# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1855 03 13_S117
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

117

Lutheranism in Texas.

Already in the 2nd number of this volume we reported to our readers that since the year 1840 a number of young men from Switzerland have planted the banner bearing the name "Lutheran" among the Germans in Texas also, and have formed a synod here, which declares the symbols of our Evangelical Lutheran Church to be its banner. According to more recent news, which we take from the "Reformirte Kirchenzeitung," there have been added to the eleven already present "six new Lutheran missionaries, who arrived in Texas on the 28th of December last year from Germany (or rather, perhaps, likewise from Switzerland?), in order to labor among the German population of that State." Our misgivings concerning these laborers in the Lutheran Zion in Texas we have already expressed in the place cited; for they have, sad to say, allowed themselves to be received into the connection of the apostate so-called Lutheran General Synod of this country, and have thereby made it only too plain that at bottom Reformed doctrine is just as acceptable to them as Lutheran.

It is a great joy to us this time to be able to give our readers tidings of activity on behalf of our Church in Texas, without having to send a limping messenger after it at once with his "But" and "Alas, however." For on the 16th of December the dear Pastor Kilian, well known to many of our readers, has also immigrated to Texas with a not inconsiderable Lutheran congregation. A native Saxon, once our fellow-student at Leipzig, he was from the year 1837 for eleven years a Wendish Ev. Luth. pastor at Kotitz in the Upper Lusatia, Kingdom of Saxony, and thereafter, from the autumn of 1848 until his emigration, pastor of a so-called Old Lutheran diaspora congregation in the neighborhood of Nisky in Prussia.

In the year 1846 Pastor Kilian published a sermon in the Wendish language, which then appeared at Leipzig, at Dörffling's, in a German translation, and further elaborated as a tract, under the title: "Die nothwendige Vorsicht lutherischer Christen bei jetziger Glaubensverwirrung. Ein ernstes Wort an das evangelische Volk." The little work was reviewed in the Rudelbach-Guericke periodical. In this review it is said, among other things, as follows: "Taking its start from 1 Thess. 5:21, the preface shows, 'what the good is, to which we are to hold, and by which we are to prove all things;' namely, 1. the Christian fundamental article of justification by faith alone; 2. the Word of God, the Holy Scripture; 3. the Ev. Luth. Confessions (cited by name and with a brief statement of their contents), left to us by our forefathers, that we might have 'a pattern of true churchly unity, and in this faith, which our fathers have so mightily confessed to us, might with united strength withstand all papistical, Reformed, and rationalistic errors.' In mentioning the oath of the clergy and teachers upon these confessions of faith, mention is also made of the neological (new- and unbelieving) demand 'that this oath be abolished. Therefore (says the author) I must tell you betimes thus much, Lutheran Christians: As soon as, in any country, the government of the Lutheran Church, with the consent of those who are under it, abolishes the oath of office, so that clergymen and schoolteachers are no longer sworn upon the Confessions of the Lutheran Church, so soon the Lutheran Church in that country has ceased to be a national church, just as in Prussia, through the union of the Lutherans and the Reformed since the year 1830, it has ceased to be a national church. And if this abolition of the oath of office should ever take place in Saxony, then those who wished to remain Lutheran Christians would have to go out of the national church on account of such apostasy. But if, by God's special grace, our church government, together with all those in Saxony who hold to the old Lutheran confession, should stand fast in all the storms that have arisen, it might easily come to pass that soon many of them from all ranks in Saxony would leave the Lutheran national church and help the freethinkers and naturalists of the present time to build up a new church. One of the two, as it appears, will probably happen: either the national church which is now Lutheran will fall away from the Lutheran faith and we shall have to go out of it, or else the Luth. Church will remain the national church and our false brethren will go out from us, because they are not of us ... God knows what awaits us. Only be sober and watch, Lutheran Christians!' — The sermon itself (the reviewer adds) is in every respect a solid piece of work, such as is extremely rare in our times, a thorough, fruitful treatment of its text (Col. 2:6-9) that reaches into life, full of evangelical spirit, rich in pithy thoughts and apt judgments, throughout firmly grounded in Scripture and excellently illustrated with sayings of Luther, so that almost nothing is left to be desired. On page 51 it says: 'What will in the end come of the present prevalence of manifold kinds of reason? When they have strutted and quarreled long enough, there will come a reason that shall have worldly power, some pope or Napoleon, who will bring the other reasons under himself. Then it will appear that the present false freedom of the reasons has led straight to popery.' — A few thousand such pastors as Kilian, and things would soon look better in evangelical Christendom."

So much for the extract from the review. Whoever among our readers has not yet known Pastor Kilian will surely, after these few testimonies, come to love him, praise God that He has led him to Texas, and in spirit extend to him the hand of brotherly welcome upon his arrival on our field of labor and of battle.

Pastor Kilian has done us the pleasure of greeting us with a brotherly letter. We communicate some notes from it. It says therein, among other things, as follows:

"It was in the year 1853 that thirty-odd Wends, Prussian Lutherans, who had turned back from the Prussian state-church union to the Ev. Luth. Church, emigrated by way of Bremen to Texas, suffered shipwreck off the island of Cuba, yet saved their lives. In the winter of 1854 these wrote to their friends such favorable letters that a company of more than 500 souls has now followed them. This Ev. Luth. congregation, consisting of so-called Old Lutheran Prussian families, to whom about 200 souls from the Saxon Lutheran state church have attached themselves, called me to accompany them hither as pastor and teacher. The company was forwarded by the house of Valentin Lorenz Meyer by way of Hamburg and Liverpool. I arrived with this congregation on the 16th of December of last year at Galveston, and with the better-off, after the poorer families had had to take work in Houston and elsewhere, have moved 200 English miles into the country. Here on Rabbs Creek in Bastrop County the well-to-do part of the company, who have also paid the passage for the poor, are about to buy a league of land, in order then to let the poorer ones also follow after into this new home. Of unoccupied land there is plenty here, but on account of the difficulty in Texas of finding the right owner of a tract of land, it has not yet been possible for the people to buy, so that they have to live in huts for weeks. My emigrant congregation has indeed passed through many adversities, although the sea voyage went off without any actual storm. We have lost more than 70 persons by death, for the most part by cholera, with which the company was seized during its journey through England. Even in Liverpool several persons died. Yet on the 26th of September we sailed from Liverpool in the large English two-decker Ben Nevis (Captain Herron), about 580 souls besides the ship's crew, since besides our closed company other passengers from Germany went along. But during the very calm voyage in the Irish Channel so many cholera deaths occurred again that we had to lie in quarantine three weeks in the harbor of Cork in Ireland. Our sea voyage from there to Galveston lasted seven and a half weeks. In this time also several more have died. Here in this country, however, the people are healthy, and have also found their brethren who preceded them in the year 1853 in good health." — —

"Although this diaspora congregation (in the neighborhood of Nisky), through my removal to Prussia, was raised to a parish of its own, so that I was also formally recognized by the Prussian state government as its pastor, yet there were motives for the families separated from the united church to leave this peculiar churchly position and to emigrate. I also found