Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Richt vay to the Kingdome of Heuine

INTRODUCTION.
XXXI
hood of all Christian men, and the importance of a godly
discipline in the Church.
It was long supposed that the treatise of Gau was an
original work — substantially, at least, the production of
its reputed author. That evidently was the opinion of Mr
Chalmers when he referred to it in his ‘ Caledonia,’ and even
of Mr David Laing at the time he published the extracts
from it for the Bannatyne Club. Mr Sonnenstein Wendt,
a Swedish writer of our own day, appears to have been the
first to suggest that it was beyond all question a transla¬
tion of the Danish work of Christiern Pedersen. This was
in i860, in an article on the “ Reformers of Malmo s”1 and
the late Mr Bolling, of the Royal Library at Copenhagen,
to whom Mr Laing, when he heard of this, had sent a copy
of the extracts he had published, confirmed it. But it is
only since Pedersen’s Danish works were reprinted, and
since this reprint of Gau’s book has been put in type, that
it has been possible to institute a full and exhaustive com¬
parison between the two treatises. The result of this has
been clearly to show that the Scottish treatise, if not always,
as Wendt says, a literal, is pretty generally a close trans¬
lation of the Danish one. At the same time not a few
divergences occur throughout. The translator frequently
compresses and occasionally extends particular clauses and
sentences. He often adduces other or further Scripture
proofs in confirmation of the articles of the Creed, &c. He
has other brief additions—and two of considerable length,
for one of which room is made by leaving out the corre¬
sponding paragraphs of the Danish treatise.2
1 Om Reformatorerna i Malmo, in Rordam’s ‘ Ny Kirkehistoriske Sam-
linger,’ vol. ii.
2 A translation of these passages, as well as of a passage omitted at p. 83,