the unlearned. Besides this, however, he also had the homiletical purpose of showing, by giving the substance of thought of Luther's sermons, how exegesis and preaching are joined together in him in a living way. By no means, then, does the present work contain merely a Lutheran exposition of the Gospel pericopes; rather it gives everything that exists from Luther on the whole four Gospels. First, indeed, in order, the Lutheran exposition of all the Sunday and festival Gospel pericopes; but then it also treats (in part, admittedly, only by way of cross-reference) the individual four Gospels according to the sequence of their chapters, concluding at last with suitable indexes. To be sure, the author has given the Lutheran exposition here only in extract; but this extract from the entirety of Luther's exegetical and homiletical writings is one truly made on an objective principle. By no means has the ever-recurring polemic of Luther against the Pope and the Turks been omitted, although, to be sure, reduced to a lesser degree, and everywhere, even in the transitions, the words remain Luther's own. We do not wish to conceal that, for all that, an extract from Luther is, after all, always only an extract; but here there lies before us one so rich and so serviceable to the general edification as nowhere else, and we can only most earnestly wish that this treasure of the deepest and mightiest Lutheran exposition of the Gospels, now become so easily accessible, may be taken up by a good many people, and thereby become a bridge for ever more of them to the one and whole Luther himself. — Had the author, by way of annotation, always precisely indicated the individual passages of the excerpted Lutheran writings, he would indeed have satisfied the critical need still further, though admittedly at the cost of the more learned