# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 10 26_S33
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pass away now and nevermore." (Rev. John, Chap. 14, v. 6, 7.)
Published by the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and other States.
Edited by C. F. W. Walther.
Vol. 9.  St. Louis, Mo., October 26, 1852.  No. 5.
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.

(Communicated.)

The Unionist Professor Dr. Hengstenberg, as a Pastor of Souls!

One ought to love God above all, and not one's neighbor; one ought to seek first God's honor, and not the apparent good of one's neighbor. If the love of God is not genuine, the love of one's neighbor is worth nothing at all. If only the gentlemen of the Union, even were it a most learned professor, would take this simple truth to heart! — As is well known, in recent times many Protestants, especially in Germany also, have fallen away to Catholicism, among others also the otherwise capable publicist v. Florencourt. The motives of his conversion were, according to Hengstenberg (see this year's preface of the "Evangelische Kirchenzeitung" of Berlin): "the comfortless sense of moral decay which more and more broke in upon him, the perception of his moral strength of will diminishing ever more with the years, and the longing to set an outward end to this struggle, which he felt himself unable to carry through inwardly," or rather the hope of finding in the Catholic Church the spiritual help which he supposed he had sought in vain in the Protestant Church. Florencourt thus doubted the power of the means of grace in the Protestant Church, and that certainly because he did not regard the office in it as fully valid, which again had its ground in his ignorance of the nature of the Church in general. Thus the unhappy blind man has fallen into the hands of blind leaders of the blind. Hengstenberg too perceives this, and feels compassion for him, calls him an "unhappy man" and "pities him from the heart!" — How, then, is such a man to be treated as a pastor of souls, how is he best helped, how is he to be counseled, what is to be hoped for him, what is to be prayed for him? Hear the renowned Doctor of Theology, who otherwise knows how to make so many words about repentance, and so gladly wants to be regarded as a man who in this dangerous time stands like a wall before the breach. "Let us hope," he says, "that the disillusionment, which in so little fanciful, so predominantly rational a nature, one that could be driven and led into a fancy only momentarily by extreme despair, to take a straw for a saving plank, will not be long in coming, . . . . let us hope that at the same time the merciful Savior, who alone can set us free and loose from such distress, will draw near to his soul and speak to him the 'Peace, peace be with thee.' Let us hope that he will then, in fellowship with him(?), attach himself to that which is Christian, which his present church offers him in agreement with the one he has forsaken, and, renouncing the struggle against the latter, walk humbly before his God and with bowed head, but with comforted heart, make his pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem." Can one conceive of anything more pitiful than this Unionist pastor's hope and prayer for the fallen? Does the great Berlin preacher of repentance not know that the first step of one who has fallen toward peace is precisely repentance, upright, earnest, true repentance, acknowledgment, confession, hating and forsaking of sin! Or does Hengstenberg hold that such repentance is not necessary in the case of sins of doctrine, is the denial and rejection of God's truth and the acceptance and defense of Satan's lie no longer a sin before his Unionist conscience? Or has v. Florencourt, by his conversion to Catholicism, not publicly rejected, for example, the justification of a poor sinner by faith alone, and the Holy Scripture as the sole rule of faith, etc., etc., and at the same time confessed himself to the devilish doctrines of an efficacy of the sacraments even without hearty contrition and faith of the recipient, of a tyrannical exaltation of the priests over the laity, of a sacrifice of the mass, of a purgatory, etc. — And to such a sinner Hengstenberg does not call out: "Repent!" but: "Peace, peace be with thee!" Does the Dr. of Theology not think at all of God and His offended majesty, and that Florencourt can find no peace