# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 06 08_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162

every practicable furtherance of the cause of the Church in America.

In the evening I returned again to Leipzig. During the present very brief stay in this city, in the course of the following forenoon, I had the joy of meeting, in the house of Dr. Marbach, the Professor of Archaeology, Seyffarth. With pleasure I still remembered the highly interesting lectures of this thoroughly learned man, in which, as a newly awakened student, I once heard with astonishment how the results of precisely the most thorough chronological and archaeological researches always contain the most surprising confirmations of the historical truth of Holy Scripture. But my joy was all the greater since in this old, beloved teacher I now found, contrary to expectation, a decided Lutheran again. An equal joy was afforded me by the meeting again of two young men who were once my pupils and who at present confess the pure Lutheran doctrine with great zeal in word and deed; the one is the son of the well-known, still vigorous Dr. Volkmann in Leipzig, who (the son) had just received the designation to a Lutheran pastorate; the other is a student of jurisprudence, Richard Löber, a nephew of the late Pastor Löber at Altenburg, in Perry County, Missouri.

Our next destination was Prussian Minden and the surrounding country, whither Wyneken had already gone ahead of me and whither I now followed him from Leipzig at noon on the 2nd of December. In consequence of a delay on the way I arrived there only on the next day about the same time. The occasion for traveling hither was this: in this region many members of our congregations have near relatives, bodily and spiritual, and in part also their former pastors; wherefore they heartily wished that we should visit this region also and give a testimony of our faith; the more so since here many of those fellow-believers of theirs whom they left behind lie, without knowing it, imprisoned in the bonds of the Union and, misled by reports received from America, now perhaps even fear concerning their fellow-believers who have gone to America that these have become unfaithful to their former right faith, in that they have joined the so-called "Old Lutherans" here.*) A member of the St. Louis Lutheran congregation, who had departed with us from St. Louis in order to pay a visit in his home country for the arrangement of his family affairs, Mr. Friedrich Lange, awaited us in Minden, and by him we were now introduced into various circles of awakened Christians of that region. With astonishment we saw that here in Westphalia not only a fire of awakening had broken out, especially among the country people, as in few other regions of Germany, but that now also the eyes of many of the awakened souls are opening with terror to the godless game which has been played with them, in that the noose of the Union was secretly and unnoticed thrown over their necks and they were crowded out of their Lutheran mother church with cunning and force, and that even their "believing" pastors have let themselves be used as willing instruments in this spiritual treachery. The simple Christians know very well that it was chiefly the old Lutheran core writings, sought out again, of a Luther, an Arnd, a Heinrich Müller, a Lütkemann, a Scriver, or also of a Spener, an August Hermann Franke, a Bogatzky, a Conrad Rieger, etc., by which the life now stirring again so mightily has been poured out over the people forsaken by their shepherds. They therefore do not let themselves be so easily persuaded that the old Lutheran Church is a dead tree which has now had to be replaced by the fresh green tree of the united Church; having come to better light through those old books, they see ever more clearly what ambiguous fruits the Union tree has borne, and they learn ever better also to judge the sermons of their most celebrated united preachers of awakening, and the sickly life of faith and wavering emotionalism produced through them, and to test them by God's Word. In particular we found in Dodenhausen, which belongs to the parish of Minden, a great company of awakened Christians who not only showed great zeal for God's Word, but also, to a considerable extent, were on the point of going out of the united Church and returning into the Lutheran Church.

*) Yes, there are, alas, not a few so-called "Evangelicals" who, in order to represent quite spitefully the present condition of those who have joined the congregation here, themselves say, and write hither and thither, that they have gone over to the sect of the "Stephanites." We can, however, confidently assert that the Romanizing Stephanism is indeed not yet extinct, but certainly is to be found nowhere less than among the former Stephanites, but sometimes, on the contrary, precisely among their most decided opponents.

With the reverend gentlemen, the preachers of that region, so far as we had opportunity to speak with them, we found it quite otherwise. Of them, indeed, not one, though servants of the united Church, was willing to undertake the defense of it; each declared, rather, strangely enough, that he certainly would not have made such a Union as that which exists in Prussia, but just because it was not made by them, but inherited, one must simply submit to it; moreover it is evident that under divine government precisely through the Union a great number of Reformed preachers and congregations have been won for the Lutheran faith who without the bridge of the Union would certainly have remained far from it. Instead, therefore, of recognizing from the elements of Lutheran faith manifesting themselves ever more powerfully in the united Church that the whole more recent awakening in Germany, because it was a divine one through the Bible, has been a Lutheran one; an awakening through which and in which God has wished to lead back into the old Church of simple Bible faith the Christians seduced by Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Calvin, Beza, etc.: they dream that the cause of the ever more manifest inclination toward the Lutheran faith is the Union, which was precisely the pernicious work whereby the reawakening simple Biblical faith has been in many ways stifled, and indifference toward the falsification and mixing of the faith has been engendered. The closer, moreover, the view we had opportunity here to take into the conditions of the united Church, the more manifest and certain it became to us that everywhere where there is stirring life the Union is going toward its dissolution. Let the learned and the high-placed among the "believing" Unionists, whose celebrity is inseparably interwoven with the cause of the Union, make ever such great efforts to maintain the Union in repute even among believers by their famous names: the people, where it awakens to faith in God's Word, will not let itself be held in the church commanded by royal power most high and established by pseudo-wise and unbelieving theologians. What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder, to be sure; but what men without God have joined together, although it does not belong together, that no man can hold together. In the end the whole edifice of the united Church will have to be left to the Rationalists alone to inherit, as the house in which it is still most comfortable for them to dwell. The united preachers with whom we came into contact here are Pastor Rädecker in Gehlenbeck, City Pastor Mensing in Minden, and Superintendent Prieß in Lahde near Minden. The first is already advanced in years, and although he too does not care to speak a word for the Union, but wishes to remain by his Augsburg Confession, he nevertheless does not care, in his old age, to enter upon the conflict in which a withdrawal from the Union would involve him. City Pastor Mensing thinks he can be a Lutheran in the midst of the united Church; so also Superintendent Prieß. The latter therefore even requested me, even after we had set forth our position toward the Union to him, to preach for him once. I of course refused him. But strangely enough he nevertheless pressed me to comply with his request. I at last declared to the Superintendent that I could preach in his pulpit only under one condition, which he would of course have to reject (for I myself would never open my pulpit to anyone under a similar condition set for me, quite apart from the fact that I could entrust my office of preaching only to an orthodox Lutheran preacher). My condition was, namely, this, that he himself should expressly permit me to reject the united Church in my sermon. I ex-