# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 07 17_S177
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pure shall to eternity endure." (Rev. John, Chap. 14, v. 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., July 17, 1852.  No. 23.
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 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.

Sermon,

delivered in the church of the German Evangelical Lutheran congregation at Fort Wayne, Indiana, at the time of this year's sessions of the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States there (on the 2nd of July), and herewith communicated at the direction of the same by C. F. W. W.

J. N. J.

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love, be with you. Amen.

Beloved in Christ, Lutheran fellow-believers and reverend, dear brethren in office!

That the Reformation struggle, carried through to victory three hundred years ago by God's help, was a struggle for liberation, on this there is but one voice among those who still wish to be counted as belonging to the Protestant Church. But if we ask what that freedom actually was for whose winning our fathers, with Martin Luther at their head, fought so bravely and so boldly staked goods and blood, we find that opinions on this differ exceedingly. Whenever in our day a party preaches some freedom, it is always Luther who is supposed to have been its first standard-bearer too.

It was the Reformation, so says the Rationalist, or the believer in reason, with which at last the night, more than a thousand years long, of a dark and unreasoning church-faith and superstition vanished and the dawn of enlightenment broke forth, whose noonday light now shines in all lands. It was the Reformation, so cries the Friend of Light, through which the human spirit, so long bound, was at last loosed from every foreign authority, and reason and science were installed in the rights which these highest goods of man now enjoy.—Now it is indeed true that through the victory of the Reformation the brand of an eternal disgrace was stamped upon the principle of the Roman Church, that everyone, where necessary and possible, is to be forced to believe by fire and sword, and the bloody horrors of the inquisitions of faith were mightily checked. It is furthermore true: under the shelter of the freedom which was won by the Reformation, many thousands in our day have also taken for themselves the freedom to make their reason the supreme judge in matters of faith, even over God's holy, infallible, eternal Word. But far from the foundation of this freedom having been laid by the Reformation, the Reformation struggle was rather a struggle precisely for this, that all men's wit and wisdom should bow and be silent before God's Word, and that the Holy Scripture should again become and remain the supreme and only judge of all religious controversies. Wherever we may accompany Luther throughout his whole life, whether into his monastic cell, where we first behold him wrestling with God, or to Augsburg, where we see him before a high prelate of the Church, or to Leipzig, where we see him in conflict with theological learning, or to Worms, where we see him before Emperor and Empire, or to Marburg, where we see him confronting a false Protestantism, or to Wittenberg, where we see him in pulpit and professor's chair; and whichever leaf of his writings we may open, whether in his polemical writings or in his doctrinal writings, in his writings for the learned or in his writings for the people: everywhere we see him fighting not for the freedom of human reason from the authority of the divine Word, but rather for the freedom of the Word from the dominion of every human ordinance. Thus Luther spoke—to cite only one testimony among thousands—among other places in his last sermon, preached at Wittenberg a few days before his blessed death, to his Wittenbergers: "Hitherto ye have heard the right, true Word; now beware of your own thoughts and cleverness. The devil will kindle the light of reason and bring you away from faith... I have more than