# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 08 21_S204
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

204

384. 445, and compare them with a quite old hymn-book, then you will be astonished, and it will not occur to you to say that there is not much difference. The people who say so do not know what is of the Spirit of God, therefore they talk so unskillfully at random. Were it not for time and trouble, I would show you in each hymn cited what has all been lost in them through the alteration. Only one thing will I communicate to you here, namely what our Herr Pastor said of the hymn No. 276. He said thus: "In the old unaltered hymn one sees at each verse the first word so bright and large, and these are the golden buttons on the coat, taken out of the pure gold of the precious Word of God. There they stand one after another down the line: Commit — To the LORD — Thy — Way — And — Hope — In — Him — He — Will — Well — Bring to pass. This saying, says he, is the fundamental thought of the whole hymn, and that it may strike everyone at once in the eye, the highly favored singer of God, Paul Gerhardt, adorned each verse with a little word of this saying. But now let one open the hymn in the present hymn-book — almost all of them have the newfangled tailors cut away, the fine golden buttons, and in their place have patched in wooden ones, overspun with a little frippery, or even mere old, worn-out hooks, as if it were an Anabaptist smock." And concerning the old hymns in general, in comparison with the altered ones, he said lately: "The old ones have flowed from the heart, the new ones from the head, and what comes from the heart goes to the heart; therefore the old ones make one warm about the heart, but with the new ones one can now and then shiver a little. In the heart sits life, therefore everything lives and moves in the old hymns, where, to be sure, it does not go without many a side-leap, and one step also is not like the other; in the head, on the contrary, sits the understanding, who has in one hand a measuring-rod and in the other a great knife and makes a face like a reckoning-master, and applies his measuring-rod, and what goes beyond it, that he cuts off unmercifully with his knife, and where anything seems to him too short, there he patches on, and when one then looks at it by the light, Herr Understanding has on the one side cut off the life with his cold knife, and on the other side has made a patchwork, and has, with respect to say it, in his wisdom spoiled everything." That, I think, he has hit off quite well.

The second and last thing, however, that I still wanted to say is this, that in this hymn-book not one hymn by Luther is to be found, and yet it is supposed to be called a Lutheran hymn-book! Yes, not even this: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, etc.," which I have seen even in Reformed hymn-books in Germany. What do you say to that? Here one can indeed once more say nothing else than that it is a book for all sorts of people, only not for a believing and faithful Lutheran. But if at last you hold up to me that No. 445 is surely by Luther, I answer you quite simply: Luther's name stands indeed above it, but the hymn itself, as it is there, Luther did not make; such a patchwork Luther did not compose. Just hold Luther's hymn, which begins the very same way, beside this one, and you will soon say that it is a sin to set the name of Luther on the forehead of this hymn. But I must also confess that it is the first time in this hymn-book that it has occurred to me that such a newfangled tailor has ventured upon Luther's hymns. You know, Jacob, in our Bavarian hymn-book there were many hymns by Luther, but they all remained unaltered.

I should only wish, in closing, that I may not have written all in vain to you. But what it has wrought in you, you will, I hope, soon report to me in a letter, and if the merciful God has opened your eyes, then I shall not regret my trouble. Be greeted with your family.

Your
Andreas.

Der Weyl'sche Kirchenbote.

In number 10 of the above-named paper a garrulous Herr Thuisko had once more, as he himself calls it, chatted, and thereby with his loquacious tongue made himself guilty, to be sure, of no small sins against the eighth commandment. But since he had begun the matter so very clumsily and had laid his ignorance and malice against us Old Lutherans too openly to the day, we thought we need not take further notice of his prattle, so as not at the end to make the vain gentleman still vainer, who fills whole pages of a church-paper (?) with his chatter.

But it was not enough for Herr Weyl that Thuisko, in real, though as it should seem pretended ignorance, had not only raised the question: "What do the learned gentlemen (the Old Lutherans) want with their Old-Lutherdom?" but had previously already answered it to the effect that they undertook to split in the middle the Wittenberg monk, Dr. Martinus Lutherus (understand — if it is anyhow to be understood — that they wanted to wrest from the New-, that is, False-Lutherans, half of Luther and to draw to themselves the one half of Luther and of Lutherdom, as if we, precisely, were not avowed enemies of the lamentable half-measures of our time, and as if they possessed even the half, to say nothing of the whole, which alone is true Lutherdom). In number 12 of the K.-B. the answer to that question is therefore set forth by a Herr K. still further in sum, to the effect that the Old Lutherans wanted nothing less than to lead the people to Rome, as Herr Weyl had already found out earlier with great acuteness and, as a watchman of Lutheran Zion, had called out into the world. Since, however, he has said not a syllable, most prudently, in reply to that telling answer to the question: "Does the old Lutherdom lead to Rome?" which was given years ago already in the Lutheraner, since he further has before him our synodical constitution with its unreserved confession of all our Symbolical Books and knows that it is a holy earnest with us in this confession, as he could also perceive sufficiently in the dispute over his falsified Hübner, and himself remarked with a side-thrust at the stiffly orthodox Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's Supper: so you ask fairly, dear reader, for the grounds and proofs which have been adduced for so grave an accusation. Well, they consist in this, that Herr K., a former Catholic, relates a conversation with an unnamed Old Lutheran preacher, from which he, and indeed not even from the words cited by him, but by the tone of the voice, by certain gestures, smiling, nodding of the head, etc., has come to the loving conclusion that not only that pastor must be a secret Papist, but that in general this disguised serpent (of secret Jesuitism and Romanism) has crept in among the Old Lutherans, and threatens to ensnare all with its magical charms, wherefore it is high time to sound an alarm, and to arouse the attention of those who still have the welfare of the Church at heart. — In truth, again a telling proof that Herr Weyl and his associates are concerned only with casting suspicion upon the Old Lutherans, not with honest combat and conclusive proofs. Would that these people might at last recognize that by such practices they only make their own cause bad, only uncover their impotence and nakedness, as they have indeed already done by this, that they, and not, as Thuisko erroneously supposes, we ourselves, have given us the name Old Lutherans, in which there lies the acknowledgment that we are not going toward Rome — for the old Lutherans, as is well known, went out from apostate Rome, — but that we want to return to the good old Lutheran doctrine, to the old, approved, Lutheran Bible-Christianity. Would that they would take the field against us on the ground of the Scripture and of our Scriptural Confessions, if they believe themselves called to protect the Church from the danger which, as they assert, is to threaten it from our side. But there they would indeed first have to study our Confessional writings, and, since they do want to be Lutherans, also honestly agree with them, or, if they cannot do that, at least cease to call themselves Lutheran and to brand us faithful Lutherans as a sect. Then Herr K. also would learn what he admittedly has not known, that the Lutheran Church truly, on the ground of the Scripture, to which she, and she alone, unconditionally submits herself, the true, essential presence of the body and blood of Christ under bread