# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86 Luther as a Preacher.

the invocation, which they have borrowed from the poets; then, when
they want to speak of love, they take their start from the river Nile in
Egypt; or when they want to tell the mystery of the cross, they begin
with the dragon Bel at Babylon; or when they want to speak of fasting,
they set out from the twelve signs of the zodiac; or when they
want to preach on faith, they hold forth a long prologue on the squaring
of the circle. Dr. Fleck, Luther relates, began his sermon with singing
and shouting and crying, etc. Münzer with singing: “there went a
peasant into the woods”; Mag. Dietrich: “yesterday we were all drunk,” etc. One
preacher, to amuse the people, cried out “like a cuckoo,” another “gaggled
like a goose” — see Beste, The Most Notable Pulpit Orators, I, pp. 5–6.
Over against such doings, the sound that suddenly struck the astonished
world’s heart from Wittenberg rang out differently indeed. The earnest call:
repent and believe the Gospel, the almost-forgotten message
of salvation in Christ, of faith in him and of love toward the
brethren, entered the soul of the Church as a new, unheard-of joy.
To this must be added the earnest character of the Reformers, and especially
of Luther. An Erasmus or an Eck would not have produced such effects,
even had they taught the very same doctrine that Luther and
his followers taught. That Luther lived as he taught, that his whole
character was rooted in the Gospel and that at every moment he staked
himself and everything for the truth of his teaching, that he let all his
doing and dealing be governed by faith in Christ — that too belonged among
the kindling elements in his evangelical preaching. But one more thing must
also be remembered if one wishes to understand how it was possible that
Luther’s preaching worked so broadly and so deeply. Whereas the Apostles
preached to degenerate heathen in whom no working of grace had yet shown
itself, Luther and his followers spoke in the midst of the Church. However
decayed, however heathenized and judaized that Church might be, it was
nevertheless still a dwelling-place of the Spirit of God. Baptism and the
pericopes had spread thousands of rays of light within the Catholic Church;
because this Church was still, after all, a Church in which the Holy
Spirit had his dwelling-places, it was therefore not so utterly abandoned
by faith and longing as some, contrary to history, would like to portray it.
This point cannot be emphasized enough when one speaks of the power of
the Reformation and its rapid progress. Where among the heathen did the
Gospel ever celebrate such swift and mighty victories as it celebrated in
the time of the Reformation? As in Christ’s own time the “traditions
of the elders” governed the people, and there was “much of the sort of
thing that they had received to hold” (Mark 7:3–4), so it was exactly at
Luther’s time. Much had again accumulated of the sort of thing that they
had received — but beneath the rubbish there were baptized hearts, and
more children of the covenant even than there had been when the Lord
himself appeared under the old covenant.

Out of its centuries-long history the Church had, even in