# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 09 19_S13
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13

made, and even the last wreckage that was still left from the shipwreck has been destroyed. Read, beloved reader, the Lamentations of Jeremiah; is it not as though every word in them had been written for this present time?

But if we turn our contemplation away from the doings of the foolish children of men, and look to the hand of God hidden in the midst of this confusion, then we must cry out: LORD! Thou art a righteous Judge! As the words of God are always fulfilled, so also now: He putteth down the mighty from their seat. He poureth contempt upon princes. We do not wish to join in the common railing against princes; we are not appointed to be their judge; they stand and fall to their own LORD. It is enough for us to recognize the all-ruling, almighty arm of God, and to acknowledge that He is right in His judgments. How many a libertine among the great lords, who was accustomed to live every day sumptuously and in joy, has had to flee in fear from one chamber into another! How many a proud potentate has had to bow before the mob! How many a crowned head, that closed the doors of its kingdom to the Gospel, has been near to losing its crown! How many rich men, landlords, and factory owners, who feasted on the sweat of the poor and filled their money-bags with usury, have seen their castles and factories go up in smoke! But the great number of the middle class, too, must already sigh under the burden of want of livelihood and insecurity of possessions, and learn that the golden times of which they dreamed do not come by the way of revolution and the overthrow of thrones. All the letters that come over from yonder are filled with complaints about the present and anxious expectations for the future. But greater than all these bodily afflictions are the spiritual judgments: strong delusions, seductive teachers, spiritual blindness; so that they no longer perceive what belongeth unto their peace. The LORD smiteth them, but they feel it not. The so-called state churches have become rotten and decayed; therefore the LORD now lets them be trodden under foot.

Yet God surely has in Germany also a great people, certainly greater than we suppose. Without doubt they too must suffer along with the general afflictions. Our eyes ought to be directed chiefly upon them; for if one member suffer, they all suffer. With temporal gifts we can hardly serve them; so let us lift up hearts and hands to their and our LORD, and help them fight with fervent intercessions, that He would shorten the days of their tribulation, equip them with steadfastness and patience, and at last deliver them according to His fatherly good pleasure. Has this been done by thee, dear reader? Is it still done? Dost thou not, through the newspaper reports that heap up every week, suffer thy curiosity to be satisfied so much as thyself to be spurred to prayer and intercession for thy brethren and sisters, who perhaps now stand in the great heat of tribulation? — How is it with thee?

Although we do not have such sanguine hopes as many, yet we too hope that the LORD will preserve His Church in Germany, even if in a time of distress. In Prussia the Lutheran Church has not only increased considerably through the secession of nine preachers*) with large portions of their congregations from the united church, but it also appears as though it had been cleansed more and more of many blemishes and infirmities that clung to it. By Dr. Schröder, Lutheran pastor in Thorn, a church paper is published in the service of the Lutheran Church of Prussia, over which one has only cause to rejoice. We may also look forward with confidence to a close ecclesiastical union of the Lutherans in other parts of Germany, from which they have hitherto been hindered by the secular arm; for of the quiet in the land, both among preachers and laymen, who with great reluctance have borne the Babylonian captivity, there is certainly no very small number. May our readers diligently remember their debt of love!

Finally, let us not forget ourselves, as though there were no distress and danger among us, because we live in happy America. America, toward which so many now look longingly across the sea, who formerly were decided enemies of emigration, is nevertheless no safe refuge from the judgments of God, and the ocean is no insurmountable wall. Already the LORD hath whetted His sword and bent His bow and aimeth, and hath prepared for it deadly weapons; He ordaineth His arrows against the persecutors. It is more than probable that the deadly arrows of the cholera will fly through the land before the year is out. Whose heart will they strike? Is it not high time to take counsel how we shall meet our God? Let him who has despised God's Word forsake his contempt, the proud man his pride, the covetous man his covetousness, the indifferent man his lukewarmness, the slothful man his sloth, the worldly-minded man his love of the world. Let every one look into his own bosom and search out what it may be that the LORD hath against him! But nowhere is there rest and a sure place of refuge, save with Christ JESUS. Turn to Him, and ye shall be saved, all the ends of the world. Strengthen the weak and the feeble: lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, and lift up your heads; for the judgments of God, however terrible they look, are buds of the nigh summer of eternal life. This blessed day of our redemption may the LORD let come soon, and clothe us with the breastplate of faith and love and the helmet of hope of salvation.

*) According to oral reports their number is said to have risen to 20. The first nine pastors were followed by 4000 souls.

(Sent in by P. Dr. Sihler.)

The Lutheran Observer and the Ohio Synod.

In No. 29 of the volume for 1848 of the Lutheran Observer the following resolution is communicated, which the General Synod of Ohio adopted this year at its session at Columbus:

“The ministry of the General Synod of Ohio pledges itself, each for his own person as well as as an ecclesiastical body, to confess the symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and to interpret the Holy Scriptures in agreement with them; also, henceforth all who apply for licensure or ordination shall be examined in these confessional writings and pledged to them.”

That the editor of the Lutheran Observer, from his unionistic standpoint, thereupon pours out his old customary complaints about the narrow-heartedness and short-sightedness of his dear Ohio brethren goes without saying. Nor does he fail, as usual, to practice his old little tricks, in order to prejudice his readers as nimbly as possible against that resolution of the Ohio Synod, and to maintain and confirm them in his false view of the relation of the church's symbols to the Holy Scriptures.

For he is either himself still entangled in his old misunderstanding, or at least seeks to maintain it in his readers, as though the Synod of Ohio, in the above resolution, wished to concede to the symbolical books a standpoint above the Holy Scriptures, in that it pledges itself “to interpret the Holy Scriptures in agreement with the ecclesiastical symbols.” Now if the meaning were indeed contained therein, as though the written Word of God in its saving truth, that is, in the points which pertain to the salvation of souls, were in itself obscure, ambiguous, and indefinite, and needed from elsewhere a human lantern and rule of interpretation in order to be rightly understood and taught: — then this would indeed be a thoroughly false and subversive opinion, through and through anti-Christian and un-Lutheran, from which no one is so far removed as precisely those so often misjudged and hated confessional writings of the Church. For it is precisely they — whether they appear, according to the outward necessity at their origin, as actual confession, as defense of it, as textbooks, or as peacemakers for disputes arising within the Church — precisely they who in all humility and reverence subordinate themselves throughout to the Holy Scriptures, and reject most decidedly, as antichristian, all human tradition of the papists against and above the written Word of God, and all faith in authority founded thereon. They desire only to be witnesses, witnesses of the “form of sound words,” which are contained in the Holy Scriptures themselves according to manner and occasion, but are not just put together in one place. And in-