Great as is the dignity [giddy height of Mayoralty in Landshut], though undeserved, which the Ever-Merciful has thus conferred upon me, equally great and much greater is the burden connected therewith.

I confess"-- He confesses, in high-stalking earnest wooden language very foreign to us in every way: (1.) That his shoulders are too weak; but that he trusts in God.

For (2.) it is God's doing; and He that has called Spener, will give Spener strength, the essential work being to do God's will, to promote His honor, and the common weal.

(3.) That he comes out of a smaller Office (Office not farther specified, probably exterior to the RATHS-COLLEGE, and subaltern to the late tyrannous Mayor and it), and has taken upon him the Mayoralty of this Town (an evident fact!); but that the labor and responsibility are dreadfully increased; and that the point is not increase of honor, of respectability or income, but of heavy duties.

(A sonorous, pious-minded Spener; much more in earnest than readers now think!) It is easy, intimates he, to govern a Town, if, as some have perhaps done, you follow simply your own will, regardless of the sighs and complaints your subjects utter for injustice undergone,--indifferent to the thought that the caprice of one Town Sovereign is to be glorified by so many thousand tears (dim glance into the past history of Landshut!).
Such Town Sovereign persecutes innocence, stops his ears to its cry; flourishes his sharp scourge;--no one shall complain: for is it not justice?
thinks such a Town Sovereign.