# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 02 14_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

100

that one steals your churches from you, that happens according to the Word of God, for love is the fulfilling of the law, for we Unionists love one another, and the love for you constrains us to draw you in this way into our blessed fellowship of love." Meanwhile the professors and pastors and jurists are not idle either, and prove in the clearest way that the Lutheran Church is not abolished in the Union, but still exists in it just as completely as the blue or yellow color in the green mixed of both. Meanwhile they persecute the Lutheran preachers and congregations, withhold from them the stolen churches, and compel them to support the Unionist parsons and schoolteachers besides, and to this day poor P. Eichhorn must wander from one prison into another. Meanwhile they speak much of love, establish inner missions, etc., etc., cry out against the Roman Church, join the embassies in order to beg free the persecuted married couple in Turin, while they let the poor people in their own land be maltreated just as shamefully. The learned men meanwhile exert themselves, the Union knows how to burn, and have now for years been seeking in their own hatchings (for in God's Word they will never find it) the right handle for bringing the confessors of truth and of falsehood under One hat, naturally with the help of the police-constables, who must now and then apply a few to a too thick conscience that will not go along, in order to make the stubborn thing a little more pliable, and at last in 1853 they have, after several unsuccessful attempts, brought it out, and publicly proclaimed it.

Resolved:

The Unionist Church accepts the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, in so far as it agrees with the Altered, or with every one's taste, and defiance be bidden to him who will not now see that in 1853 they have become honest and rightly Lutheran.

Do you still remember, Martin, the wonderful travel-book with the droll pictures in it, which we once read together in childhood? There was also described a flying island which went about in the air, inhabited by the king and his court, but besides by nothing but scholars and artists with their servants. These did very strange things. For example, in a great factory building there were nothing but spiders and spiderwebs, and the gentlemen made the attempt to manufacture silken garments out of the latter, but only attempts, for it had never been heard, as long as the island had stood, that a single silk thread had been spun, yet the thing was tolerated at all events. From another similar building a dreadful stench poured out upon the traveler, to whom it had been permitted to view the curiosities, so that he could hardly take courage to enter. However, curiosity overcame disgust; but what does he see? All the halls are filled with * * *—you need not read this passage to your Catharine—and in the midst of it and under it profound scholars with highly delighted countenances, who have now for years been pondering how to produce out of human excrements again proper edible food. We could not believe the thing then, and as we met on our whole long wandering no such land, it was resolved among us that the travel-writer must have been a boaster. But by degrees I begin to see that we may have done the man wrong. The land and the people exist, and you now also, I hope, know where and who the people are. Well, God be with you, Martin!

Your Hans.

P. S. My wife bids me send greetings to you and your wife, and you should prepare the turkey only for next Monday, for we mean to hold, in defiance of the devil, a merry meal with you yet, since, as my wife says, our dear Lord God still lives, and one should not let the devil notice that he has grieved one.

Your Hans.

The dear Hans,

who in this number has once more given vent to his oppressed heart, will surely claim the compassion of all readers; it is a pity that the good fellow has not been to school; then something fine might well have become of him, and he would have been spared such pitiable deceptions as have again befallen him. For history teaches, as is well known, that the Calvinists—and these are indeed properly the Unionists—have always played thus with the Augsburg Confession, as has happened at the Berlin Unionist Church Diet. They have in this walked quite in the footsteps of their dear father in the faith, John Calvin. Calvin, namely, as is well known, also signed the unaltered Augsburg Confession with his hand without hesitation, when he wished to accept a preacher's post in Strasburg, and accepted the altered only in his heart, since in that city at that time no one was allowed to hold an office who would not render this signature. Calvin boasts of this act himself still in the year 1557, in that he writes to Schelling in Regensburg: "I do not reject the Augsburg Confession, which I long ago willingly and gladly signed, as the same has been explained by its author (Melanchthon) himself." (Ep. 236. ed. Lausan.) How does the same Calvin write in the year after Melanchthon's death?—Thus he writes (to Beza on the 10th of Sept. 1561): "The Augsburg Confession is, as you know, the torch of your Fury" (he means the Queen Mother, Catharine de Medici,) "to stir up a fire by which she may set all France in flames. But it is well to look to what end it (the Augsb. Conf.) is to be forced upon them; since its too great mildness (mollities) has always displeased the judicious and has been regretted by its author, and in most places is adapted to the particular usage of Germany. I pass over that its brevity makes it both obscure and, on account of the omission of many pieces of greatest importance, defective. Moreover, it would be absurd to adopt that one to the neglect of the Confession of the French. Yes, in this way matter for strife is prepared for the future, because the majority will never depart from the confession once accepted." (Ep. 313.) Already in the same year in which Calvin had written the words quoted above, (1557) he wrote to the Evangelicals in Poland: "That will surely be no departure from the Augsb. Conf., if a clearer explanation (?) of your faith is added to it!" What, then, does Mr. Calvin understand by such a clearer explanation? He says it in what follows with these words: "The manner and way of the communication is to be explained thus: that Christ, namely, while He remains according to His body in heaven, comes down to us by a wonderful power of His Spirit and at the same time lifts us up to Himself."—That is the fine "clearer explanation" which Calvin gives of the 10th Article of the Augsb. Confession, and which permitted him to sign this Confession; as it is found word for word in the 244th letter of the cited edition cared for by Beza. Is it then a wonder if the Calvinistic spirit now plays similar pieces?

Since Hans did not know all this, he is well to be excused if, because this matter was so new to him, he has perhaps been more agitated over it than was necessary. Should the language of Hans perhaps seem somewhat rough to some, let them only consider that he is not so practiced with the pen as the learned, who understand how to bring forth the greatest rudeness in the finest manner.

(For the "Lutheraner.")

Appeal
to all members of our Synod,
to take to heart the still so palpable want in it of preachers and schoolteachers.

While in the old fatherland our dear Lutheran Church sighs under the yoke of the State, and the churchly-Lutheran affairs there grow ever more troubled, and from the surge of the opinions and attempts of the day the voice of the One, pure, unadulterated Confession is ever more drowned and threatens even to fall silent, the merciful God has looked graciously upon our new fatherland and lets the light of His sweet, gracious Gospel shine here in bright splendor, and gathers daily souls out of the godless wicked world and rallies them around the banner of victory of the pure, scriptural Confession of His faithful Church of pure Word and Sacrament.