# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 10 02_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

19

mind, I owe them neither the Word, nor the holy Sacraments, nor the faith, whereby alone this blessed change has been brought about.

P. To whom dost thou owe it, then?

C. A strange question! To whom else, but to my dear Savior, and His holy Christian Church. He it is who, as He says through the prophet Ezekiel, chap. 16., took me up as a poor worm lying in its blood and trodden down, and made me a member of His rich house, gave me life and salvation, and adorned and decked me inwardly and outwardly with great glory.

P. Thou mentionest just the 16th chapter of the prophet Ezekiel! How often have we read it together, when God, according to His great mercy, first opened our eyes, and converted us from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to Him, the living God! How must it be with thee now, my Charles, when thou readest the heavy complaints and the bitter reproaches which the LORD raises in the same chapter over and against His people, that it carried the riches and the glory which He had given it, as His beloved bride, to its lovers!

C. Thou grievest my heart! Well I know that I often fail, but thou judgest too severely! Knowingly and willingly I depart not from Him.

P. Thou doest nothing else by thy connection with the secret societies than that of which the LORD complains, and for which He threatens His people with heavy punishments. He hath redeemed thee from thy misery and wretchedness, and through His means of grace alone, in His holy Church, hath given thee spiritual life, salvation and glory; why then givest thou not the praise and the honor to Him who alone took shame and death from thee, and imparted to thee life and glory, yea, purchased it with His own heart's blood? Why turnest thou it to those to whom, by thine own confession, thou owest nothing, and who now, through thine ingratitude and thy shameful unrighteousness, adorn and plume themselves with the praise and splendor which belong to Him alone? That means indeed nothing else than to hang the glorious bridal ornament of the loving Bridegroom upon the lovers, and is a far more shameful thing than what thou hast so bitterly censured in young H...

C. Thou canst talk away like this a long while, if it please thee, but demand not that I should understand anything of it! Speak out plainly, of what new crime dost thou accuse me?

P. Bad enough, that such simple things have become to us Christians like Bohemian villages! Hast thou not just now, in a long rigmarole, made much boasting of your mighty love and charity? Do ye not paint and sing, write and trumpet of your mighty works of love, and thereby set the people gaping with mouth and nose? Hast thou not thyself said that in your societies the real Christian life of love first sprang up, of which the priests and the common crowd of Christians only chattered and heard? Hast thou not just uttered the blasphemy that these societies first put thee properly in a position to fulfil thy baptismal covenant? And yet thou must at the same time confess that these societies have given thee neither preaching nor baptism, whereby alone thou gottest the power and the life to be able to practice love, but Christ the LORD alone in His holy Church! Does that not mean, to tear from the head of the LORD Christ the crown of His glory, and to plunder His house, in order to make the lovers and their house great with it? Is there a more shameful robbery of the temple than that which the Christians of today commit with their thousandfold societies? Christ makes you fit and equips you for every good work, that ye, through His goodness, may show yourselves among the holy angels before His glorious countenance, and expects now of you that ye employ it all to His honor. But ye go off with these powers given you by Him, and set up, God knows what societies, and make them great and glorious before the world, and the LORD must stand there poor, forsaken and despised, and His house desolate and a mockery of men. Why do ye not spend your life to the glory of the LORD and of His Church? Why do ye not practice your works of love in the Church and from the Church, as her sons and daughters? Then the glory would fall to where it came from, and to where it belongs. Behold, it was said formerly, in all the contempt and bitterest hatred of the heathen and of the world, Behold the Christians! these are the people! they show in deed and truth by their love that another spirit is in them, and that they are God's children, who according to their confession works all things in them. Now it is said: Behold the Odd Brethren, or the Red Men, and other society people! These are the people! there one can see love! and Christ becomes a mockery of the world, and His Church, in and upon which He will reveal His glory, a fancy of old women and silly weaklings. She can do nothing more! If a man wants to become a proper hero of virtue, wants to leave off drinking, or to become a reformed convict, or to give up his dissoluteness, or to practice love and charity, the Church cannot help him to it; he must join a society, then he is and can be everything; the Church one hardly needs any more; the societies, they accomplish it, and the Devil laughs at it! For that is his only aim and his satanic joy, to dishonor Christ and His house; if he succeeds in this, it is all one to him where in the world the glory falls, if only it is taken from our King and LORD. To Him belong all powers and to Him alone is due all glory; but ye indeed take both from His hand, and hang it upon strangers, to make them great with it! O the infinite misery, and the blindness and hardness of heart, which sees and feels Him not!

C. Now for the first time I understand thee; and I must confess that in that light I have indeed never regarded the present society system. But what is one to do? Is not the Church so wholly decayed that she can hardly accomplish anything more? Where is the old discipline still exercised? where can it be exercised at all? and where is the love? Many a member of the Church might perish in hunger and distress before help would come to him from the congregation. Who still troubles himself about the poor and needy? Where, in these days, is anything still done to the honor of God, and for the welfare of mankind, except by the societies?

P. And yet these same societies must, for every truly good work, take the powers from the Church; for this remains fixed: Without me ye can do nothing! John 15, 5. Seest thou not the dreadful contradiction which runs through the whole doings and life of the society Christians?

C. But thou must also confess that the societies were first called forth by the decay of the Church and have become almost necessary!

P. Through the pride of human wisdom they are called forth, which in its puffed-up state always imagines it can run before it has learned scarcely to walk, and which yet has never accomplished anything right in divine things, and can accomplish nothing, because it follows its imagined good opinions, and not the Word of God! And as concerns especially your secret societies, Christianity has just as much to do with their tendency as the sun with the glimmer of rotten wood!

C. Say what thou wilt; the Church had for once forgotten her glorious calling, to be the mother and nurse also of the bodily poor, and so the societies had to take her place, if the need and misery were really to be relieved; and thou doest verily wrong to the founders of our societies, as to themselves, when thou deniest them Christian love, for only the hearty compassion with the great need of poverty, and the desire to relieve it, has called them forth. And thou must yet concede that infinite sorrow is relieved, and many a tear dried, yea, unspeakable comfort and help is brought by our societies into the huts of poverty, where the Church passes by cold and inactive, like the priest and Levite in the Gospel.

P. The last is not true. The Church, that is, the true believers, do not pass by the poverty and misery of mankind, but through the crowd of the unbelievers, which in