# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S251
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literary Notices. 251

in use, sometimes it has been recoined and reworked into new proverbs with
or without rhyme, sometimes they are merely pointed expressions borrowed
from Scripture. The author therefore carefully lists, with citation of
sources, all the forms found across the various periods, and thereby makes
possible an insight into how far, roughly, and especially in the Middle
Ages, Scripture became common property. The total number of biblical
sayings in popular speech amounts to 296, most of them already current in
the Middle Ages. 179 have flowed from the Old Testament, 117 from the New,
the majority from the Proverbs of Solomon and the Gospel of Matthew, which
are then followed by Jesus Sirach, the other Gospels, the Psalms, Job, and
the Epistles. The core in the Middle Ages is formed by 12 sayings which one
meets most frequently in all sorts of ways: God leads his saints
wondrously; no one can serve two masters; we are all poor sinners; man and
wife are one flesh; whatever you would that men should do unto you, and so
forth. After Luther, many others are then added through the spread of
Scripture, which Schulze has scarcely enumerated completely. For, as he
himself remarks, among no people have so many Bible-words passed into
common use as among our own. Among the more recent proverbial sayings
belongs also this: Philistines be upon thee, Samson! In a brawl between
students and townsmen at Jena in 1693 a student was left dead on the
spot. The local pastor Göz preached the following Sunday that "it had gone
there just as it stands written: Philistines be upon thee, Samson!" Hence
the townsmen were soon called Philistines, in Jena and elsewhere.

As the practical and popular nature of proverbs conditions it, so these
too are practical, turned chiefly toward life, or else only generally
religious. For the majority of them, evidence can be produced from pagan
sources. The distinctively Christian element is very weakly and vaguely
represented, unless one wishes to reckon here trust in God, the reign and
judgment of God, the empire of God, the Empress Mary, the names of Christ
and of the angels. And although from this one may not conclude a want of
Christian influences, they nevertheless recede very much into the
background. The saying is indeed found frequently in the Middle Ages:
Faith without works is dead; but sayings about the power and gift of faith
are entirely lacking, even after the Reformation. Popular religion is a
general fear of God and uprightness, which has taken up the distinctively
Christian element more or less, mostly only outwardly, from which the
possibility and dominance of rationalism will be explained.

Very attractive are the reshapings that the people have made of the words
of the Bible, in which much native wit is shown, sometimes roguishness, and
occasionally also frivolity. Prov. 27:2: "Better a neighbor at the wall
than a brother far away." Eccl. 1:18: "He who understands much, knows and
can do much, is a heavily burdened man; he worries about what is and what
is to become, what is to be feared for troubles; thereby he eats his heart