PostMedival Preachers Author:Sabine Baring Gould General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1865 Original Publisher: Rivingtons Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can sele... more »ct from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: GABRIEL BIEL. This excellent and learned man is generally supposed, from his name Biel, the modern Bienne, to have been a Swiss, though some assert that he was a native of Spire, and the latter is probably the real place of his nativity, though his family may have been of Swiss extraction, for he is called " Gabriel Biel ex Spira " in the beginning of his " Sennones de tempore," as published by Johan Otmar, in Tubingen, 1510. He went by the name of " the Collector," from the fact of his being a laborious compiler rather than an original composer. He was undoubtedly one of the best scholastic divines of his age, and was a careful reader of the Fathers. Gabriel Biel was a member of the Kegular Canons, and was Doctor of Theology, which he taught as professor in the University of Tubingen, founded by Count Eberhardt of Wirtemberg, in 1477. He soon became a favourite with this nobleman, who listened to his sermons with delight. At one time he was vicar and ordinary preacher at the metropolitan church of St. Martin at Mainz, but the date of his appointment is uncertain. Gabriel Biel wasa man of gravity and learning; his sermons were popular, not on account of the eloquence with which they were delivered, for of that there was little, but of their beautiful simplicity and intrinsic excellence. His hearers were not amused by his discourses, but I venture to say that they were edified. His style is pithy, his sentences pregnant with meaning, for what he said, he said in few words, and he said it too very gracefully. Instead of wearying his hearers with unprofitable scholas...« less