THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
the Calvinists, and the retaliation which he brought upon himself by his unrestrained polemics (followed by deaths in his family during a severe epidemic), reduced him to such a state of distress that he postponed all disputations, and occupied all his time in prayer and meditation, concerning eternal life and the estate of faithful souls in the heavenly paradise. The fruit of these meditations was his Freudenspiegel des ewigen Lebens, das ist, griindliche Beschreibung des herrlichen Wesens (Frankfort, 1599). Three spiritual hymns form an appendix to the first edition of Freudenspiegel.
Hardly had the epidemic passed, before renewed controversial attacks came forth from the Calvinists, prompting Nicolai to complement his Freudenspiegel with Spiegel des bosen Geistes, der sich in der Calvinisten Biichern regt (Frankfort, 1599). When forty-four years of age he married the widow of a pastor at Dortmund. He now resolved to avoid all polemics for a season, and occupied himself with a somewhat extensive dogmatic work on the " Mystical Temple of God." In the year 1601 he was elected chief pastor at St. Catherine's Church, Hamburg, where his writings, especially the Freudenspiegel, had gained him friends. He preached every Sunday and Thursday to a wellfilled church, exercising alike by his words and by his personal acts a devout influence upon his congregation, his colleagues, and all the city. He was revered and praised in wide circles as " another Chrysostom," a godly man and faithful shepherd of souls, a talented writer, and a pillar of the Lutheran Church. He felt especially called upon to preserve and confirm among the Hamburg preachers the peace and confessional unity of the Church, the pure Evangelical doctrine, as grounded in divine Scripture, and witnessed and repeated in the Book of Concord of 1580 and its Apology. A counterpart to his Freudenspiegel was the Theoria vitoe ceternae (1606) written the year before, during an epidemic at Hamburg. A posthumous work was the polemic De Antichristo Romano (Rostock, 1609).
Nicolai is known mainly by four spiritual hymns, produced in 1588-96: (1) " Mag ich Ungliick nicht widerstan," a partizan hymn against the Calvinists; (2) " So wunsch ich nun ein gute Nacht," on Ps. xlii.; (3) " Wie schon leucht' uns der Morgenstern, " on Ps. xlv. (Eng. transl. by several persons, including Miss Catherine Winkworth, " O Morning Star! how fair and bright ") ; (4) "Wachetauf! ruft uns die Stimme," on Matt. xxv. (in Eng. by the same translator, " Wake, awake, for night is flying "). Of these four hymns especially the two latter belong to the gems of the Evangelical hymn treasury. Both mark the beginning of a new period of lyric subjectiveness, by their ardent reflection and loving tenderness, which are outwardly facilitated by their poetic and musical rhythm. There is also a rich coloring reflecting the supernatural, such as is still foreign to hymns of the Reformation era. Although circulating widely, and adopted by church hymnals, they were not supplied with melodies equal in sublimity and favor until the appearance of the Melodeyen-Gesangbuch, by J. and H. Pratorius, Schneidermann, and Decker (Hamburg, 1604). The three-
hundredth anniversary of his death was celebrated .hroughout northwestern Germany Oct. 26, 1908.
Victor Schultze.
Bibliography: Nicolai's worka were edited by Dedeken, 6 vols., Hamburg, 1611-17. Lives have been written by V. Schultze, Mengeringhausen, 1908; L. Curtze, Halle, 1859; R. Rocholl, Berlin, 1860; and R. Eekart, Gliickstadt, 1909. Consult further: H. H. Wendt, Vorlesungen liber Philipp Nicolai, Hamburg, 1859; S. W. Duffield, English Hymns, pp. 226-227, New York, 1886; V. Schultze, Waldeckische Reformationsgeschichte, Leipsic, 1903; Julian, Hymnology, pp. 805-807.
NICOLAITANS: A sect mentioned in the Apocalypse of John which had adherents in some of the churches of Asia Minor. The community of Ephesus is praised on account of its oppo- Censured by sition to them (ii. 6), while the
St. John, community of Pergamos is blamed (ii. 14-15) because it suffered such people in its midst. The latter community is reproached with the sin into which the Israelites were once led by Balaam, namely, that of unchastity and of the partaking of meat offered to idols, and also with adopting such teachings (ii. 15, 24). The same sect is certainly alluded to in the address to the " Angel " of the community of Thyatira: " I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols " (ii. 20). Since according to the better reading the text does not give " the wife " but " thy wife " (cf. Zahn), the reference is not to the wife of any one of the community (Holtzmann, Weizsacker, Bousset, etc.), and still less to the priestess of the Chaldean sibyl Tambethe, in Thyatira (Schiirer and Volter). It would seem more plausible to understand by " angel," the bishop, and to suppose that his wife was accused (Zahn and others) ; but that she should be leading such an immoral life in Thyatira without restraint is incredible in view of the praise awarded to the angel of the community. It is much more probable that in these words the weakness of King Ahaz toward his idolatrous wife Jezebel is compared with the weakness of the government of the community toward the Nicolaitans, and that Jezebel is only regarded as a type of the sect. While the Nicolaitans encountered energetic resistance in Ephesus and gained few adherents in Pergamos, in Thyatira they exercised a wide-spread influence. It is probable that their leaders laid claim there to the possession of prophetic inspiration (ii. 20) and to a knowledge of " the depths of Satan " (ii. 24). This probably signifies a dualistic conception, by which evil is referred to the powers of the under-world, thus doing away with human guilt. It is these leaders of the sect, not Jewish teachers (Zahn), disciples of John (Eichhorn), or Judaizers (Ewald, Gebhardt), who are the false apostles mentioned in the address to the church at Ephesus (ii. 2).
The picture thus derived of the Nicolaitans strongly resembles that of the antinomian libertinism in Corinth, as shown in the epistles to the Corinthians. It may be inferred therefore that the former also had its origin in the Gentile Christianity of Paul. However, what was merely a tendency in