A horizontal typographic ornament acting as a header divider, featuring a central rod decorated with symmetrical, scrolling floral or foliate patterns.

Preface

of a

Theological Writer.

I am not writing a preface to this work in order to praise it. The author’s modesty prevents him from naming himself, and my own name would provide no recommendation for his pages either. Anyone who considers spiritual birth Also known as regeneration or being "born again," a central concept in Pietist theology to be among those things "which belong to the entirely natural course of the moral improvement of every right-thinking person, and which merely receive special names in the Bible according to oriental figurative language The author is likely critiquing Enlightenment rationalists who argued that biblical descriptions of miracles or rebirth were simply poetic "oriental" metaphors for basic ethical behavior," will surely dismiss this analogy between physical and spiritual birth as a product of religious fanaticism Schwärmerey: a derogatory 18th-century term for what was perceived as irrational, overly emotional, or mystical religious devotion. Indeed, such a person has likely long since passed the same judgment on my own writings, should they have ever come to his attention.