Venatorius, Thomas

VENABLES, GEORGE: Church of England; b. at Hampton Gay (6 m. n. of Oxford) Apr. 23, 1821; d. at Burgh Castle (17 m. e. of Norwich) Dec. 30, 1906. He was educated at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and was ordered deacon in 1850 and ordained priest 1852. He was curate of Nether Warton and Deddington, Oxfordshire (1850-53), and Broad water, Sussex (1853-54); and vicar of St. Paul's, Chatham, Kent (1854-58), Friezland, Yorkshire (1858-69); St. Matthew's, Leicester (1869-74), and Great Yarmouth (1874-86). After 1888 he was rector of Burgh Castle, Suffolk. He was also chap lain of Shoreham Union in 1853-54, rural dean of Flegg in 1878-86, select preacher at Cambridge in 1883, and honorary canon of Norwich after 1881.

Among his numerous writings special mention may be made of his How did they get there g or, The Non.Conformirtg Ministers of 1662 (London, 1862); Our Church and our Country; or, From A.D. 62 to A.D. 1862 (1862); Counsel for Communicants (1865); The Churchman's Manual (1871); Unity and Uniformity (1892) ; Considerations on tile Epistle to the Ephesians (1893); Thoughts at the Eventide concerning the Church of the Anglican Communion (1898); Up (1902); The True and Visible Unity of the Church (1903); My Church (1905); and Who and What am 1? (1906).

VENATORIUS, of"nd-to'rf-us (GECHAUF, JAEGER), THOMAS: German Protestant and humanist; b. at Nuremberg about 1488; d. there Feb. 4, 1551. He seems to have received his humanistic training in Italy, probably at Padua; in 1522 he was called as preacher to the Neues Spital at Nuremberg, and from 1533 until his death was preacher at St. James's in the same city, except during the summer of 1544, when he introduced the Reformation at Rothenburg-on-the-Tauber. Venatorius was, primarily, a humanist, the last among the clergy of Nuremberg. Even his Catechismus minor, hoc est de iustituenda juventute in fine Christians (Nuremberg, 1535) is essentially humanistic in spirit, and he edited the Plutus of Aristophanes (Nuremberg, 1531) and the first edition of the works of Archimedes (Basel, 1544).

The first independent theological production of Venatorius was his Axiomatca qucedam rerwm Chras tianarum (Nuremberg, 1526), a compend of Evan gelical doctrines in which special stress is laid on the permanent signification of baptism, while the Reformed theory of the Lord's Supper is energeti cally rejected. In 1527 he wrote his Pro baptismo et fide parvulorum against the Anabaptists, and in 1527 a purely devotional work, Ein kurz Unterricht den, sterbenden Menschen ganz trSstlich. Venatorius is best known, however, for his De virtute Christians libri tres (Nuremberg, 1529), through which he be came the real founder of Protestant ethics. With a careful avoidance of savage polemics, Venatorius discussed the theory of the sacraments in his Kurtze vnterrichtung von beyden sacramenten, dem Tau, f vnd Nachtmal Christi (Nuremberg, 1530); and in Sept., 1530, he published his Ermanung zum Creutz in der zeyt der verfolgung, apparently with allusion to the prospective decision of the Diet of Augsburg. A series of exegetical lectures seems to have been the basis of In divi Pauli apostoli priorem ad Timotheum epistolam distributiones viginti (Basel, 1533), which is dogmatic rather than exegetical in nature. His one polemic work is the De sofa fide justifucante nor in oculis Dei, ad Johannem Hanerum epistda apolo getics (Nuremberg, 1534), in which he defended the Lutheran point of view.

(T. Kolde.)

Bibliography: J. G. E. Schwartz, in TS%, 1850, pp. 79 sqq.; T. Kolde, in Beiträge zur bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, siii. 97 sqq., 157 sqq., Erlangen, 1905.