Sudermann for having collected, transcribed and preserved this literature has hitherto not been acknowledged. His hymns both of this period and later years reflect much of the sentiment and the imagery of these Christian writers, of whom Tauler was for Sudermann the master-teacher and close companion.
The last two decades of his life, like the earlier periods, Sudermann spent chiefly in literary employment. Until about 1628, he lived at the Bruderhof. He was never married, always enjoyed good health, and even at the age of 80 years he governed an active and a vigorous pen. He was a voluminous transcriber of Schwenkfelder literature, and in this role he was designedly supplying a real want of his friends. These transcripts are frequently inscribed thus :
"Disz Buch soil niemands eigen sein,
Schwenckfelds Discipeln ich schenks insgemein."
In this period he completed the fair-copy of his hymns contained in collections S Ilia, S Illb and S IIIc of the list given below. All of the important collections of hymns by Sudermann which appeared in print, were published in the years 1618-1628. As might be conjectured, a number of the hymns written in this decade reflect the fierce religious strife of the calamitous Thirty Years' War.
Sudermann was the author of 2500 hymns and other religious poems, of which 435 have appeared in print. Wackernagel alone prints 211 of Sudermann's hymns in full. Schneider[1] gives a list of Sudermann's writings amounting to twenty-seven numbers, not including his theological treatises. If now we remind ourselves that for more than a score of years Sudermann's duties as Hofmeister claimed the major portion of his time, that he directed the publication of many of Schwenkfeld's works, that during his curacy at the Bruderhof he accumulated a collection of old manuscripts which has ever since been an object of admiration to bibliophiles, copied five large volumes of hymns,
- ↑ Cf. A. F. H. Schneider, loco citato, pp. 12ff.
