# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S112
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

112 Luther as a Preacher.

...earth: earth and gnarled roots were certainly not lacking in him; but he was a truly grown tree and not an artificially made one. His heroic disorder, as it has been called, his own frequent letting-himself-go too far — that we will neither defend nor recommend — but nevertheless, that Luther was a whole man and a whole Christian and, as we shall see further below, a whole theologian on the pulpit as well, and that he knew himself as such everywhere and did not wish to be anyone other in the pulpit than he was in ordinary life, that out of his natural gift, out of the knowledge that had become his most personal possession, he spoke out freely and boldly without much deliberation, and cherished only the one wish, to be understood by the little Hans and Gretchen behind the door, even at the risk that he might have had to show the door to the forty masters he had among his hearers — this is what made him so significant and popular a preacher. When he let himself go in his weaker passages, it came precisely from the fact that in his stronger passages, too, he gave himself just as he was. Precisely for this reason he was nonetheless a sanctified personality even as a preacher, even though the weak sides of his nature did not conceal themselves. Whoever prunes nature too severely runs the risk of losing all individuality. And holy naturalness — that was surely also the great characteristic of the prophets and apostles, just as it is the task of all Christian upbringing and formation not to break nature but to transfigure it, so that its powers become free from the bondage of the flesh: to the glory of God, in service to one's neighbor. And this sanctified nature Luther possessed as a Christian and theologian and as a preacher, however much the dark ground might show itself everywhere in him, the ground on which the Holy Spirit has to work in every Christian, theologian, and preacher, as long as he lives. So let us, too, take Luther the preacher as he is, and say that his transfigured and sanctified nature was his power as a preacher. He lets it have free rein in his sermons. Listen to him when he speaks of the faith that makes righteous before God, when he praises the love that dwells in God's heart, when he speaks of the love that Christian ought to have toward Christian: how calmly and clearly he speaks, and how he often lets himself go and drift in it, as though it were a theme he never wished to break off again. As an eagle is the same eagle whether it perches or flies, so Luther's eloquence is the same, whether it speaks of the pope and the village boors who crawl upon the earth, or whether he soars up to heaven and speaks of the great love of God. A single verse often becomes there like a great sea of divine thoughts of love, and he speaks and speaks and makes out of this one flower, as he himself says, a whole meadow. And it is precisely this breadth, this original repetition, this presenting of the matter from the most various sides, that probably contributed most to the popularity of Luther's sermons. How little effect, after all, the tightly-cut synthetic art-figures of the present day so often have, precisely because they are so tightly and artificially thought out and worked up! But whoever knows how often a...