# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 06 24_S175
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

175

trate all knowledge of the truth. But if it also is in vogue, then it stands well also with all other things, be it religion, divine service, God's honor, and that one can rightly understand what is to be thought of all estates and things. Therefore let us never be idle and secure, but ever begin again from the beginning, as it is written: When a man thinketh he hath come to the end, then it behoveth him to begin anew from the beginning. For there is ever danger that the devil may take away the pure doctrine of faith, and begin anew to blind and plague us with the doctrine of works and ordinances of men. —

(To be continued.)

Learn also to bear ingratitude.

We must live among ungrateful people, and not be offended thereat, nor therefore cease to do good; but, as Solomon says, Prov. 5, 16., "let our fountains flow forth" and always do good, not minding whether one repays it ill; just as God "maketh his sun to rise daily — on the thankful and the unthankful". Matt. 5, 45. For if thou doest it for the world's thanks and thinkest to earn well, thou shalt find the contrary, and it will serve thee right and fairly, like one who bites open an empty hollow nut and gets his mouth full of dirt. That thou wilt now be violently angry and overturn mountains, and therefore do no more good, then thou art no more a Christian; thou doest thyself harm, and accomplishest nothing after all. Seest thou not where thou art at home, and livest in the world, which is full of wickedness and ingratitude? as their rhyme runs: Qui retribuunt mala pro bonis: who repay good with evil. Whoso will not learn this, let him run out of the world; for it is no art to be only among pious people and do good to them, but to be able to remain among wicked people and yet not become wicked also. Therefore let a Christian learn from his youth (that he may afterward be accustomed to it and able to bear it) that he do good to every man, and expect evil in return (yet not praise and approve the same, but, as much as he can, according to his office punish and resist it). For this is the best proof and sign of a right good work, when those to whom it has been of service are not only ungrateful, but also do evil in return. For this is good also for this, that man may not on that account think himself good and please himself; so it is also before God so altogether golden and precious, that the world must not be worthy to reward it.

(Luther in der Kirchenpostille).

Discord for God's Word's sake.

Thou complainest that my doctrine has so broken in that there is no house where there is not an uproar and discord over me. My Emser, who has asked thee that thou shouldst give so noble a testimony against thyself to my doctrine? How could my doctrine be better strengthened than by such a confession of its worst enemy? God drives thee, as Caiaphas, John 18, 14., so that even thy hatred must speak my best. I have, in my hope that I have begun in God's name and teach the right Word of God, no stronger proof and miraculous sign than that it has so swiftly, without my driving and seeking, spread into all the world, moreover through countless resistance and persecution of all the mighty and learned, and creates disunion. And if it did not do so, I should long since have become despondent and faint. For that such work and tumult is the proper nature of the divine Word is testified Ps. 147, 15. and by Christ Luke 21, 15. and Matt. 10, 34 — 36. "Think not that I am come to send peace" etc. And thou holy priest of God givest out a peaceable doctrine, which shall not offend, to be written, and appealest to the last judgment. Dear man, make St. Simeon a liar, who says Luke 2, 34.: "Christ is set for a sign which shall be spoken against" etc. All the strifes and wars of the Old Testament were a figure of the preaching of the Gospel, which must and shall create strife, disunion, contention and tumult. In such a state stood Christendom in the times of the apostles and martyrs, when it stood best.

It is a blessed discord, uproar and tumult which God's Word awakens; then begins right faith and strife against false faith; then begin again the sufferings and persecution and the true state of Christian people.

Luther.

Character and Effect of the True Lutheran Doctrine.

The renowned jurist Ulrich Zasius makes the following confession: "I admire and revere Luther from my soul, for from him I have learned to thank God, as him who alone worketh all, for all good. In former time I flattered myself when something purer had proceeded from me, when I found somewhat more devotion in myself, when I made myself of merit by any good work, a benefit, a counsel for another. The hope began, according to which I believed I had, as it were, a legal claim to blessedness. I despised those in whom I thought I perceived a colder striving after the higher. Delivered from this error by Luther's praiseworthy teachings, I hold myself for nothing other than an instrument through which God accomplishes the good work in me, so that nothing of it is mine but the labor. Happy art thou, Zasius, that thou hast learned this in thy old age!" — Thou callest thyself, dear reader, a Lutheran; canst thou also boast of something similar from thy experience of the effect of the Lutheran doctrine? Behold, there thou hast the picture of a true Lutheran, in which thou mayest mirror thyself.

Our Zasius was a Lutheran in the midst of popery; he died, admired by his contemporaries as the greatest jurist of his time, as professor at Freiburg, 1535, in the 75th year of his age.

Papal Heresy.

Pope John XXII. declared (1325) those to be heretics who maintained that Christ and his apostles had possessed nothing of their own. Yea, he caused four of the Franciscans, who called themselves Spirituales (the spiritually-minded) and who maintained this, to be burned as heretics at Marseilles on that account; he thought that with this doctrine one might in the end not recognize him as the vicegerent of him who has said: "He hath not where to lay his head". This pope wrote a treatise on the art of making gold under the title: "Ars metallorum transmutatoria", yet he understood better how to make gold by papal taxes upon his chair of Peter than by distilling at the hearth. The most remarkable thing, however, in the papal art of gold-making consists in this, that by means of their indulgence they can make gold even out of sins; as, therefore, the bodily, dissolute son of the unclean pope, Alexander VI., had once gambled away 100,000 gulden, he said, "it was the sins of the Germans".

Anecdote for Preachers.

When the late M. G. Serger (pastor at Riethenau in Württemberg, born 1683) once heard a pastor, who was an honest but timid preacher, preach before his gracious lord, he said to him after the sermon: "He had now heard him preach, and would now also tell him how he appeared to him; namely, like a commandant who stands before a fortress and would gladly take it, but yet has not the heart to fire into it, but aims his pieces, bombs and cannon all over it; so he did with his gracious lord, he would gladly win him, and yet had not the heart to fire away at him." — There are, however, also such preachers as well have the courage to shoot their hearers through the heart, but who do not hit them for this reason, that they either have themselves no experience of the conversion of sinners to God, or that they are yet not able rightly to divide the Word.