# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 02 28_S108
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

108

low our brethren the grace of their God, offer heaven and blessedness, even though we knew that many, that thousands, that millions would not accept these unspeakable treasures of eternity?

Yet, my beloved, though the Book of books be offered in vain to thousands, the work of Bible-spreading remains nevertheless an unspeakably blessed work. Or is it perhaps a small blessing if a thousand Bibles are distributed and if through them even only One soul is brought to the knowledge of its salvation, rescued and made blessed? Does not the Lord say: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" "Is not then One soul worth more than the whole world and all its treasures? What an unspeakable blessing it would therefore be if we had supported the holy work of Bible-spreading for years, if thereby even only One soul, created for eternal life, were rescued! Did not the Son of God shed His whole blood for each single one? Would He not, therefore, if even only One soul had been forgotten in His redemption, suffer and die once more for it? Do not, as He Himself says, all the angels of God rejoice, does not the whole heaven rejoice over One sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance? And we should count it a small thing if by our poor mite only One soul were made partaker of eternal life?

Yet, my beloved, do not think that through the Bibles now spread by millions only here and there One soul is led to heaven. However great the number of those in whose houses the Bible lies in the dust, there are yet thousands and thousands to whom the Bible becomes a key with which they open heaven to themselves and to others.

Consider what a blessing the one Bible wrought which Luther once found in his lonely cloister! In it he found not only for himself the salvation so long sought in vain: how many millions of souls would the papacy have swallowed up besides, had not Luther been enlightened by the light of the Bible to discover the mystery of antichristian wickedness and to proclaim the pure evangelical doctrine again! How would it have gone also with the many different sects of our day, into how much more dreadful errors would they have fallen, and how many more souls would thereby have lost their salvation and yet lose it, if precisely in the last 100 years the Bible had not been so generally spread! It is indeed true, to be sure, that it is of incalculable importance that God has instituted, beside His written Word, the holy ministry of preaching, that through it the Scripture may also be expounded; but what would the oral preaching have accomplished and still accomplish, if the awakened hearers could not at home, in the quiet of their chamber, search in the Scripture whether it be so as has been preached to them? How firmly are, among others in the Romish Church, millions of souls held in the most abominable errors, since in this Church it is taught not only that the so-called traditions are to be regarded with the same reverence as the written Word of God, but the layman is forbidden the reading, yea the very having of God's Book in his mother tongue, under threat of the ban!

Who can reckon up the blessing of the spreading of the Bible in the mother tongue? Who can count the stirrings and movements of grace which have gone on and go on in all those who have read and still read in the holy Bible? Eternity first will disclose these mysteries of divine grace. There we shall see that, according to the divine promise, not One Bible has been printed in vain, not One has come in vain into the hand of a man, not One has been read in vain, but that every one has accomplished that whereunto the Lord sent it, to the one, namely, to the actual attainment of salvation, to the other, on the contrary, at least for a testimony that God willed His salvation.

O so let us today rejoice heartily and praise and extol God that He has aroused us and has let us succeed in uniting for the common spreading of the holy Bible. Thereby we take part in the carrying out of the great gracious visitation of our latter time; thereby we help to carry on the work of the purest and most unalloyed mission; thereby we become helpers and fellow-laborers of God in the rescue and salvation of the world; and if we contribute our own out of love to Christ and to the souls bought by Him, then even the smallest mite offered by us will not be lost; it will be exchanged for us there for rescued sinners and for an exceeding glorious reward of grace of eternal joy. Yea, blessed is he who here, full of faith and love, has taken part in the work that the Book of God may come into the hands of all men! — he will not be terrified on the last day when this Book is opened by the eternal Judge; for this Book will not condemn him, but absolve him. —

Ah Lord Jesus, help us all to this! —

Write our names in the best place,
In the Book of Life, we pray,
And bind our souls full fast
In the fair little bundle
Of those who bloom in heaven
And live free before Thee,
So will we praise forever
That Thy heart is faithful. Amen!

A Most Recent Important Discovery.

The "Lutheran Observer" of the 20th of January of this year reports to its readers that recently a Mr. Kohlmann, pastor at Horn near Hamburg, has found an old manuscript from the hand of the notorious Bremen Hartenberg, in which it is attested that Luther, shortly before his death, recanted to Melanchthon his struggle against the Sacramentarians. — What things the people in this "Century of Discoveries," as the Observer calls it, discover! Judging by this example, one will certainly in this nineteenth century yet invent gunpowder and the art of printing and discover America, so that Berthold Schwarz, Guttenberg and Columbus, already treated ungratefully enough, will lose all credit altogether. For, as is well known, that discovery of the nineteenth century made known by the "Observer" was already made in the 16th century, 5 years after Melanchthon's death, but of course only after his death. Since that time men told that story throughout Germany as the well-known "Heidelberg country lie" down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the same it lost itself again for days, weeks and years, until at last, as the "Observer" proclaims, it was recaptured in North Germany and dispatched by way of London to Gettysburg and from there communicated to the American world. Since the "Lutheraner" has once already refuted this thick, fat lie against Mr. Nollau, at present in St. Louis (see Volume 2, No. 12), it refers its readers thither, but requests Mr. "Observer" kindly not to withhold from his readers these [illegible] contributions to the biography of that new-old fable.

New Political Periodicals.

It is gratifying to note that the desire to obtain news of the events of the day no longer by means of the satanic press is growing ever greater, and that this desire is more and more met by the appearance of such political organs as bring the reader that news without at the same time befouling him with blasphemies against what is holy and with obscenities. The hour in which the atheistic newspaper writers here are finally deprived of their monopoly seems to have struck. In the last weeks two new political exchange papers have come to us, both of which state as their purpose to serve Christians as an organ for their orientation in the worldly sphere. The former appears in Louisville, Ky., under the title: "Wächter im Westen." The paper is issued once weekly by a society of "evangelical" (United and Reformed) Protestants and is edited by a Mr. Leopold Mader. The other paper appears in Buffalo under the title: "Zeitschrift für Staats-, Schul- und Bürger-Sachen," edited by Mr. Conrad Bär, the publisher of the "Informatorium" edited by Mr. P. Grabau. This periodical is the "Schul- und Hausfreund," formerly published by Mr. Bär, in altered form.