# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S84
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

84
Luther as Preacher
by
Prof. Dr. Hengstenberg.
(Continued.)

However skilled Luther himself was in dialectic, his polemical and dogmatic works show. Natural history, too, was well known to him, so far as it existed at all in his day. In his sermons he often comes to speak of natural phenomena; he knows "that the stag has the nature to draw the snakes out of their hole with its breath, kill them, and eat them. Likewise also, that when a little weasel wags its tail before a snake's hole, it lures the snake out, and when it comes crawling out, the weasel strikes the snake's fangs into its own throat, so that the venom does not harm it, and strangles it." He says, "The philosophers ought to know the nature of creatures; but nowadays the peasants know more about it than our natural masters." He mocked Melanchthon for his superstitious astrological fear, and said: "The stargazers and natural masters have gone clear up to heaven, and have twisted what he says here about signs into their own lies." In this, Luther had a deep eye for the phenomena of nature, and often points to them in order thereby to make his Christian ideas clear. Luther also held history in high honor. How much he knows how to bring forward in his sermons from ancient and modern history, down to the legends! Everything turns for him on the example. Only, he does not, as is the fashion nowadays, draw his examples solely from conversion-stories and other such tales with their sugary aftertaste: the whole realm of history lay open to him, and he made use of it like a man who is everywhere at home and understands everything and can put everything to use: heathendom and Christendom alike. "What," he said, "philosophy, wise men, and all of reason can teach and devise as useful for an honest life, history sets forth mightily with example and story, and places it, as it were, before one's eyes, as if one were present and saw it happen. And if one considers it thoroughly, then almost all rights, arts, good counsel, warning, threats, terrors, comforts, storms, instruction, discernment, wisdom, and prudence — in short, all the virtues — have welled up out of histories and stories as out of a living spring. Therefore are

has laid this burden upon you, who hired out your services to your masters. So he who conscientiously endeavors to fulfill his duty toward his master does his duty not only toward a man, but toward God." (John Calvin, Commentary on the N.T., ed. A. Tholuck, II, 68.) Of Philemon, Calvin says in his commentary on the epistle to him: "Philemon was not one of the common people, but a fellow-laborer of Paul in Christ's vineyard, and yet the authority over his servant that was granted him by the laws is not taken from him; he is only bidden to grant the man forgiveness and to receive him back again — indeed, Paul earnestly pleads that he may be restored to his former place." (Ibid., p. 371.)