# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 01 22_S84
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

84

changes in the world have no higher purpose than to make way everywhere for the Gospel and the kingdom of Christ. Since, then, it has in this way become ever easier in our days to send heralds of the Gospel to all zones of the earth, so the debt of Christians to carry on the work of the conversion of the heathen with all zeal grows with every day. Since God in our days is visibly hastening to bring the fulness of the Gentiles into His kingdom of grace, Christians are now doubly bound to use this time, now broken in upon us, of a great visitation of grace, for the bringing of the lost sheep into Christ's sheepfold, ever more faithfully and carefully. And since, especially, even in the midst of the land which we inhabit, messengers to the heathen are laboring who can continue only if we open our liberal hands, how should we excuse ourselves one day before God if we had done nothing toward the completion of the most important and most blessed work that is entrusted to us as Christians, and which these messengers carry on! O how many thousand Christians would have thanked God with tears of joy three hundred years ago, if so glorious an opportunity had been offered them to contribute a mite toward the conversion of the poor blind heathen!

Yet, my beloved, there have been not only times when Christians had no opportunity to take part in this work; there have also been times, and there are still now, when thousands of zealous Christians had no means for it. O how many Christians there may be at present who, burning with zeal to come to the help of their lost brethren according to the flesh, being pressed by bitter poverty, cannot spare even the smallest contribution thereto! O how many a householder there may be, especially in our old German fatherland, ever drained by war and revolution and other grievous afflictions, who today eats his pitiful morsel of bread with his family in tears, without knowing whence, in these winter months still remaining, food and covering shall come for him and his hungering and half-naked little ones! How gladly would many of these, poorest in body, offer something for their brothers and sisters still poorer in soul, but has nothing save a heart that sighs for them. With us it stands otherwise here. God has led us here into a good land, into a land of great earthly blessing. All have here what they need; most have here even something more; and some see themselves as if overwhelmed with blessing in temporal goods. O let us consider to what end this blessing has been given us! Let us not forget: we have not received this blessing to let it lie dead in the chest; or to put it out at usury and draw interest upon interest from it; or to procure for ourselves a good, comfortable, soft, luxurious life; or to hang our body with wretched finery, and to build splendid palaces and to fill and adorn our rooms with ostentatious furnishings; or to extend our business endlessly; or to buy up one tract of land after another, and the like. No, what we have is not our property, with which we might do as we please. Our goods are God's goods, our purse God's purse; we are to be only stewards over them, and God's Word is the book wherein God has recorded to whom we have to make payments out of God's purse. Above all it is the Child JESUS, who still lies poor, wrapped in wretched swaddling-clothes, in the manger, to whom we, with the wise men from the East, are to open our treasures and before whom we are to lay down not only the myrrh of our repentance and the frankincense of our prayer, but also something of the gold of our temporal possessions. For the little Child JESUS comes to us in individual ones of His poor members, in His poor Church and in His poor lost sheep out of the flock of heathendom, and begs of us a gift out of the alms-chest of God, which is entrusted to us for the short time of our earthly life for faithful administration. What? should the Christ-child beg an alms of us, and we would refuse Him? What would we then do other than the Bethlehemites, who turned Him out into the cold dark stable, while they diverted themselves in bright warm rooms? —

Yet One more reason I must name to you why we are to recognize the holy work of missions as a debt especially for us here. For we inhabit here a land from which the heathen aboriginal inhabitants still remaining have partly been driven out in the past, and partly are driven ever farther. We live here among heathen, upon whose fathers, shortly after the discovery of this continent, a little more than 350 years ago, men who called themselves Christians committed the most revolting cruelties that ever the sun shone upon. Among other things, in that time some 15 million Indians were cruelly murdered like game of the forest within ten years by the Roman Catholic Spaniards. Not to mention the dreadful offences which nominal Christians have given these heathen at all times to this hour, and still give, and thereby have for the most part brought upon themselves the hardening of the same against the Christian faith. Have not we, therefore, Christian inhabitants of this land, an immeasurable debt to pay to those wretched ones? Ah, woe to all citizens of these States who will do nothing that the comfort of the Gospel and its eternal blessings may be brought to the unhappy heathen natives of this western land! We dwell upon their mountains and in their valleys, we feed our herds upon their prairies, we cut our timber in their forests, we travel upon their rivers: how we should be terrified one day, when they accuse us before God on that day, and we, set over against them before God's judgment seat, should hear from their mouth: "Here stand they, our enemies; from the earthly fatherland which we possessed they have driven us out, but the way to Thy Father's house, O God, which they knew, they have not shown us. Our temporal goods they have taken from us, our blood they have shed, and our souls they have offended, and the eternal blessings which Thou hadst entrusted to them they have not only themselves trodden under foot, but also begrudged to us. LORD, avenge, avenge what they have done to us!"

O my dear friends, let us then, though ever so many forget their debt, be mindful of the same and take care that for our poor Indian brethren the bright star of the Word of God be kindled which now shines upon us. Let us not be harder than even a bloodthirsty Herod, who directed the heathen wise men from the East to Bethlehem to the Christ-child. Let us consider that even One soul is worth more than the whole world; for the world will pass away with all its glory, but the souls of men are imperishable, and a soul converted to Christ is eternally blessed in the beholding of God. Suppose, then, that by all the sacrifices we bring to the holy cause of missions only One soul were won, what a rich reward should we then have reaped for it! Yea, what would it be if we had even given all our goods and possessions, yea, all our blood and life, for the rescue of even only One soul? It would be nothing, nothing in comparison with this, that God Himself has purchased each one with His own blood. Acts 20, 28. Come then! God grows not weary of doing us good; we also will not grow weary of doing good to our brethren. Though we may belong not to the rich of this world, but rather to the poor, yet we belong to the poor to whom the Gospel is preached, to whom, therefore, God has given more than to all the rich of this world; therefore let us gladly lay down a mite also from our graced and blessed poverty. But let us also not despise our small gift, which appears like a drop with which one would quench a world standing in fire; it is the same to God whether He helps by little or by much; the smaller our earthly gift is, so much the more and the more fervent prayers let us add to it, and God's blessing will be exceeding abundant.

Praised be the glorious name of the LORD from the tongues of all peoples, for ever and ever. Amen.

Why Do We Confess Ourselves to the Evangelical Lutheran Church?*)

*) This is the tract already promised, of the Strasburg Ev. Lutheran Tract Society, which Pastor Horning founded. Ed.

This question sounds narrow-hearted, and many a one who hears it suspects an answer with which he cannot agree. To speak of a "Lutheran Church," and that in a time when men talk of nothing but progress, of forsaking the old, of paving the way for new ecclesiastical conditions