Prefatio §II: From the 1687 Tract on Ecclesiastical Peace to Critica Concionatoria and the Scultetus irenic exchange

§ II. — Thus it came about that, after nearly two lustra — that is, in the year of the last century eighty-seven — almost by lot, a little Tract on Ecclesiastical Peace appeared, set forth by me in the form of a Preface to the Themes of the blessed Cornelius Bergius, once my predecessor in this chair, re-edited for the sake of our theology students; soon to be transferred into the vernacular by order of my superiors; adorned also in Batavia with a most friendly preface by a certain most learned man, and reprinted there in the year 1689; and having met with the varied fortune that men's — and especially theologians' — diverse pursuits produce,

I judged that for a time I ought to refrain from offering further that pearl of Ecclesiastical Peace — not indeed cast by me before swine, or prostituted to dogs — and turned my mind to other sacred labors: exegetical and didactic, and elenctic upon many controversies after the pattern of Spanheim's Elenchus, and practical as well, both privately upon the Holy Decalogue of God and outwardly (so-called by abuse) upon the Methodology of adorning the preacher.

From that last occasion there went forth into public light, a few years ago, my Critica Concionatoria, interspersed here and there with certain strictures and pacific persuasions, and received kindly enough even by many Lutheran brethren (as the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig for the year 1700 testify) — especially by the late Daniel Severinus Scultetus, theologian of Hamburg, not undistinguished among the learned of our time for excellent and pacific booklets.

To him, therefore — since he had supplied me so convenient and the more welcome an occasion the more unexpected it was — I could not in good conscience fail to publish a most gentle Irenic Epistle, devoted solely to fostering his so pious zeal for Peace. The excellent man replied with a special Tract titled On the Universal Diffusion of the Reformed, courteously inscribed to my name; and at that time I thought I ought to rest content with it, lest I irritate in any way a well-disposed mind by being forced to answer something of that more prolix kind of writing (not immune to rather frequent repetitions), which would more easily have dragged us both away from the Counsels of Peace into litigation — especially when he was lending his labor more to the theological truths themselves (about which for two centuries already men had disputed in vain with the greatest contention of mind) than to the weight and moment of those truths.