# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 11 09_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

42

existed. — The Acarus Crossei is now known as a distinct species."

The assertion which I have elsewhere put forth in definite conviction, that the aim of the natural sciences runs directly to this: to wrest from nature the laws of creation, to bring the act of creating to us, to lay it into the hands of man, to put man in the place of the so-called God — appears to find the beginning of its confirmation through the foregoing fact. — Science will hold up to the so-called believer in God wonders before his light-shunning eyes; the natural sciences will lead us into a new, unveiled, wonderful creation, into a new realm, in which there is nothing great and small, nothing divine nor human, in which there is nothing supernatural, but everything is Nature. — Or is it not so? Has chemistry not demonstrated that from inorganic substances (stone, metal) organic, vegetable life (plant) develops, thus from the lower the higher? — Well? — The above fact goes a step further and shows us the development of animal life from known and unknown elements. — According to such logic, by virtue of which the more perfect develops out of the less perfect, the central point of all rational thinking, according to such logic the universe, in the various millennia it has run through, has exceeded the original conception of creation — on various occasions. — A creation, if it had really been possible, as it is related and described in the Old Testament in a childish manner, would be altogether impossible today, etc."

Well, neighbor, what do you say to that?

2nd Nbr. — If you will not take it ill of me, that you unbelievers are wretched people.

1st Nbr. — Why, by thunder, you shall prove that to me! Do you suppose perhaps that what is told here is not true?

2nd Nbr. — I do not know. Their senses and their understanding have already deceived many a naturalist. For that reason people read for a long time in natural histories of geese that grew on trees, and of other similar things. That English naturalist may also have been mistaken. But granted that he was not mistaken, what then?

1st Nbr. — Why, then we can, as the article here says, bring the act of creating to us and put man in the place of God. Has not the man made the animal in the retort? He is its creator.

2nd Nbr. — Neighbor, keep your senses! If you sow your lettuce seed, and lettuce grows from it, have you made the lettuce? and if you set eggs under your hen, and chicks come forth from them, are you their creator?

1st Nbr. — (In his zeal) Your crude comparisons do not fit at all. We have here quite a different case. The man had a retort, and put chemical substances into it, and connected a cannibalic battery with it!

2nd Nbr. — By my simple understanding I should think that just confirms what I say. For if he is to be a great artist, yes, a creator, who with so many contrivances brings to light perhaps a loathsome grub, how much more must one hold him to be an artist, yes, a creator, who makes so little ado, as to sow seed on a bed, and to set eggs under a hen, and yet gets from them fine lettuce and pretty chicks. The species Phascarus Gallus (domestic fowl), I should think, is still quite another masterpiece than the Acarus Crossei.

1st Nbr. — (who in the meantime has taken up the newspaper again, and has listened with only half an ear) No, no, this is quite a different case. It says there that the chemical substances had been exposed to white heat, and that in them, as little as in the quicksilver, was animal life to be suspected.

2nd Nbr. — There are things where one does not suspect them. I once lodged in the boarding-house at N., and because I feared I might be disturbed in the night, I took the liberty of telling the landlord, who is a most obliging man, about it. He had my bedstead carefully searched through, and corrosive sublimate smeared into all the joints and crevices; no one suspected any animal life in it any longer. But what happened? In the night, contrary to all expectation, I was badly bitten.

1st Nbr. — You always come with your disagreeable comparisons.

2nd Nbr. — (thinks to himself: I could also say it without a comparison, but then it would hardly be so plain and so disagreeable to you.)

1st Nbr. — But you cannot deny that, as this article says, the perfect develops out of the imperfect; that is sound logic, that is what the evidence of the eyes teaches; you yourself say: From the seed comes a plant, from the egg a chick; does not the more perfect come out of the less perfect there? Ha! Very well; then we shall also yet see things that will make our eyes swim, and as it is so beautifully expressed here: the natural sciences will lead us into a new, unveiled, wonderful creation, into a realm in which there is nothing great and small, nothing divine nor human — then the things also are not so created as they now are, but have developed from less perfect ones, and it is a fable that God created the world as it now is.

2nd Nbr. — In this I must indeed grant you that the natural sciences will yet lead you where there is "neither divine nor human," that is, into the fellowship of the beasts and devils; for where there is neither divine nor human, and yet something living is to be, there it must be beasts or devils; but in this I must not grant you, that God did not create the world as it now is, and that therefore the Biblical history of creation is a fable; for setting entirely aside that I am a Christian, my understanding, thank God, still reaches far enough not to be led behind the light by the saying: "From the less perfect the more perfect develops." Of course from the less perfect seed comes a more perfect plant, and from the less perfect egg a more perfect chick. But whence then comes the less perfect seed and the less perfect egg? Can you get seed from anywhere but from plants, and eggs from anywhere but from a bird? If you can sow gravel and raise lettuce from it, and set wooden eggs under your hen and get chicks from them, then you shall be right, otherwise not.

1st Nbr. — There is nothing to be done with you.

2nd Nbr. — If you think to move me to atheism, then indeed nothing will be done with me until you have deprived me of my understanding; for one must have no understanding, or, what comes to the same thing, not use it, in order to be an atheist. But may God preserve to me my understanding and the right use of it, whereby I already recognize from nature that there is a God, and besides this the faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, whereby I attain to the knowledge in which eternal life consists.

Does the Lutheran Church Act Rightly in Rejecting the Hand of Fellowship Which the Reformed Offers Her?

By Professor Dr. Delitzsch in Erlangen.*)

To those who have a mind to answer this question in the negative, we give first to consider that whoever answers it so draws a stroke of rejection through the whole work of the German Reformation. Then Luther, and the heroes of our Church, were carnally minded stiff-necked men, who liked strife better than peace, and it was a pitiful blindness that Joh. Arndt in 1590 would rather let himself be removed from his office at Badeborn than yield to the inclination of his prince toward Reformed doctrine by the omission of the exorcism, which under other circumstances is harmless — a pitiful blindness that Paul Gerhardt in 1661 laid down his office because the electoral restriction of polemics against Reformed error, irreconcilable with the Formula of Concord, distressed his conscience, and no persuasion, no concession of the Elector and

*) We communicate this essay, which appeared in the present year, partly as a testimony to the present standpoint of the dear Prof. Delitzsch, partly as a testimony against the Union-church practice, so widely defended and exercised here also. Ed.