Meffreth, the subject of this notice, was a preacher of great popularity in the fifteenth century; his sermons display great power of a certain order. He was undoubtedly an accomplished theologian, a good scholar, and a man of diversified reading; he could speak with force, and describe with considerable graphic power,—but for all this, in his two hundred and twenty-five sermons there is not one in which the unction necessary for the conversion of souls is to be discovered. It is quite impossible to read these sermons without feeling that the preacher’s great object has been the exhibition of his own ingenuity and learning, not the saving of the souls of his hearers.
Of the man himself but little is known, and that little we gain from his own title-page. From it we ascertain that he was a German priest of Meissen, and that he flourished about 1443.
His only work is the Hortulus Reginæ, seu Sermones Dominicales et de Sanctis, per totum annum, in Partes Æstivalem et Hyemalem distributos. Proderunt Norimbergæ, 1487, fol.; Basileæ, 1488, 2 vols. fol.; Coloniæ, 1645, 4to.; the same sermons, Pars Hiemalis; sine loco et anno, folio.
Sermones de Præcipuis Sanctorum Festivitatibus; Monachii, 1614, 4to.; Coloniæ, 1625, 4to.
Meffreth having stated boldly, in his Sermons on the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, that she was born with the taint of original sin, his editors were put to some trouble in order to get a licence to publish; in the first edition there is an explanatory note by the publisher, in the second, a long preface by Fr.
