# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S108
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

108 Luther as Preacher.

Hail to thee! It well beseems us to call upon thee,
Whose offspring we are, who alone among all upon earth
Hast granted the glorious gift of repeating thy word.
Thee therefore my song doth praise, thee it celebrates ever and always.
Thee the heaven obeys, as thou biddest; and all the stars,
As thy power moves them, turn gladly and willingly,
Whom, as servants and messengers, in hands none may touch,
Thou wieldest the kindling, the unquenchable bolt of lightning:
Before it nature trembles; yet through its fire thou kindlest
The common spirit, which quickens all things and in all things
Appears in shining splendor, in the greatest as in the smallest.
Thus thou dwellest throughout the All and reignest as king. Without
Thee may no work ever come to pass upon the green earth,
Nor in heaven's ethereal realm, nor deep in the sea,
Save what the wicked do foolishly, after their own mind.
Yet thou knowest, in turn, how to bend even evil to good,
Ordering the disorderly, dissolving hatred into love,
So that the bad is fitted into the harmony of the good,
So that one single spirit weaves and rules in everything,
Whose law those flee who among mortals do evil,
Wretched ones who, longing after the eternal goods,
Yet do not hear and honor the common will of God,
Which, had they followed faithfully, they too would have enjoyed a glorious life.
But robbed of the beautiful, they now strive hither and thither,
Some driven restlessly to battle by desire for glory,
Some entangled in manifold cares for the gain of money,
Others turned toward ease and the care of the body;
All, with futile zeal, chasing after things opposed to one another.
But thou, Zeus, giver of all, thou lightning-flasher, wrapped in dark clouds,
Turn, oh turn mankind away from their sorrowful delusion,
Chase it far from the soul, and grant us a share in the wisdom
Of that counsel by which thou dost surely order and rightly dispose all things,
That in the enjoyment of honor we may in turn render thee honor,
Singing in everlasting song thy work, as befits
Man to do; for never was anything higher granted to gods or men
Than to praise, in harmony, thy law that rules through all.

(To be continued.)

Luther as Preacher
by
Prof. Dr. Hengstenberg.
(Continuation and conclusion.)

Before we go on to consider more closely Luther's actual manner of
preaching, we must first observe that he held his sermons on the
churchly pericopes. To these he held fast, although he does not wish to
find fault with those "who take up the whole books of the evangelists,"
just as he himself also preached straight through whole books, for
instance the first book of Moses. But Luther prefers the pericopes for
this reason, "for that, too, of the ori-