# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 05 10_S127
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

127

What thou thyself hast not dared to hope:
God's everlasting favor,
The forgiveness of guilt,
Is promised thee freely by the Lord.

For out of love He bore
The everlasting curse
Which we by sin had merited.
Through much bitter distress,
Through the bloody death,
He has reconciled us with the Father.

Therefore believe, praise
Thy Savior, and bring
Thyself in love as an offering to Him.
O how blessed art thou!
Thou hast peace and rest:
God is gracious and friendly, in truth.

Though thy life flee away as swiftly
As the fleeting wave;
Therefore rejoice, O heart, the more.
For, delivered from evil,
And forever [illegible],
Thou shalt behold thy LORD so much the sooner.

Hermann Fick.

A Steadfast Confessor of Christ.

In the year 1610 the daughter of a distinguished state official in the service of the Sultan of Morocco, in Africa, had a slave girl who came from a Christian country and was herself a zealous confessor of the Savior. The great devotion and fear of God in which the upright soul lived, even before the eyes of her noble mistress, moved the latter's heart to learn the chief truths of the Christian faith from her maid. She found therein such lofty comfort that she called upon Jesus and confessed faith in Him, although she knew that the most grievous penalty of death was set upon apostasy from the Mohammedan religion. — Her father and her kinsmen labored in vain to change her mind. Though they sent her to a strange place that she might come to another mind, she had already become too much a friend of her Savior for Him to be taken from her again. Neither kindness nor severity could do anything with her, and the representation of the dangers by which they thought they could turn her away only grounded her heart more firmly in love to the Savior. Since now the father was in the king's service, it soon became known at court also, and the Sultan had her brought before him, to learn from herself whether she was a Christian. — She answered yes, and added that she would, with divine assistance, remain a Christian to her end. The Sultan, dismayed by this steadfast answer, threatened her with death and thought thereby to frighten her mind. But she answered: "I fear not death, and will gladly suffer it for the sake of my LORD Jesus Christ. The whole world will not be able to devise so dreadful a torture by which it could separate me from Him." — The Sultan had her delivered to the judge at Morocco, who adjudged her to death, but out of pity for her youth made one more attempt to win her. Yet he received no other answer than that she knew only too certainly that the Mohammedan doctrine was vain deceit, and that she was willing with all her heart, out of love to Him who died for her, to lose her life. — The Sultan made her new promises and offered her in marriage the foremost man after himself in the kingdom. But in vain! She replied with extraordinary joyfulness: "The whole world is far too poor to buy from her her only comfort and treasure of the soul; therefore a blessed death was much more welcome to her than an unblessed marriage." Thereupon sentence of death was pronounced upon her and her head was cut off, which she suffered quite undaunted and with steadfast patience.

(Rev. John 2:10.)

Confidence in God.

The excellent Senior Fresenius in Frankfurt on the Main once, as a youth, found his needy mother, long a widow, in deep sorrow and her eyes full of tears. He asked her the cause of this great sadness, and she disclosed to him that she was to have a thaler within this hour, and did not know where she could get it. The pious son also knew no counsel. Meanwhile he said: "It seems to me, too, that this thaler is very needful to you. However, I herewith turn the hourglass, and am assured that if it is so very needful, it will be here before the hourglass has run out; if not, God will convince us that it was not so very needful as we supposed." The hourglass had not yet run half out when a messenger came and brought him a thaler which another had long owed him. This thaler became so much the dearer to him and his family that they afterward had it exchanged, and even when they were afterward richly blessed with temporal goods, still faithfully kept it. Such pieces of money, small in themselves, Fresenius was wont to say, become in time of need great show-pieces, with the inscription: Behold, that God can help!

(1 Pet. 5:7.)

Voice of the People.

When once the council at Nuremberg obstructed the adoption of the Formula of Concord, the Nuremberg citizens declared: If they had no money, they would sell their coats in order to procure this book!" — O how much better would it look in many regions in church affairs if the people had always been left the voice in religious matters that also belongs to them!

Be not deceived; God is not mocked!

In the village of Z. near Crossen lived a man who for a time became a member of the local temperance society, but afterward fell back and then gave himself all the more to drink, throwing to the wind all admonitions and warnings. To this was joined in him — as one sin always comes out of another, since they are all bound together and come from one and the same tree of corruption, and as with every relapse it generally grows worse with the sinner — scoffing at religion and the Bible. He once said to a Christian friend, who would gladly have rescued his soul from destruction and therefore admonished him now and then, these dreadful words: "In the next world I shall be a stoker, and then make it nice and warm for the souls!" And behold, what befell this man? — He had the bad habit of creeping into bake-ovens and sleeping in them when they were still quite warm. This he did again one day, took a bundle of straw with him to lie upon, and went into the still hot oven with the intention of making himself a good, warm bed and sleeping excellently. But presumably some coals had remained behind, which set the straw on fire; for the wretched man went up in flames and had to burn alive in his sins.

Liegnitzer Kirchenblatt.

Sin Is the Ruin of People.

In how countless many examples has this already been confirmed. Sin is, indeed, our ruin altogether; it has destroyed body and soul, robbed us of the image of God, and is the cause that we must go to the grave as to the body; for death is the wages of sin. But in particular instances the ravages of sin and its curse confront us in quite a special way. This we would see from the following story, which the old, pious Harsdörfer tells in his Geschichtsspiegel.

A day laborer went in the 17th century in harvest-time into the field to bind sheaves. As he had forgotten something at home, he sent his son of 7 or 8 years back to fetch it. The boy stayed away a long time, so that the father had to wait for him in great heat with the utmost impatience. When he now saw the child coming from afar, he cursed him. The boy, who heard his father's threatening and scolding words, ran away from fear of the blows. The father seized the nearest stone, threw it at the child, and hit him, so that he fell at once dead to the ground. Soon after, the father repented his deed; in utter despair he ran into the nearest barn and hanged himself. His wife, who had but recently risen from childbed and had her child not far from a fire, learned what had happened, and was so terrified that she laid the child on the ground and wanted to run to her husband. Meanwhile the fire seized the old rags in which the child was wrapped and burned it miserably. When the mother came back, and her