# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 11 11_S41
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pure shall to eternity endure." (Rev. John, Chap. 14, vv. 6, 7.)
Published by the German Ev. Luth. Synod of Missouri, Ohio and other States.
Edited by C. F. W. Walther.
Vol. 8.  St. Louis, Mo., November 11, 1851.  No. 6.
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 the same in advance and 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 sent to the Editor; all others, 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.

Dr. M. Luther's Testimony
of
the evangelical truth, what the Church of Christ is essentially and properly.
In Memory of October 31, 1517.

The memorial day of the dawn of the blessed Reformation lies behind us; and as the same was assuredly celebrated churchly in the Lutheran Church on this side and beyond the ocean in many places, so it is surely fitting also not to pass it over in silence in the "Lutheraner."

For this beginning was not a work of men, when Luther posted the 95 Theses on the castle church at Wittenberg — as indeed he never took it into his mind to reform the Church — but it was a work of God, when God began to let the light of His Word, with which He had preserved, for centuries, in a hidden manner, His scattered children in the Roman Church, shine again mightily and victoriously into the long dark night of the Church so horribly corrupted by the human ordinances of the papacy.

A work of God, we say with good reason, was this beginning, as also the progress, so swift and wonderfully blessed against all the craft and violence of Satan, of the Pope and his servants, of the Emperor and his mighty ones; for neither Luther, this man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, this chosen instrument, this sword of the LORD and of Gideon — neither he, nor afterward his like-minded friends and fellow laborers were anything else, or wished to be anything else, than willing instruments of the Holy Ghost for the profit and benefit of the holy Church. And just because they were driven ever deeper into the pure and clear Word of God by the fierce attacks of their papistic adversaries, and were ever more brightly enlightened by the Holy Ghost through the same, they then broke through one mist of the papacy after another with this light, and with the battering-ram of this Word overthrew one bulwark of Satan after another. But while they thus pulled down, they built; while they thus rooted out, they planted; while they bore witness with God's Word against the destructive, soul-murdering errors of the papacy, especially concerning the meritoriousness of the works of the law and of the keeping of human ordinances, they at the same time bore testimony for and of the one doctrine of the Church of Christ which alone makes blessed, on the ground of the divine Word, and especially of the justifying grace of God revealed in the Gospel, through the sole merit of the LORD Christ, which faith alone, merely and exclusively, lays hold of, appropriates and holds fast unto the forgiveness of sin, without the doing of works; for it was far from them to bring up a new doctrine contrary to the Word of God and foreign to the Church of Christ, and to gather adherents through and around it, as the papacy had done under the appearance of the divine Word and of the Church, and as founders of sects and heads of factions always do; but they were ever diligent and applied great earnestness and zeal to showing and proving the unity and connection of their doctrine with the confession of the One holy Christian Church from the beginning.

And this they did, when, with the light of the divine Word and of the lamp of the doctrine of justifying faith kindled at it, they also thoroughly illumined and shone through the doctrinal point of the third Article: I believe "One holy Christian Church," and thereby dispelled the mists of the papistic errors and lies in which the poor Christian people were held captive.

Then it became clear and manifest to all eyes that did not wantonly shut themselves against this old and new light, why the Church of God is called the one, holy, Christian or catholic, and how comforting and strengthening to faith this is.

She is and is called the One, therefore, not because she has (as the papists, setting their Pope in the stead of Christ, thus as Antichrist, in the temple of God, lied and falsified) a visible head in him, as successor of Peter, the prince of the apostles, and as vicar of Christ, who governs her by divine right by means of his servants and helpers (the priesthood) with