a town of Prussia, in the province of Brandenburg, situate on the River Nuthe, on the Berlin and Anhalt Railway, 31 miles S. of the former city. It has woollen and linen factories, and manufactures scythes, leather, paper, and spirits. It has a court of justice, and a parish and burgh school. Pop. 7500.

LÜCKE, GOTTFRIED CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH, one of the most learned theologians of Germany, was born at Egeln, in the duchy of Magdeburg, 23d August 1792. He received his early education at the gymnasium of his native city, and after the Easter of 1810 studied theology for two years at Halle, under Knapp and Gesenius. From Halle he removed to Göttingen, where he continued his studies under Planck; and here he became first known from his prize essay on the church of the apostolic age (De Ecclesia Apostolica, Göt. 1813). The publication of this little work procured him at once the office of repetent in the theological faculty. It also drew him into close literary friendship with Bunsen, Ernest Schulze, Brandis, Lachmann, and others, who were students and aspirants for literary distinction about the same time. Lücke was soon afterwards drawn by the personal influence of Schleiermacher to Berlin, where he passed as licentiate of theology. In 1817 he published at Göttingen his Grundriss der Neutestamentlichen Hermeneutik, a youthful but brilliant attempt to mark out the limits of his favourite study, that which he delighted to designate as Christian philology. In the spring of 1818 he was appointed extraordinary professor of theology at Bonn; and in the following autumn he received promotion to an ordinary professorship. Here he devoted himself with the greatest enthusiasm to the study of exegesis and of church history. Besides contributing to the Theologische Zeitschrift and the Christliche Zeitschrift of Bonn, he about this time began his Commentary on the Writings of John (4 vols., Bonn, 1820-32); and to the same period belongs his Trilogie with Nitzsch and Sack, and his celebrated letter to Delbrück (Bonn, 1827) on the relation of Scripture to the rule of faith. In 1827 Lücke succeeded Studlin as professor of systematic theology at Göttingen, where he continued to reside till his death in Feb. 1855. Lücke contributed valuable papers to the Studien und Kritiken. To him especially we owe many biographical notices of the great men with whom he had been closely associated in study, and whose names form landmarks in the progress of theological literature. The best known of these biographical sketches are those of Planck (1835), of Schleiermacher (1834), and of De Wette (1850). Towards the close of his life, he contributed to the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Christliche Wissenschaft und Christliches Leben; and during the conflict with Strauss, he wrote anonymously a little tract entitled Strauss und die Züricher Kirche (1839).

It is undoubtedly as a commentator that Lücke deserves chiefly to be remembered. In common with the whole school of Schleiermacher, to which he belonged, he gave a marked preference in study to the writings of the apostle John, and these he has illustrated with a freshness and vigour at that time unequalled in the whole library of comment. Beyond all his competitors he is the artist of exposition; and in the interest with which he handles dull details of criticism to bring out the hidden beauties of Scripture, he is inferior only to Bengel and Stier. He is, however, too often led astray by his preferences for the fourth Gospel, and his labours have lost much of their interest since the attack of Strauss has given a wider range to modern German criticism, and has shown the danger of a false preference in a matter so vital to the interests of Christendom. In an honest recoil from dogmatism, which he hated instinctively and combated fiercely, Lücke has often unfortunately stopped short in the scrutiny of notorious difficulties, and left them unsolved, when another step in the analysis would have sufficed to clear away every trace of doubt. The greatest blot on his pages is his ascription of the Apocalypse to an unknown author, whom he supposed to have flourished in the reign of Nero; but his greatest merit remains, of having been one of the foremost and the most powerful to break up the dominion of rationalistic criticism, and to clear the way for a philology more thoroughly Christian even than his own.