# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S113
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Luther as a Preacher. 113

...such simple people, in preaching too, must have the saving truths told to them again before they understand them; how feeble the mental powers of little Hans and Gretchen often are, who nevertheless listen so gladly; and how eagerly, in turn, a soul in need of salvation wants to hear a great deal, and in full detail, about the main matters of the sermon — matters to which everyone, even the best Christian, must again and again raise himself — will grasp that sermons kept tersely, in which supposedly not a sentence too many is allowed, can edify very little, but at most keep the head in a state of excitement, whereas the sermons that turn the same subject again and again into a new light are the ones that are truly edifying and formative. A preacher forgets this too easily, and most of all when he thinks less of his hearers and more of himself and his artistic pretensions. How rarely does a hearer take in the whole sermon! What good does all the expenditure of form do, and the laborious cadence of the understanding, self-satisfied as it is, in each several part! But that the hearers understand the sermon, and are edified by it — that, in the end, is what everything comes down to. With this, to be sure, no praise is sung to the thoughtless and idealess sermon; it is poor when it says little, and it does not grow richer by using many words.

There is another quality of Luther's that we must also bring out briefly here. It is intimately bound up with the manner already described, of giving himself wholly as he is — of walking in faith in heaven, and of standing over his hearers as a preacher, and yet, through love, being again in their very midst — according to the gifts he had received. This is his mastery in describing. To be sure, nothing appears in his sermons of the morbid description of heaven and hell; he wanted to know no more of it than Scripture reveals. His descriptions touch only on such objects as he draws in as an aid (in subsidium) to strengthen the main thoughts; hence nothing appears in him either of the sentimental description, wanting to be poetic, of human states of mind and of scenery, without any edifying purpose: he describes and paints only in order to make the fundamental thoughts of the sermon clear. How beautiful, for example, is the description of poor Mary in the Christmas sermon for the first day of Christmas, in the K. P. [Church Postil]. For three pages together he paints out the helplessness of Mary on her journey to Bethlehem; but this description has no purpose in itself, unlike the paintings of many a poeticizing pastor. The main emphasis for him, in the end, lies in proving that Christ was truly born of a virgin, and that here there is "no deception, but, as the words state, a true birth." Elsewhere he describes "the natural brooding hen," or a "woman giving birth," or "the rich man," but every time it is plain that he has deeper thoughts in the background. One of the finest such passages (vol. 19, p. 154, Erlangen edition) is surely the one where he speaks "of the last trumpet of God"