# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S218
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

218 Lucas Osiander on the Right Way of Preaching to the Simple.

-lows: "I have named these sermons of mine a Bauernpostille [Farmers'
Postil] because in composing them I have in every respect had regard to
the simple country folk, so that they might understand and retain them
well. For although one ought indeed to set forth to the peasants the
same Christian doctrine that is preached to burghers, chancery officials,
persons of noble rank, and great lords, yet when one would teach quite
simple people, one must to some extent adopt another manner and form
than when preaching to people who have studied or are otherwise
endowed with more understanding than the common man. For, in the
first place, it will not do, with the poor common folk, to take the whole
appointed text and expound and treat all its several parts in a single
sermon, as a preacher is otherwise accustomed to do where he expounds
a biblical text in orderly sequence, part by part; for there it falls to him
to take little or much text and explain everything in it together, leaving
nothing in it untouched. If one wished to adopt this manner in
expounding the Sunday Gospels and Epistles among the poor simple
folk, the sermons would become far too long, and the hearers would grow
weary. It is also burdensome for those who must come from outlying
hamlets across the fields to attend the sermons at the parish church, and
afterward must likewise trudge back across the fields to their homes,
especially in the cold of winter. And because such simple folk are
generally ill-clothed and suffer cold both out in the fields and in the
church, they at last cease to attend closely to the sermon once it grows
long, and since they cannot well remain in the church for cold, a faithful
shepherd ought rightly to spare his little sheep in this regard. It is also
in no way needful, nor advisable, that a preacher in a village should
undertake to treat many different loci communes, or doctrines (which,
to be sure, can all be drawn from a single text), in one sermon, as one
may indeed do and may in prominent cities or at court (where there are
many kinds of hearers, and very unequal ones). For in such prominent
places one must set forth many kinds of the food of God's Word at once,
so that everyone, according to the condition and occasion of his own
person, may hear something by which his soul is fed, even though the
preacher, briefly yet thoroughly and to the full, speaks of many different
matters. But among the common countryman this will not do; rather,
one must set before them in one sermon only two or three doctrines (or
loci communes) and explain these fully — so far as time allows — and
impress them intelligibly, which cannot be done if one would treat many
different doctrines or loci communes at once among simple people. For
even if one wished to take time enough for it (as in summer), simple
folk still cannot grasp and retain so many different doctrines at once;
rather, when they hear the last, they no longer know what the first one
was, just as when one assigns a pupil too much in a single lesson, he
cannot retain it. But when one sets before them two or three wholesome,
necessary doctrines (well grounded in God's Word), then