# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 02 03_S91
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

91

together with its riches, honor and pleasure, and turns it to dust and ashes; then there would be for a man no greater misfortune than just to be born a man; for after an ever short and fleeting shadow-life full of toil and labor, full of anguish and care, full of plague and punishment, full of conflicts and offenses, full of embittered enjoyments and frustrated hopes, death would then come and put an end to this shadow-play.

But, what is still more dreadful — since God's Law and man's conscience unanimously testify: "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment," all parents, without knowledge and comfort from the second and third articles of the faith, would indeed have to lament and wail at the birth of every new child; for since in consequence of Adam's fall every child is begotten of sinful seed and is conceived and born of its mother in sins, so also each one, through such sinful conception and birth, is before the eyes of the holy and just God, who demands again the divine image in every little child, worthy of the curse and damnable; and therefore, without God's grace in Christ, all newborn children would in the end be only a fattening for the gluttonous insatiable one, bodily death, who would at the same time, to the constant scorn and malicious joy of Satan, thrust them down as a growing population of hell into eternal death.

But no! God be praised and blessed, for the sake of His unsearchable and unspeakable mercy, for the sake of His free and undeserved grace in Christ! — for He has no pleasure in the eternal death of the sinner, but that he turn and live; and in order that he might be able, and attain to the forgiveness of sins, to life and salvation through faith in Christ, God has rather appointed His only and eternal Son to be our fulfiller of the Law, and set Him, as our sin-bearer, payer of debt and curse-bearer, upon the tree of the cross, than that even one newly born little child of man should be lost.

For in order that the unclean and defiled conception of all children of men might be cleansed and sanctified, He was conceived of the Holy Ghost in Mary, the Virgin; and for the comfort of all mothers and children, the latter of whom die in the womb before birth, He, the living Son of God, lay under His mother's heart. In order that God might be reconciled to all little children born in sins, and their guilt of sin be made good and paid, the dear Lord Christ was born of the Virgin Mary as the Holy, Innocent and Undefiled One and became a child of man for all, made under the Law and its curse, that through Him they might become God's children and after the temporal birth obtain eternal life.

So you Christian parents may and shall indeed heartily rejoice, according to the second article, that all your children, together with you, are in fact redeemed through the Lord Christ from the guilt of sin, from the wrath of God, from the curse of the Law, from the accusation of conscience, from the fear of death, from the power of the devil and from the eternal pain of hell; that the Lord has obtained also for them righteousness for sin, merit for guilt, reward of grace for punishment, blessing for curse, for death and damnation the eternal blessed life. And that now is just the gracious ultimate aim of God, for which He calls children into life through you, that through the Lord Christ they may obtain eternal life, and that heaven too may be peopled through them with saints and blessed ones.

As often, therefore, as you, Christian mother, though under violent pains and with great labor of soul and body, bring a little child into the world, you shall, even if in such a struggle your soul should depart, never call it, like Rachel, Benoni, that is, Son of my sorrow, but rather in the sight of the Lord Christ, who has already redeemed this little boy also, like Jacob, Benjamin, that is, Son of the right hand, since through the Lord Christ, the essential Son of the right hand, the sonship of God and eternal blessedness and glory are already obtained for him. For as through one, that is, Adam's sin, condemnation has come upon all men, so also through one, that is, Christ's righteousness, the justification of life has come upon all men.

But how now do your children become partakers of the grace of the heavenly Father, of the merit of the Son, of the gracious indwelling of the Holy Ghost, of the forgiveness of sin, of the sonship of God and of eternal life? Answer: through the working of grace of the Holy Ghost by means of the Gospel and of holy Baptism and by means of the faith thereby awakened in the souls of the children, through which they lay hold of Christ and appropriate Him, and become children of the Father, brothers and sisters of the Son, dwelling-places and workshops of the Holy Ghost. This now is the spiritual regeneration of your little ones, in which, wholly without your doing and cooperation — only that you bring them to the washing of water by the word — God is the spiritual Father and the Church of Christ the spiritual mother of your little ones, and such birth takes place in the likeness of the birth of the Lord Christ, who by this very thing is also spiritually conceived in the hearts of the children.

But after this great and unspeakable miracle of grace, which is in truth much greater and more glorious than that of the bodily birth, has taken place in your children: so there befalls you, dear parents, now the greatest honor from God — and in this consists, according to the third article, the most exalted dignity and glory of your parental calling — that you are now also to be helpers and co-workers of the Holy Ghost upon the souls of your children, regenerated and sanctified by holy Baptism and faith.

You are henceforth to regard them not merely as your flesh and blood, in which you would properly love only yourselves in your children — as indeed such merely natural and fleshly love, in its disposition, is nothing else than an enlarged selfishness — but you are to regard them as created by the Father, redeemed by the Son and regenerated and sanctified by the Holy Ghost, as a threefold work of wonder and love of the triune God, as the noblest and sweetest earthly gift of the same, entrusted to you as stewards and nurses, that you, in upright fear of God, living faith in the Lord Christ and sanctified love toward your children, may set all diligence thereto, by praying and interceding, by discipline and habituation, by restraining and letting go, by doctrine and example, to help weaken in your children original sin and the old man and strengthen baptismal grace and the new man, that from such little plants of the Lord there may come trees of righteousness, planted by the rivers of water, which root beneath and bear fruit above, to the praise of God the Lord and to the glory of His holy name. For although God, the Holy Ghost, could accomplish such a great thing even without your doing and cooperation, yet it has pleased Him, according to the good pleasure of His will, to take you, in this cleansing, pruning and watering of His planting, in this holy work well-pleasing to Him, as His fellow-helpers and co-workers, partly to let His image and honor shine upon the children in you and to awaken in them at once a reverent awe and childlike love toward you, partly to further you yourselves, by the performance of this heavy and sweet work, in Christian sanctification and to train you for heaven; for while you bring up your children according to God's Word and will in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, you are at the same time trained and furthered by this itself in upright repentance toward God, when you behold your sinful likeness in your children, as in a living mirror of repentance, before you; in unfeigned fear of God, when you, as is proper, take care lest by this or that sinful word, deed and gesture you awaken the same in your children; in true faith in the Lord Christ, when your teaching and restraining, your pains and labor on this and that child long seem as if lost; in the love of Christ, when you have to overcome the sluggishness, stubbornness, wickedness and selfishness of your children; in the patience of Christ, when you, with all fatherly earnestness and zeal against the breaking out of sin and the springing up of sinful habits, must yet bear, yea, suffer the inward hereditary corruption of your children, when the devil blows these smoldering coals at times into a hellish flame, until upon your believing cry to the Lord His grace damps it again; in the christ-