# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 05 01_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

141

the arrangement made by Gregory the Great, that the servants of the Church should sing everything that fell to them at the altar, thus also the pericopes, and that the congregations should answer in song; and this not so much because the well-sung word is more intelligible in larger churches than the spoken, for this reason would find no application in most village churches, but rather because by that manner the congregation is put in a position to join in the prayer itself, especially in the slowly chanted prayers, which is not possible with mere reading aloud.

As to the responsive singing, we find in the Lutheran Agendas a manifold participation of the congregation, so that either the pastor intones and the whole congregation, led by the choir of singers, responds, or the cantor or the choir or a choirboy intones and the whole congregation responds, or the congregation, divided into two halves, intones and responds alternately.

But what was wholly new and peculiar in the Lutheran Church was the church hymn; the only thing the Christian people had of it before the Reformation were German songs on the Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, which however were sung only outside the church; this holds also of other songs, e. g. of that one: "Also heilig ist der Tag" (from the twelfth century); in the church the German people for centuries had nothing else than the Kyrie eleison. The Lutheran Church was the first to bring the church hymn to full development, and to set it in its right place, whereby in its first two centuries it decidedly preferred the hymns of doctrine and confession, e. g. "Es ist das Heil uns kommen her," to those which expressed rather the feelings of individual Christians. Yes, the Lutheran Church held the most excellent of those hymns, such as "Ein Kindelein so löbelich," in such high honor that it has often commanded that sermons be preached upon them at suitable seasons of the church year in the catechism sermons.

With the church hymns the melodies of the same, in which a certain fundamental tone prevails, also came into being; only one must not, to be sure, hold our present choral singing to be wholly in agreement with that of the old Lutheran Church, for the old melodies have been much corrupted by the falsely celebrated art of the chorale books, and in particular the older Church did not know the breaking off in singing at the close of the stanzas, which often destroys all the sense of the words, but let the pauses occur at the comma, the period, and so forth.

The labor which the training of the congregations in responding and in other responsive songs generally, as also in learning the church hymns as to words and melody, required, was an exceedingly comprehensive and burdensome one, and was still greatly increased by this, that the mass of the people could not read; hence at first the collections of church hymns were intended only for the use of the pastors and sextons, who had to sing them before the congregations in the services until these could sing them along. Therefore one was obliged to be very sparing with the number of the hymns; thus the first hymnal edited by Dr. Luther, of the year 1524, contains only eight hymns, the one that appeared shortly before his death 129, and this is about the stock which, according to the church orders, was in churchly use until about the year 1650; in this one sought, for these and other reasons, to resist the intrusion of many new hymns; one also insisted that the hymns always be sung entire, and only the Strasburg church order permitted the breaking off of the same; to be sure, they had also not yet grown, as later, to so considerable a number of verses.

(To be continued.)

Three Pairs and One.

Thou hast two ears and only one mouth;
Wilt thou complain of it?
Much shalt thou hear, indeed, and—
Little say thereto.

Thou hast two eyes and only one mouth;
Take it to heart!
Much shalt thou see, indeed, and—
Much keep silent.

Thou hast two hands and only one mouth;
Learn to reckon it!
Two are there for work, and—
One for eating.

Sartorius' Lebensspiegel.

"Hübner's biblische Historien."

Edited by C. G. Weyl, Preacher in Baltimore.

We have deemed it our duty to warn our readers, in the 12th number of this paper, against this book, whose title is already a lie and whose contents are full of blasphemies. To bring the editor of this book, Mr. Weyl, by this our well-motivated warning to a recognition and confession of his grievous sin, could naturally not occur to us, since we have come to know the man's character only too well. From that quarter we rather expected something quite different, and what we expected has come to pass, and more besides. We have shown, as the readers will remember, that Mr. Weyl has not, as he expressly promised when soliciting support for the work, republished the Hübner "in its old unaltered form and substance," but has furnished a book which has nothing in common with the old Hübner except that it bears the name of Hübner (thus, to be sure, even this deceitfully) on its forehead. We expressed at the same time the good hope that Mr. W. might perhaps have announced the book as Hübner's work in form and substance in the most definite terms, and afterward issued it as such, not out of malice but out of ignorance. We could not believe that a man (to say nothing of one who would be a Christian and a servant of the Church) could be so devoid of all shame as to play a fraud of which he knows beforehand that it must become manifest. What has Mr. Weyl now answered first on this point in his justification? It is hardly credible, and yet so it is: Mr. W. has admitted that it was not out of ignorance, but with full consciousness, contrary to his promise, that he did not have the old Hübner reprinted; partly, namely, because a copy of the old Hübner could not be found (?), partly because the same "might be unsuitable for the present age and perhaps also too one-sidedly churchly."*) That he had at first promised it was "an innocent error." He had indeed wanted to publish "a school book for all Christian denominations and no stiff-Lutheran one," for he "marched with the times." We confess we had not expected such an answer, not even from a Mr. Weyl. He has hereby set his true character in a light in which we have hitherto not seen and regarded him. The Word of God, to be sure, which discovers all the hidden depths of the human heart (Heb. 4, 12. 13.), has already portrayed such characters; one need only read Is. 3, 9. 1 Tim. 4, 2. We can now not only say: "God have mercy on all hearers who have such teachers!" we must also add: whoever lets himself be led by such men, after he has read such self-justifications from them, is worth nothing better.

*) From this second reason one sees that the first, the lack of a copy of the old true Hübner, was not the real reason with Mr. W.; for supposing Mr. W. could have obtained an original edition, he would nevertheless not have republished it for the sake of the second, third and fourth reasons.

But we had in the 12th number of our paper not only censured that Mr. W. had disgracefully broken his word to furnish the old Hübner, but had also shown by literal extracts from the book that the same is a book composed in a rationalistic spirit, full of empty talk of virtue that denies Christ's alone-saving merit, and full of blasphemies against Christ, full, namely, of sayings by which Christ's true Godhead is blasphemously approached too closely. What does Mr. Weyl do? To the justification of the worst of the passages cited by us as proofs the man with his evil conscience does not set himself at all, but, passing these over in silence, he seeks to justify only such as he hopes his public, unacquainted with the pure doctrine, will swallow. Then he adduces for his book the approving testimonies of two men who are supposed to be universally acknowledged as orthodox, namely that of Pastor Fr. Stohlmann at New York and one of the same kind from Preacher Rauschenbusch, already known to our readers. To this we have only this to remark, that the gentlemen named, even if they were ever so