MOSHEIM, Johann Lorenz von (c. 1694-1755), well known as a church historian, but also distinguished in his day as a master of eloquence, was born at Lübeck on the 9th of October. There is some uncertainty as to the year, but the probability is in favour of 1693 or 1694. He received a somewhat irregular education at the gymnasium of his native place, and afterwards entered the university of Kiel, where he took his master’s degree in 1718. His first appearance in the field of literature was in a polemical tract against Toland, Vindicix antiques Christianorum disciplinae (1720), which was soon followed by a volume of Observationes sacrx (1721). These works, along with the reputation he had acquired as a lecturer on philosophy, and also as a fervent and eloquent preacher while acting as assistant to Albrecht zum Felde, his teacher and future father-in-law, secured for him a call to a theological chair at Helmstadt, in 1723. The Institutionum Historix Eccle-siasticx libri IV. appeared in 1726 (2 vols., 12mo), and in the same year he was appointed by the duke of Brunswick abbot of Marienthal, to which dignity and emolument the abbacy of Michaelstein was added in the following year. Mosheim was much consulted by the authorities when the new university of Göttingen was being formed; especially had he to do with the framing of the statutes of the theological faculty, and with the provisions for making the theologians independent of the ecclesiastical courts. But having signed in 1726 a promise to remain in Helmstadt he was unable to accept the call to the Georgia Augusta which was urgently pressed upon him, until the year 1747, when the duke of Brunswick at last released him from his obligation. To enhance the dignity he already possessed as a learned and brilliant ...