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Updated: June 21, 2025


Lutherans enshrine it in their inmost souls because it is the receptacle of treasures of meditation and devotion with which their forms of worship have been enriched for four hundred years. To ignore Angelus Silesius, Paul Gerhardt, Albert Knapp, Philip Spitta and their glorious compeers, would be to silence a choir that sang the praises of the Lord "in notes almost divine."

In this single year he wrote over a hundred songs, the best he ever gave to the world, and," as Professor Spitta continues, "when we look through the words of his songs, it is clear that here, more than anywhere, love was the prompter love that had endured so long a struggle, and at last attained the goal of its desires.

The "John" Passion and the "Matthew" Passion of Bach are as little alike as two works dealing with the same subject, and intended for performance under somewhat similar conditions, could possibly be; and since the "Matthew" version appeals to the modern heart and imagination as an ideal setting of the tale of the death of the Man of Sorrows, one is apt to follow Spitta in his curious mistake of regarding the differences between the two as altogether to the disadvantage of the "John."

Thus the collection of the compositions for the flute by Frederick the Great discovered some ten years ago in the lumber rooms of the "Neues Palais" at Potsdam, and recently published after being edited by Professor Spitta, proves that the royal patron of Voltaire, and the founder of Prussia's military power was no mere dilettante, but a real genius in the art of composition.

Assuming this to be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach "spoke to the parson," he confessed his love and his betrothal.

The first satellite sometimes looks dusky, but never absolutely black, in travelling over the disc of Jupiter. The second appears uniformly white a circumstance attributed by Dr. Spitta to its high albedo.

Further Spitta comments: "The plan on which Bach wished to found his own family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most certain of understanding him.

This is a pity, for Spitta really had a very good case to spoil. The "Matthew" is without doubt a vaster, profounder, more moving and lovelier piece of art than the "John." Indeed, being the later work of a composer whose power grew steadily from the first until the last time he put pen to paper, it could not be otherwise.

Spitta, indeed, goes further than this. So bent is he on proving the superiority of the "Matthew" that what he sees as a masterstroke in that work is in the "John" a gross blunder; and, on the whole, the pages on the "John" Passion are precisely the most fatuous of the many fatuous pages he wrote when he plunged into artistic criticism, leaving his own proper element of technical or historical criticism.

See especially O. W. Emmet, The Eschatological Question in the Gospels and other Studies, pp. 191 ff., and K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, pp. 274 ff. The most important names in the first period are Königsmann, Schleiermacher, Gfrörer, and Schwanbeck, especially the last; in the second period B. Weiss, Wendt, Sorof, Jüngst, J. Weiss, Spitta, Clemen, Hilgenfeld.

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