# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 Luther as Preacher.

...Greek Fathers himself, but has only heard of them through compendia, will never gain an impression of the rhetorical character of the Greek Fathers in their own spirit. How many misunderstandings over church questions, how many disputes would vanish, how much true union would be found, if one resolved to read Luther's sermons with a heart hungry for salvation, and not to content oneself from the outset with mere scraps, as a mind already closed and, as regards both faith and theology, finished, is always disposed to receive them from Luther as from others. Whoever brings himself to study the whole of Luther, and especially his sermons, is the first to understand the Gospel as the Church that bears his name preaches it.

Let us, however, consider Luther as preacher; for this it is above all necessary first to become acquainted with him in his general education. Whoever has read even a little of Luther, and especially of his sermons, also knows that Luther, by the standard of his time, was a universally educated man. The Latin writers were well known to him. He read Cicero, Virgil, Livy, and others, and indeed, as Melanchthon says in his Life of Luther, not as boys do, to take words from them, but as instruction and images of human life. "Hence he also examined the intentions and opinions of these writers more closely, for he had a faithful and retentive memory, so that whatever was best in what he had read and heard was always present and before his eyes." Well known are Luther's judgments on the classics. He praises, says Jonas — in the Kanzelberedsamkeit Luthers [The Pulpit Eloquence of Luther], p. 2, where the relevant passages on Luther's education are found — the fables of the ancients, extols their virtues, calls Homer and Virgil his own books, loves Plautus; he could recite whole passages from him and from Virgil, attempted a translation of Aesop, in short showed himself to be a man who devoted time and effort to the study of antiquity. From the sermons themselves one can see all this. He introduces — for indeed he himself at first preached in Latin — whole Latin hexameters in his sermons. He cites Latin writers by name, both from classical antiquity and from the period of Scholasticism. Philosophy, too, was well known to him. He studied Aristotle diligently and was well versed in the systems of the ancients. He praises dialectic, for "it shows one precisely the way, how one ought to speak of things in an orderly and correct manner, whence to take it, and what one ought, properly and with certainty, to call and judge or decide to be right or wrong. Dialectica is necessary, he says, for one needs it not only in the schools but also in consistories, courts of law, and churches; there it is most needful of all. For often a poor argument raises confusion and distress before one's eyes; but if one looks at it well, each point by itself, one can easily guard oneself against error and deception."

(To be continued.)