# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 03 04_S105
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.
(Rev. 14:6-7)
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine shall not pass away, now or ever."
Published by the German Ev. Luth. Synod of Missouri, Ohio and other States.
Edited by C. F. W. Walther.
Volume 7.  St. Louis, Mo., March 4, 1851.  No. 14.
Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for out-of-town subscribers, who are to pay for it in advance and to bear the postage. - In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 Cents.
Only those letters which contain communications for the paper are to be addressed to the Editor; all others, however, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent hither under the address Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

A Little Cabinet
of Some
Remarkable Falsifications of History,
which are found in the St. Louis "Friedensbote," together with the necessary proof.

First Piece.

For the sake of the dear Union, the "Friedensbote" at St. Louis has distorted and falsified such a multitude of historical facts that a whole paper of its own would be needed if all these distortions were to be demonstrated and rebuked. To check this, in the cause of truth, we will nevertheless name and illuminate at least a few of them, partly the grossest, partly those that are most seductive, so that, even if the masked writers of that paper should not thereby be turned from their practice, so shameful before God and men, at least many an honest reader, to whom the sources of history are inaccessible, may be preserved from dangerous misleading.

Among the means which the said "Friedensbote" employs in order to bring the false wares of its peace among the people and to promote the false Union, one of the most important (which it therefore also uses afresh on every round) is the distortion of the relation in which Luther once stood to Calvin, and in which the latter stood to the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession. Against all the genuine documents in existence, which prove the very opposite, the "Friedensbote" boldly asserts, namely, that Luther had read Calvin's "books with particular pleasure," indeed, that Calvin had stood so high "in favor with Luther that Luther once, when a passage from Calvin's book was shown him which was directed against Luther, and when they sought to set him against Calvin, simply replied: ""I hope indeed that Calvin will think better of me; but one must put up with something even from so excellent a man!"" The "Friedensbote" therefore asserts that "against Calvin there stands not a word in Luther's Short Confession on the Lord's Supper of 1544 1)," and that "it is quite indisputably certain that Luther did not regard Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper as a false doctrine." To prove all this, the dear Messenger relates all sorts of legends, which owe their origin to the Calvinists and Crypto-Calvinists and which bear the stamp of invention at once on their brow, without naming the source, with an audacity that astonishes, and which one can explain only by recalling the apostolic saying: "Deceiving, and being deceived." For surely the gentlemen writers of the Friedensbote themselves lack the necessary means of convincing themselves of the truth or groundlessness of what comes to them through the second or third hand. Surely the dear gentlemen often have anything but the intention to deceive when they bring their counterfeits into the public. Indeed, such men ought to possess so much self-knowledge and conscientiousness that they would take care not to venture into the field of history, and so, against their knowledge and will, to load upon themselves the terrible guilt of the falsifiers of history.
1) We have already communicated this Confession in Nos. 18, 19 and 20 of the previous volume.

What relation existed between Luther and Calvin can doubtless be seen best from the own words of these men themselves relating to it, which they have recorded in writing and which are still extant. With what others report, and what one knows only from hearsay, it is a precarious matter, especially when one must fear that partiality was in play; but when one has it black on white, one can build well upon that. Here too the saying holds: Vox audita perit, litera scripta manet, that is, the word flies away, the written letter remains.

An important document, which clearly shows how Luther and Calvin stood toward one another, especially after the latter had laid aside the Lutheran mask, is a letter which Calvin, shortly after the appearance of that last Lutheran "Confession on the Lord's Supper," namely in January 1545, wrote to Luther in the Latin language and for the resp. deliv-