ty accepted this removal, and
preached my trial sermon on Judica Sunday, in the presence of the
parishioners and commissaries. I received the call on the following
day, and thus under God's providence brought hither my wife and child.
This was my fourth piece of church preferment, where for my own part I
desire, God willing, to live and die; but my wife wishes herself away,
in a better place in the plains, on account of the difficulty of
getting servants. I leave it in the hands of God and my superiors."

Thus far extends what is preserved of Boetzinger's biography. He
finally found rest at Heubach, and administered his office there for
six-and-twenty years. He died in 1673, at the age of seventy-four,
after having led for forty-seven years a life which cannot be
designated as peaceful. Heubach was a new parish which had been formed
at Gotha by Duke Ernest the Good, and Boetzinger was the first pastor.
He was obliged to dwell in the royal shooting lodge, which had been
built by Duke Casimir in the forest, for grouse shooting. In the
neighbouring forester's house lived an insolent forester; the country
was in a wild state, little inhabited, and the people, corrupted by the
war, led a lawless forest life. It appears that the new pastor was not
particularly welcome to these denizens of the woods, the forester
especially was his vehement opponent, and the pastor secretly
complained, in Latin distiches which he inscribed in the church
records, to his successor, of the bitter sufferings which this servant
of the woods occasioned him. He in a brotherly way warned his successor
against the wickedness of the man and his bad wife. But in spite of
this contention, it may be concluded that this long-tormented sufferer
was not altogether unhappy, and a harmless self-contemplation is to be
perceived in his Latin verses. When at last he died, laudatory poems by
some of his noted clerical brothers were written, as was then the
custom; some of them are extant both in Latin and German. Even Herr
Andreas Bachmann, the court preacher at Gotha, a distinguished man,
yielded a tribute of respect to his "Dear old, now deceased clerical
brother;" it begins with the following verses, which will conclude this
chapter:--

Martin Boetzinger, God's servant, faithful and true,
Upright as Job--was long time pastor I ween;
A much tormented man with crosses not a few,
As will, in the record of his life, be seen.