# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S248
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

248 Siegfried Saccus, on the Order That May Be Kept in Preaching, etc.

only be a heathen city, since it is comprehended under the class of "cities of the heathen." 8. "In chapter 18, the new Babylon appears, in the fullest description, as the center of world trade — not in the sense in which Tyre once was, but rather in that the merchants of the whole world grow rich through her, that her goods and pleasures flow together in her, that all luxury, all excess, all self-indulgent living is concentrated in her. That fits only heathen Rome."
(To be continued.)

Siegfried Saccus, on the Order That May Be
Kept in Preaching.

(From W. Beste, The Most Eminent Pulpit Orators of the Older Lutheran Church, Leipzig, Mayer, 1858.)

Dr. S. Saccus, cathedral preacher at Magdeburg, died 1596, gives, in the "brief instruction on the order that may be kept in preaching" printed before his postil, the following exhortation: "It matters very greatly to young preachers that they accustom themselves to a good order and to a certain manner of teaching, and it is a harmful and shameful delusion among certain people that they think no order need be kept in preaching, that they may merely prattle whatever comes into their mouth, that they reject the languages and the liberal arts as though these were not necessary or useful for the explanation of Holy Scripture, that they pretend, wherever something is arranged in an orderly way, that it is mere philosophy and has no spirit, and hold it moreover that in the whole of Holy Scripture no order at all is kept. As indeed happened to me myself with a certain man who wished to be something special: when, at the beginning of my preaching, I had preached a sermon on the text "call upon me in trouble, etc.," he said to me: Concio tua non placuit mihi. (Your sermon did not please me.) When I asked why, he said: Quia erat methodica (because it was coherently arranged), and added: Alius erat spiritus Lutheri — that is, Luther had had a different spirit and kept no order in his sermons. This same man kept absolutely no order in preaching, as though it were the greatest disgrace to teach in an orderly way; and he wished, moreover, to shelter himself for this under the name of the Lord Luther, just as if Luther had deliberately taught confuse (in a confused manner) — though the contrary can very readily be proved. Young preachers, on the other hand, should know that God the Lord is not a God of disorder; non est Deus confusionis sed ordinis (he is not a God of confusion but of order); and that in Holy Scripture a beautiful and glorious order is kept beyond measure, as can be shown by many examples, both from the Old and the New Testament. And just as God the Lord himself, and also the holy angels, prophets, and apostles kept a good order, so we too should accustom ourselves to a good order in teaching. For that serves both the teachers and the hearers alike. The teachers, in that they