# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 05 01_S137
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pure shall to eternity endure."

Published by the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States.

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 5.  St. Louis, Mo., May 1, 1849.  No. 18.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers living out of town, who are to pay the same in advance and bear the postage. — In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 Cents.

Only those letters which contain communications for the paper are to be addressed to the editor; all others, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent hither under the address: Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

(Submitted by Prof. P. Wolter.)

Self-Contradiction in the Catholic Kirchen-Zeitung of Baltimore.

From two successive numbers of the Catholic Kirchenzeitung of Baltimore we take, word for word, the following two passages:

1. From No. 43 of this year, page 346:

"The Bible, and especially the New Testament, is not merely the most excellent book of instruction and edification for men who strive after truth and holiness of will, after peace with God and peace of conscience; but it is at the same time the most faithful and sympathetic book of comfort and warning, which makes prudent Christians who desire salvation attentive to the signs of the times, warns them in all dangers and snares, and comforts and strengthens them against the sufferings of the time, against which all who love the LORD and are devoted to Him with unshaken loyalty of will have unceasingly to contend, and keeps them in the quieting assurance that the LORD guides the course of the events of the world by His omniscience and all-wisdom, and, interposing in due season with goodness and almighty power, sets bound and measure when evil gains the upper hand and threatens to destroy everything. — Then, however, the Word of God is for all believers at the same time a workshop of the Holy Ghost, the most glorious arsenal of God, from which the fighting Christian is to take armor and weapons, to beat his raging enemies from the field with them. Before all other weapons the holy Paul, Eph. 6, 16, recommends the shield of faith, wherewith Christians are to quench the fiery darts of Satan, shot forth by unbelief, which has seated itself in the teacher's chair, and are themselves sharpened and poisoned by teachers of Christians. — Then they are to take, verse 17, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, whose strengthening and victorious power is not only fully proved and tried against all the temptations and assaults of the devil, the world and the flesh, but also lifted the mind of the first Christian heroes of faith and witnesses of blood, under the most cruel tortures and torments of their executioners and murderers, above themselves and all that is perishable, and filled it with the most joyful hope, with the certainty of eternal life."

2. From No. 44 of this year, page 354:

"Among and alongside those sad endeavors to weaken the authority of the Bible and gradually to destroy it, there is the Bible-madness of our days, which has become the ruling fashion of the time and spreads over the whole earth with an epidemic (should probably read: like an epidemic), a phenomenon which one could not believe if one did not behold it with one's eyes. The Bible, most shamefully abused, to which men had left only as an ordinary school-book some worth, and scarcely so much worth as the writings of Herodotus, Homer and other heathen, is flung into the world and among the inhabitants of the earth, like the commonest junk-ware, by the bale and by the hundredweight, so that this very flinging about by the bale cannot fail to lower the value of the ware which those unholy learned attempts may still have left. Millions are spent upon this Bible-squandering, while one can coldly look upon hundreds and thousands of naked, starving children of men abandoned to misery round about one! While the most learned men, with the gravest mien, rack their brains to search out the meaning of the holy document, written in dead old languages, and in this strenuous endeavor proclaim to the world their divergent and daily more different results of research in quartos and folios, without coming to agreement with one another and with themselves, men stubbornly insist upon putting into the hands of the people the old book, written in long extinct languages, existing only in many differing copies and translations, without the least explanation of difficult expressions and passages."

* * *

One can scarcely trust one's eyes when one finds these two utterances, so directly contradicting each other, in one and the same paper, and moreover in two immediately successive numbers. For as much of truth and edification as the former contains, so godless and abominable is the second. Both, however, once more furnish the sad proof that at the very least the spokesmen of the Roman Church, not from complete ignorance of the truth, but against better knowledge and conscience, out of sheer godlessness, hate the manifest truth, well known to them, and seek to root it out.

We should not need to add so much as another word in proof of this assertion, for even the dimmest eye perceives the manifest contradiction in those two cited articles, as when it says, for example, in No. 43: "the Bible, and especially the New Testament, is not merely the most excellent book of instruction and edification for men who strive after truth and holiness of will, after peace with God and peace of conscience," etc., or: "the Word of God is for all believers a workshop of the Holy Ghost," etc. — I say, even the dimmest eye perceives the cutting contradiction of these words with what one reads in No. 44, where, for example, the circulation of the Bible among the inhabitants of the earth is called a Bible-squandering, whereby the value of the ware is lowered; or where Holy Scripture is called: "an old book, written in long extinct languages, existing only in many differing copies and translations, which is put into the hands of the people without the least explanation of difficult passages and expressions." — I think one can feel it with one's hands how far the esteem for the Bible goes with the Papists, even though they use ever such beautiful expressions for it. Yet we will point with a few words to the rotten ground from which this absurdity springs, that the Catholic Kirchenzeitung on the one hand the Bible in the