# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 10 25_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34

the Christian churches, to render eternal thanks to God the Lord.†) For my own person, I count myself blessed thereby."

†) Out of this festival, thank God! — nothing has come, and however many traitors and apostates there may be even in the Protestant Church, who would gladly lay the Protestants again in the lap of the Babylonian harlot, yet they will not, God willing, succeed in future either. The Editor.

After the Jesuit has next given counsel how first the cities of Magdeburg, Brunswick, Hildesheim, and Hanover are to be got into one's power by all manner of deceitful practices, and finally to be intimidated by the setting of bloody examples, he adds: "For to keep faith with heretics is, as Your Honor knows, nothing else than to deny the Catholic faith and to help the poor misled souls by all couriers to the devil. Have the Catholics not hitherto been great fools in keeping their promise so long to the Lutherans and Calvinists? It strikes me just as if one who wished to be particularly clever should try to guard against harm a mad raving man who had seized a naked knife or other deadly weapon, and could with good words and promises, giving back the knife or a better one, craft it out of his hands: but would give it back to him according to the promise! Would not such a man be held an arch-fool, and be charged with all the harm that followed? — What more, then, would there be to say of us Catholics, who want to, ought to, and must free those spiritually mad, insane people, who have seized the knife of worldly power, of it by divine craft, good words, and promises, for the blessedness of all their souls, if we would share in the eternal glory! I am here somewhat more prolix, but not on Your Honor's account, but solely because I would admonish you brotherly to impress these considerations the more diligently upon the Lord General-Colonel and his counselors."

In what follows the Jesuit shows how Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen are easily to be obtained by craft and bribery, and then adds: "And should that fail" (miscarry), "all the utmost force will be employed; there is people enough to spend." The shameless Jesuit is therefore not troubled if in the process ever so many of his own people are spent and perish, provided only his plans against the Protestants are thereby accomplished!

In the next part of his letter the Jesuit gives counsel, in order to move Denmark at least not to come to the help of the Lutheran cities, that one should seek to bring a Lutheran gentleman, as shrewd as possible, who is already Romish-minded at heart, into the service of the Danish king, so that he might continually work upon the king in favor of the plans of the Romanists. The Jesuit then continues: "Your Imperial Majesty's people are said already to have a very suitable subject" (for this) "in view. As he has been described to me, he is said to be a very stately, practiced, cunning, skilled, eloquent, and concealed person, so that in him one will have nothing to miss in future but the public profession (confession) of the Catholic faith."†)

†) One sees from this how dangerous Romish-minded people are within the Protestant Church, precisely when they do not formally go over to the Roman Church. Such persons are often bought by the Jesuits to remain a while longer in the Protestant Church, because they can then work more for popery than if they were to lay aside the mask quickly. Since the Jesuits hold the principle that a good end sanctifies an otherwise evil means, it agrees very well with their conscience that one of their own, as has often happened, should not confess his faith even to death, and should figure as a Protestant superintendent, minister, and the like. The Editor.

In what follows the Jesuit comes to Sweden, and how it is to be prevented from coming to the help of Protestant Germany. He says there, among other things: "As to Sweden, Your Imperial Majesty will honor it beyond measure with outward friendship, meanwhile incite the Poles against it with all their might and strengthen them with troops, so that it" (the Swede) "may not take upon itself the cities in Germany. In the meantime there is good hope, since the Swede loves danger, that he too will soon perish therein. After his death there will be a pitiable state of things in Sweden."††)

††) That plan, too, of keeping Sweden from giving assistance to Germany by deceitful protestations of friendship, has, as is well known, failed. Even Jesuit politics was not equal to a man such as Gustavus Adolphus was. The Editor.

After the Jesuit has further reported that the Emperor has sworn to the Pope, "even if he should have no fitting pretexts" (pretenses), notwithstanding the sworn friendship, finally to invade Denmark also and to subject this Protestant realm again to the Pope, he adds the following excuse for such perjured faithlessness: Since the highest degree of human obligation is to promote the blessedness of men. Now this cannot happen with heretics except by all manner of deceit, executed by irresistible force; as the holy Catholic faith holds: if one does not deceive the heretics to this end" (to make them blessed) "when one can, one commits a sin against the Holy Ghost, seeing that the opportunity once neglected cannot be brought back, and (one) thus remains in eternal mortal sin, and no repentance can take place."

The precious letter, which besides what has been quoted gives many important disclosures about the course of events in Germany during the Thirty Years' War, closes as follows: "It is a work on which the welfare" (prosperity) "of the Catholic Church depends; I would therefore esteem myself no more blessed than if this our faithful seed, cast into good ground, should bring forth a thousandfold fruit well pleasing to God. Now God and all the saints will help thereto, to whom I commend Your Reverence in highest devotion. Dated Prague, the 8th of April, Anno 1628." His name the cowardly knave did not dare to sign. He writes of it: "This I was to write at once, upon the Imperial Majesty's express command, to Your Reverence without characters" (without signature of name), "because you may well trust the bearer" (the carrier of the letter). —

Here, then, dear reader, you have an example by which you can see what principles the Jesuit gentlemen cherish, and whether the concern of the Protestants for the welfare of the Church and the State, for faith and morality, over the increase of the Jesuit order in America is groundless. Men like Mr. Maximilian Oertel, the well-known apostate, indeed seek to make the fear of the Jesuits ridiculous, and to represent it as something shameful to Protestants. But that is only a Jesuit trick, to move the Protestants to let his dear Jesuits, who have provided him bread, go on and quietly alone. Another clumsy measure to get the historical testimonies against the Jesuits off his neck is that he boldly denies the truth of what is reported, and, for example, after our communication of the "Thorner Blutbad" gives us the advice to study history better and not to believe all the old wives' fables. By this denial of notorious historical facts, however, Mr. Oertel testifies that either he in particular lacks knowledge of history, or that he is shameless enough to deny before his uneducated or like-minded readers what he himself knows to be true. As for ourselves, we can assure Mr. Oertel that we not only have read and possess the authentic sources for the history of the Thorn tragedy, but that we have in general occupied ourselves with the study of the history of Jesuitism so far that it is not necessary for us to take refuge in fables and tales for the presentation of it.

(Submitted.)
Our Mission.
(Continuation)

They (the Methodists) rejoice over the weakness and lapses of our Christians, and instead of warning them when they see them err, they point at them with fingers and say: "I thank thee, God, that I am not as these." They think themselves clean from every sin, and therefore in their pride look upon the lapses of others with tenfold eyes. So often, therefore, as we have to do with Methodists, and talk with them about God's Word, in which they are usually very poorly versed, they seek