# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 11 23_S51
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

51

important reasons and moved by other grounds, which both the laws of prudence and the good government of the universal Church suggest to us, and which we keep in the depth of our heart,*) after mature consideration, from certain knowledge and from the fullness of our apostolic power: have hereby extinguished and suppressed the oft-named Society, and abolished and done away with each and all of its offices, houses, schools, colleges, etc., in every province, in every realm and territory."**)

*) What testimony, then, would the Jesuits have received from the Holy Father altogether, if he had not out of prudence still kept silent about the worst!?

**) It is known that the Jesuits themselves did not submit to this decree of their Pope where the Pope's arm could not reach them. For since Frederick II. of Prussia and the Empress Catharine II. did not accept the papal Bull, the Jesuits remained, among other places, in Silesia and in Russian Poland undisturbed in their possessions; while besides, the ex-Jesuits also in other states, where proceedings had been taken against them, continued secretly to work on.

In what follows the Pope declares concerning the further employment and placing of the ex-Jesuits: "Moreover we will that, if any one of those who professed the Constitution of the order administers an office for the instruction of youth in the sciences, or is a teacher in a college or in a school, after the complete removal of all (Jesuits) from the supreme direction, administration and government, only those shall be permitted to remain in the teaching office and be given the power, who give signs that good is to be hoped from their teaching, and provided that they show themselves averse to those disputations and doctrines which, either through their laxity (loose moral teaching) or through their uselessness, cause the most dangerous disputes and so great harm."

In what follows the Pope now also takes from the Jesuits the privilege hitherto enjoyed "of reading the books of heretics and of other writings rejected and condemned by the apostolic See."

The whole long Bull concludes at last with a threat of the great ban, the imposition of which the Pope reserves to himself and his successors against those who would not recognize, not carry out, or under any pretext declare again invalid this his abolition of the order and name of the Jesuits, for, says Clement, "we will that this present Bull be and remain always and continually valid, firm and in force . . . and also in the future be inviolably observed." — —

From this testimony of a Pope himself the reader may now judge with what effrontery the local 'Herold des Glaubens' can dare to write "that all the accusations (made by us against the Jesuits) have long been refuted and refute themselves daily everywhere, wherever the Jesuits work, of themselves before the eyes of all who will see and hear!" Further, that it can dare to call the Jesuit order a society "that has deserved well of the world in every respect and that stands alone." Of such impudence only a paper is capable that not only stands in the service of the Jesuits, but is also edited by seasoned Jesuits, whose highest moral principle is: "the end sanctifies the means, even if the means should make the Holy Father himself a lying slanderer.

Besides, we must remark here that whoever, having read only the above literally extracted passages of the Bull of abolition of Pope Clement XIV., still will not be convinced that the Jesuit order is a society destroying body and soul, undermining religion and morality, laying waste state and church, must either be a Jesuit himself or be struck by God's judgment with the most fearful blindness. For what a monster must a community be whose chief purpose is to support and spread the papacy, if a Pope himself, deafened by the outcry of all Christian peoples, saw himself compelled to brand them, his most faithful henchmen, as a society in this way, and before all the world to annihilate them with shame and disgrace, as a Clement XIV. has done!

So much by way of introduction. The next time we will let the Jesuit gentlemen themselves speak and pass judgment on themselves; whereupon we shall then also furnish the proof for the genuineness of the scandalous Prague Jesuit letter communicated by us.

(To be continued.)

The Errors of the German Anabaptists or Baptists Here.

However little cause one has to fear that the German Anabaptists now also appearing will make great progress among the German Lutherans here—their doctrine is too confused and too full of contradictions—: yet we hold it our duty not, like other papers, merely to announce the appearance of the so-called "Sendbote des Evangeliums," or even, in sinful indifference toward falsehood and the seduction of souls, to announce it without any warning, but to point out the false and dangerous character of the peculiar Anabaptist doctrines. A servant of the Church is indeed to be a fisher of men, who, where the net of the Gospel is torn, must see to it that the rents are mended again. He is to be a watchman (not a sleeping, dumb dog) who, wherever the enemy raises his voice against the truth, promptly reports the enemy to the inhabitants of the castle of the Church and uncovers to them his stratagem and ambush. If thereby but one soul were warned of a dangerous error and kept back from it, that is fruit enough for his small labor. We are indeed far from saying, with the rough Zwingli, who once at the Marburg Colloquy appeared in a black coat of arms and with a gun in his belt,*) "Qui mersus fuerit, mergatur," that is, whoever has had himself rebaptized, let him be baptized with a stone about his neck in the depth of the sea.**) We rather share the principle of our old Lutheran Church, laid before the King of Denmark by Dr. Rudelbach in an official opinion, that one should grant also to the Anabaptists religious and liberty of conscience, unless, like their Münster grandfathers, they hold principles dangerous to the state and hatch plots for the overthrow of the civil order. We therefore declare it also a lying slander when the Hamburg Anabaptist Onken, now going about here, makes the Americans believe that he was persecuted in Germany by the Lutherans, since he knows very well that the authorities (calling themselves Lutheran, to be sure, but rationalistic and United-evangelical) who would not permit him his vagabondage and proselytizing, have just so, and much more severely, persecuted those who are really Lutherans. But as far as we are, as said, from begrudging the German Anabaptists the freedom which they enjoy here, so earnestly must we nevertheless warn against their heresies, and so great and pernicious must we declare them. All kinds of errors, as they are found scattered in the other sects, one finds gathered in the Anabaptists as in a ground-soup. Reformed, papistic-antichristian and Socinian-rationalistic errors are here, as the monsters in the old fable-lore, united into one whole. And these errors are so potent with them that they penetrate their whole system of faith and doctrine like a poison and leave not one article of faith pure and unharmed.

*) See Greser's (an eyewitness) History of his Life.

**) At Zwingli's counsel the Anabaptist Manz was therefore drowned by the magistrate at Zurich, just as the senate at Geneva, at Calvin's instigation, had the denier of the Trinity, Servetus, burned. Luther, on the other hand, interceded with the Elector for a Carlstadt, and wrote to Tetzel, when he was forsaken by all the world, a letter of consolation.

In order to do full justice to the German Anabaptists here, we will, as regards the errors which we charge upon them, hold strictly to what they have given to the light in their new organ, the "Sendbote des Evangeliums."

From the said paper, of which we have so far received only the first three numbers, it already appears clearly that the German Anabaptists here teach falsely, among other things, in express contradiction to Holy Scripture: of the power of Baptism in general, of infant baptism in particular, of the essential parts of Baptism, of the Holy Supper and of the Church; to say nothing of single utterances from which it appears only too plainly that after the manner of Münster and of Münzer they mingle the kingdom of Christ with the kingdom