# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 11 14_S47
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

47

garn, or, according to other reports, to be transferred to Moravia, they resisted, and the alarm became general. After the flight of the Emperor the Reichstag assembled in Vienna has declared itself permanent and has transferred the executive power to a committee from its midst consisting entirely of decided democrats. What will be the next thing now? Unconfirmed reports sound very ominous.

In Italy a national congress is preparing, which is to assemble at Rome and to have as its purpose a league of all the Italian peoples. Of the Pope one hears nothing at all any more, neither evil nor good.

In Baden a republican movement arose again in September, but was soon suppressed again. The Imperial Regent has now called out a corps of 60,000 men and distributed it to the five most dangerous points for the maintenance of the existing order. The Danish disputes are still at the old point, yet peaceful prospects are said to exist. As characteristic of the disposition of the party that is itself still monarchical it deserves to be mentioned that in the new draft constitution of Prussia they wish to strike out the words: by the grace of God, because those words have at present lost their meaning and their retention would be useless, if not dangerous. Thus men wish publicly to renounce the biblical doctrine that the government is God's ordinance. The cholera has at last also broken out in London and some other cities, also in Edinburgh and the surrounding country. Its appearance on our shores is perhaps not very far distant any more.

"The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." John 6, 63.

These words are worth much gold. God has ordained that His Holy Spirit should come in the ordinary way through the Word; this Christ Himself says in this place. Therefore, if anything comes before you which seems ever so beautiful and holy, so that you even think it is quite an angelic thing, yet take it before you and hold it against God's Word, see whether it is grounded in the Holy Scripture, and whether God has commanded, bidden and ordered it or not. If it is merely a bare thought, a peculiar devotion and good intention without God's Word, spit upon it. Since God has now established the office of preaching, beware of such devotion and thoughts as the devil well can set going, even if they were so sweet that they wept great troughs full of tears. You must know which devotion is evil and which is good, natural or spiritual, for they are all almost alike one with another; the books of the monks were full of spiritual devotion, and many a man was deceived by such devotion, for they were not able to distinguish or conclude which devotion is right, or which is wrong, since they had not the Word of God, and said they dared not resist the Holy Spirit. But I say: I will resist them, if they have not the Word of God. For St. John in his first Epistle (4, 1. ff.) commands, "that we should try all spirits," and judge, and see who preaches and what he teaches. If I am to try the spirit, I must have the Word of God; that shall be the rule, the touchstone, the Lydius lapis, the light by which I discern what is black or white, good or evil, even as the sun illumines everything. And where the light does not shine, say: I will gladly let it be fair before the world, and a precious thing; but that it should help me to God and deliver me from death, there I will neither hear nor see it, if it agrees not with the divine Word, however much it may glitter. If such devotion concerns my soul's welfare and salvation, I will spit upon it, trample it under foot, not suffer it, hear nor see it; for God's Word is not there.

Upon this the preaching of Christ is founded, where He teaches that His words and speeches are life and spirit, so that, when the assassin-preachers come, and boast of the Spirit, and say that they are constrained to preach by love and the Spirit, — that we then look to it and be not seduced. Matt. 24, 24. For they also now say indeed: "I mean it well and with all faithfulness; God knows from heaven, I would stake my salvation for your salvation." But say you: Preach to the geese, you are a devil, leave me undisturbed with your spirit; Christ will not have me hear, and says: "It is the Spirit that quickeneth"; where do I stand and you? "My words," says He, "are spirit"; if you take hold of them, you have Him.

You might perhaps ask: Where does the Spirit quicken? or, by what? where shall I find Him? Here the answer is given you: Hold fast to my speeches and words; if you grasp these, you have the Spirit. Thus the words are Spirit in him who teaches and preaches, and also in him who listens and believes; so far as he clings to the Word, so far is he a Christian; on the other hand, so far as he has flesh and does not believe, he is flesh. Dr. M. Luther.

Correspondence from the Hanoverian Territory of the 4th of September.

... The conditions are of such a kind that, when one sees our people, so highly favored of God, lying thus smitten in its blood in the hands of the murderers, when one sees how it goes whoring after its corrupters and will not see the God who made its cities glorious, one might cry out with Jeremiah: Oh that mine eyes were fountains of tears! For the rest, if one knew the past, it has not really become worse, but the terrible injury which was rankling and raging in the bowels has now only broken out, so that in a certain measure in this disclosure of the injury there lies a deliverance, at least comparatively and in part. Our people as such, as an organized nation, has now avowedly fallen away from Christ; we have no Christian-German people any more, and the unity of state and church is in fact at an end. I grant you, this is a liberation; for we had only the husk left, but the substance had long since fled. That cannot, however, prevent one from looking forward with fear to the further development of our life. Meanwhile the Lutheran Church can now, by God's grace, win victories; for even if it now loses all outward supports — and did it really have any among us? — it can now present itself in its peculiar freedom and glory, without trusting in the flesh, though under the most decided cloak of servitude. It will now be shown, and it seems to me it is already being shown, how precisely in its certain Confession the Lutheran Church is given the only firm ground which outlasts the terrible falling apart and tottering of all conditions; whereas the wretched Union, which however as a child of the police-church system had its support in the same, will and must now fall to pieces. The ecclesiastical confusion in the Prussian territory appears to be endless, and the separated Lutherans seem after all in the end to be those to whom all faithful members of the Church who were within the Union must flee, and there they will then reap the reward of their faithfulness. There was lately at Gnadenberg near Bunzlau in Silesia a numerous conference which in this respect is a clear sign of the times.*) A decided aversion to the Union and inclination toward the Lutheran Confession has there expressed itself powerfully; the preservation of what is Lutheran was quite properly the object and purpose of the deliberations. The young Professor Kahnis (formerly at Halle, now, if I am not quite mistaken, at Breslau) expressed himself especially decidedly, also Professor Oehler. A letter from Harleß to the assembly made so powerful an impression that it had to be read aloud repeatedly. True, they have not yet gone so far as to negotiate with the Separatists, yet the assembly through Professor Kahnis caused the Upper Consistory at Breslau to be told that the negotiations had indeed not yet progressed far enough to determine the relation to the Old Lutherans, but that they know themselves bound to them in love, esteem and gratitude for what they have done and suffered for the good cause. — With us in the land of Hanover matters stand so that up to now the Church has not been drawn into the revolutionary movement; we have indeed already a draft, prepared by a commission, of an election law for a deliberative synod to meet shortly, which will take under consideration the reshaping of the constitution of the Church under presbyterial or synodical form; meanwhile that is the quite legal (lawful) and necessary way. God grant us grace that in this synod His good Spirit prevail; if not, should rather anti-Christian measures be confirmed by our church authorities, the struggle would at once break out and we should be driven to a decision. Petri has been issuing an ecclesiastical periodical since the beginning of June. — Think of it, the proposal has also already been made, and indeed by Professor Dorner in a small pamphlet, after the analogy (pattern) of the political structure, to found a German national church; in essentials, as it seems to me, the whole amounts to a carrying out on a large scale of what was intended at the ill-fated Prussian General Synod of 1846. We shall of course in no case engage in it.

(Sent in.)

The Lutheran Church Emerging from the Union in Prussia.

So a friend writes to us in these days: The following I find in the "Stimmen aus und zu der streitenden Kirche," June number:

Of the movements in the Lutheran Church of the old provinces (in Prussia) the Dorfkirchenzeitung writes the following:

*) A similar conference, so reports the D. Kirchenfreund, took place also under the presidency of Dr. Heubner at Wittenberg.