# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 07 27_S186
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

186

secutions of the Church by the Roman emperors, thousands upon thousands gave up their lives under the most cruel torments rather than deliver up to the heathen authorities even a part of the Holy Scriptures that was in their hands.

Well do you know — or at least might know — how in the course of the centuries the devil, as the father of lies, has falsified and corrupted one fundamental doctrine of the Holy Scriptures after another through his false teachers, in order thereby to corrupt the whole sum of the saving truth and, if possible, to bring it to nothing; but the gracious and mighty God has mightily helped, has raised up faithful witnesses, an Athanasius, an Augustine, a Luther, and with His pure and powerful Word has scattered the lies and errors and brought the wholesome doctrine to the light so much the more clearly; He has also, after a short duration, thrust down into well-deserved disgrace and into the night of oblivion the writings of the English and French deniers of God, your fathers in unbelief; and vain is your effort to raise up again your idol Tom Paine, into whose painted corpse you will never breathe life. Only this you do not know, that and how it is God's judgment — since man, after all, cannot subsist without faith — that you must believe such apostles of lies, since you will not believe His apostles.

All your crafty devices and furious assaults against the Holy Scriptures, this fortress of the truth, are therefore wholly in vain and lost, and sooner must your hard heads all be dashed to pieces against it than that you should move even one stone of its divine structure out of its place.

But you also know quite well from the inner nature of the Holy Scriptures that they are of divine origin and did not arise from human priestcraft; for how would it have been possible for the latter to set down, centuries beforehand, a series of coherent prophecies of future events, which in their time were fulfilled without human arrangement and direction and became an historical truth, which is reported even by contemporary heathen historians?

How would it be possible that Moses, for example, and the prophets should have been liars or at least enthusiasts, when they lift up their testimony: "Thus saith the LORD!" seeing that, partly, the prophecy, as reported above, has always been fulfilled, and partly, further, the holy commandments which they treat of stand in agreement with the moral law, which likewise God has implanted inwardly in rational human nature, and which in both requires perfect love to Him and the like to the neighbor, which is just what the natural voice of your own conscience testifies against you? And what, then, did these men of God get from their prophesying, teaching, rebuking and threatening, in riches, honor and good living from the mass of their people? Nothing but poverty, disgrace, shame, hatred, misery, distress and tribulation, this one and that one even death. Yes! had they flattered the corrupt multitude according to the lust of its flesh, according to its insolent longings for liberty against the LORD and obedience to His commandments, and preached to them what their ears itched for, as you do to the apostate and disobedient children, to the froward and perverse generation of this time — then indeed they would have carried off your reward, money, honor, standing and good days.

But what truth-loving men they were, and zealous only for the honor of God and the salvation of the neighbor — this also appears from the fact that they by no means hold themselves to be perfect saints, but rather are careful not to conceal their sinful stumbling and falling, as is known of Moses, David and Jeremiah, but to confess it frankly, so that no man should cling to their persons, but only to the Word of the living God.

You, however, aim at nothing but to make the blind, ignorant people cling to your persons, that they may acknowledge your follies and lies as brand-new wisdom and truth, your blasphemies against the Holy as manly candor, your mocking and hating of God, your insolent arrogance and pride against the LORD as the dignity and noble freedom of human nature. Not the Bible, as God's Word, are they to trust, but what you speak is to be as if spoken from heaven, that is to count on earth.

But you yourselves also know quite well the mighty effects of this Word, divine in its origin and its content, essentially and properly, what deeds it has wrought in the course of the centuries — deeds which were not done in a corner, of which also the history of the world bears witness, and in comparison with which all discoveries of hitherto unknown parts of the earth, all inventions in the realm of human art and science, all knowledge and learning from the investigation of natural things and of the human soul, as also of the history of the human race among all peoples and times, all products of the fine arts — in sum, everything that men have brought forth from natural powers and gifts, recedes into the shadow and as it were dissolves into nothing. For what else have even the most renowned discoverers, inventors, generals, statesmen, scholars and artists, thinkers and poets accomplished and achieved than, at best, all sorts of temporal use and advantage, many kinds of earthly knowledge and experience.

But what is this compared with the world-transforming and world-renewing power of the divine Word, which is unceasingly attested by history, especially since the birth of Christ, which history justly makes also in its reckoning of time the turning-point of the history of the human race? —

Or — I ask you yourselves and challenge your reason and conscience to judgment — would it be possible and conceivable that these written-down fables of the crucified Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, as you blaspheme Him and the Gospels, should through the oral proclamation of the apostles and their successors have as it were newly born superstitious idolaters and rude, wild barbarians, hitherto estranged from all civilization, struggling with nature for their daily bodily self-preservation, in constant strife and war among themselves and with neighboring peoples, tribes and hordes, in insatiable vengefulness, in cruel thirst for blood destroying one another, and here and there also seeking to appease the angered god and the terrified conscience by horrible human sacrifices — I ask you, would it be possible and conceivable that the preaching of a crucified Jew through 18 centuries should have rescued such degenerate and ruined peoples, tribes and hordes from this wretched, lost condition, and through faith in Christ transformed them into true worshipers of the triune God in spirit and in truth, gathered them into a congregation of the living God, that is, into the Church of Christ, and by the power of His Spirit, transforming from within with quiet might, into peaceable, civilized, sensible, loving men, ripening in all manner of wholesome human science and arts of peace, peacefully uniting in the legal bond of civil society, that is, of states? —

Within this great wonder of the world, however, which you, as a fact of the history of the world, cannot deny to its face, and which is repeated even now before our eyes in the fifth continent — within this, how many thousands upon thousands of individual souls have not been converted by this gracious Gospel from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God?

Formerly they worshiped as gods the several created things and forces of nature, the beneficent, in order, as they imagined, thereby to obtain their favor, the harmful, to avert the threatening evils, both however from slavish fear; and in insane superstition and idolatry they knelt down before wood and stone, the products of their own hands, which had eyes and saw not, ears, and heard not; — but after their conversion to Christ they knew, revered and worshiped the triune God, the Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the whole universe, praised and extolled Him out of holy love and in childlike gratitude for all His great deeds and works; and in times of bloody persecution, how many individuals have not, upon the stake, upon the glowing grate, under the teeth of wild beasts, in invincible courage of faith and in the blessed certainty of eternal life, confessed and called upon as their only Lord and Savior, praised and extolled Him, whom you, blinded by the will-o'-the-wisp of Satan, hold to be a crucified Jew and blaspheme foully. And though you, against the innermost voice of your conscience, presume to declare this to be pious enthusiasm, you must yet be put to shame the more by the fact that these saints of the LORD, in the midst of their torments and distresses and in their often so painful slow dying, harbored in their hearts no hatred, wrath, bitterness and feelings of revenge against their tormentors and persecutors, but called upon God to grant these poor blinded ones, who knew not what they did, grace unto repentance, and thus the direction of their Lord with their life con-