# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 07 24_S190
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

190

tinction between essential and non-essential articles of faith; and Spener himself designated three-fourths of the Holy Scriptures, and among these in particular the Gospels, as unimportant for use in the congregation, wherefore he also "heartily wishes that we had once removed from our churches the use of the pericopes of the Gospels, but had left free choice, or else had taken the Epistolas instead of the Evangelia as chief texts." This tendency applied only the standard of what was practical in its view to the existing order of divine service; whatever did not appear practical, that is, awakening and edifying, was treated carelessly and indifferently; men put it back in use, let it fall out of practice, and spoke against it, and when it had then become distasteful to the congregations, and they were weaned from it and it was set far from them, they used their influence upon the church authority to abolish it also by law. The gradual course of this destructive procedure with respect to divine service can be observed in the case of the Litany. According to all the notions which the Spenerian school had of prayer, the Litany could not please it; it was held to be a dead formalism without fullness of words and unction, in whose place the free prayer of the heart was to come; it had therefore to give way, and indeed in the following manner: First men permitted the exchange of the Litany for the church prayer to be read, and crowded the former back into the prayer-hours and days of penance; then they no longer let it be performed by the congregation in responsive singing, but only read by the preacher, and when the congregations had thus quite naturally lost their taste for it, they abolished it by law and then let the prescribed church prayer also pass over into a free prayer of the heart. Something similar happened with the pericopes, which were displaced by free texts, with the Kyrie, the Prefaces, the exhortation to the communicants, and much else; on the other hand, many other things came in, for example, an altogether immoderate use of kneeling in divine service.

Both tendencies, that which sets in order and that which awakens, go hand in hand for a considerable time, however inwardly different their aim may be. Thus shortly before or soon after 1700 there comes in almost every territorial church a point of time when both tendencies join hands for the restoration of divine service, and in this way attempt to produce a remarkable fusion of the most diverse endeavors. But it has succeeded neither with the ordering tendency in bringing back again into the churchly orders those estranged from them, nor with the awakening tendency in reviving again those spiritually dead. Rather, the opposition of these two tendencies, which emerged ever more sharply, only increased the mass of the estranged and spiritually dead in the congregations; for if the ordering tendency relied upon the sense for the old still existing in the congregations, upon their pious habit, upon their custom of church-going, partaking of the Lord's Supper, etc., the awakening tendency opposed it and persuaded the congregations that all such habit and practice introduced by men was merely of evil; and if, on the other hand, the awakening tendency, with contempt for the traditional ceremonies, sought only to awaken a spiritual life again, the ordering tendency opposed it and warned the congregations against that adversary, which, it said, only shattered the outward church orders and by its spiritualizing led into utter instability. The farther these two churchly tendencies diverged, the greater became in the congregations the number of those who became bewildered about everything and indifferent toward everything, and so there arose from 1700 to 1750 a mood which became estranged from the existing orders of divine service and indifferent toward this rich inheritance from their forefathers, and which lost with the love for them also the knowledge and understanding of them.

When now Rationalism, especially from 1750 onward, gained more and more the upper hand, the devastation of the original orders of divine service, begun already a hundred years earlier, was brought to completion. Then came the time when old and ancestral became synonymous with bad and tasteless, and when the proof that a piece of divine service, or a ceremony, came from the Middle Ages was already sufficient to justify its abolition; yes, it went so far that the sentence of rejection was pronounced already if such a thing had existed only before 1750. Accordingly the original celebration of the Apostles' days and other festival days was abolished, or transferred to Sundays, whereby, however, the sermons on the pericopes of the latter were displaced; on the other hand, the celebration, never known before, of other days, for example, of days of penance and prayer, as also of harvest days, was introduced; the Sunday vespers dwindled, especially in the country, to a mere so-called prayer-hour, in which perhaps only a psalm was read, without further exposition, and if catechism examination was still held, yet the catechism sermon was omitted entirely; the Saturday vespers also fell more and more out of use, and when they still took place, yet the private confession was displaced in them by the general. From what miserable grounds such and similar devastations were undertaken and accepted one sees most especially in the case of private confession; for this was abolished in many places with slight trouble, because it cost the working people too much time, caused the preachers unnecessary trouble, because with the general confession probably more would commune, because the penitent seldom has anything special to say to the confessor which he could not also say to him privately; yes, the blind let themselves be brought very soon by the blind leaders to the delusion that private confession is only a mere remnant of the papistic auricular confession, that it is in itself wholly useless, or at least far inferior to the general confession.

The weekday services gradually ceased altogether in most places, especially in the country, or there came into them, in place of biblical books, only freely chosen texts — the old churchly pieces, the Introits, Kyrie, Credo, Preface, Agnus Dei, Litany, Te Deum, Magnificat, Benedictus, etc. — all these pieces, which are in part as old as Christian divine service itself, whose earnest beauty must go to the heart of every unprejudiced person, which, with the sole exception of the Reformed Church, are to this hour in use in all Christian churches, through the use of which the Lutheran Church faithfully preserved a bond of unity with the whole of Christendom —: all these pieces have almost without a trace disappeared and been forgotten, and thus the congregations have lost an important part of their means of instruction. The number of the church hymns, of which there were originally about 150, which were used year in, year out as fixed, has been excessively increased by newer botched productions, and thereby the way has been opened to an unregulated variation; in this manner the learning by heart and the inward pondering of the core hymns, and also the knowledge of their melodies, has been lost, and so the congregations have again forfeited an important means of instruction. Finally, the responsive singing of the congregations with the pieces of divine service arranged for it, for example, the Litany, the Te Deum, etc., yes, often also the responding to the altar chanting of the preachers, if this still takes place at all, has disappeared, and thus the active participation in divine service has been taken from the congregations. From what has been said thus far it is sufficiently evident how greatly the original order of divine service of the Lutheran Church has been, the longer the more, torn apart and laid waste, in that much that is old Lutheran has been abolished, omitted, forgotten, or shortened, and in its place, or beside it, much that is new, un-Lutheran, and Reformed, especially since the recent attempts at union, has been put.

Whom now the presentation given of the present state of things and the immediate view of the reality do not bring to the conviction that an ordering influence is necessary here, to him it would hardly be possible to procure this conviction. This at least every unprejudiced person, from whatever standpoint he may stand, will have to concede, that the present arrangements are for the most part, and still far more than in most places of our old fatherland, a badly connected thing, neither half nor whole. When now Dr. Kliefoth, with special reference to Mecklenburg, testifies to us from his own experience that for several years already among the Lutheran congregations there the dissatisfaction with the disjointedness and disorder of public divine service, the longing for a fuller divine service, as also the readiness to accept the right remedy, has become ever more general