# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 05 14_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146

believing, faithful and sensible housewife and helpmeet. Of the five children born to him in this marriage two died early; two sons and a daughter survived him and will, as we hope of God, help to preserve their blessed father's memory among us. For the first seven or eight years of his ministry the dear Löber labored, as at that time, and probably still now, many other younger believing preachers do, in a less bright light of evangelical knowledge. The far-sounding watchman's call of the venerable Harms in his 95 Theses for the jubilee year 1817, early acquaintance with Dr. Luther's writings, the stimulus of the new jubilee year 1830, for which he published in print a memorial of the Augsburg Confession, according to the notice of the Berliner Kirchenzeitung "a lively voice even from the Altenburg region, where otherwise spiritual death reigns"; all these voices of awakening had indeed already brought him onto the path to the jewel of the pure evangelical doctrine; yet the influences of Pietism, Herrnhutism, and the false spirit of Union, all of which at his first new awakening to spiritual life had been taken up by him without his knowing it, had not yet been sufficiently recognized by him in their contradiction to the pure Gospel and been eradicated again. This second purification, the turning away also from the subtler unbelief, was wrought by faithful God in our Löber through the living and powerful testimony of younger friends who had attached themselves to Pastor Stephan at Dresden, and through acquaintance with Stephan himself. He could not long resist the power of the truth; he examined, prayed, searched, and when the brighter light had now also dawned upon him, he put away what appeared to him not in accord with it in doctrine and life. To be sure, he too had erred in the person of Stephan, in so far as he took him, with all his adherents, for the one brightest and last light in this age of the world, and therefore also accepted at the same time his false doctrines concerning the power of the ministry even in worldly matters and concerning the Church, which as a visible one was confined to Stephan's surroundings; but nevertheless a progress in the knowledge of the truth had also been wrought in him. In consequence of this attachment to Stephan he emigrated with them, bound by an erring conscience, resigning his office without dismissal, in the autumn of the year 1838, arrived, by God's almighty protection, safe and sound through the torrid zone, over the wide Atlantic Ocean to New Orleans, to the astonishment and horror of his friends and relatives left behind, and arrived equally well preserved in St. Louis in January 1839. In May of the same year, in consequence of his sermon on Sunday Rogate, his eyes were first opened about Stephan by voluntary confessions. Now began a new purification, which lasted for several years. The manifold bodily affliction which he had to endure in the time of the first settlement, severe illnesses, the death of his sister and of many other friends and parishioners who had emigrated with him, in addition the inward siftings and struggles in the new congregations in Perry County, which brought with them the complete sweeping out of the Stephanistic leaven, completed this purification, and it soon showed itself in noble fruits. When he had well recognized the sin of his abandonment of office, he laid his ministry at Altenburg before the LORD into the hands of the congregation, through which, however, the LORD at once conferred it upon him again. He asked his former sovereign for forgiveness in writing and soon received it in the most benevolent terms. From the three errors of Stephanism, a false doctrine of the ministry and of the Church, as well as the false understanding of evangelical liberty which had become practice under Stephan's rule, he renounced them in a special writing, which he also sent, signed by the other brethren in the ministry, to the Christian friends in Germany. Thus he had been made elect in the furnace of affliction, Is. 48, 10., had come through fire and water, but was also brought out again and refreshed by the hand of the LORD. Ps. 66.

Now the LORD began again to build and to plant through him. Diligently and faithfully he taught, in company with his voluntary assistant, Mr. Brohm, now pastor at New York, and after his departure with Mr. Rector Gönner, as also with Pastor Keyl at Frohna, Mr. Schoolteacher Winter and Mr. Nitschke, the few pupils of the preachers' seminary at Altenburg, which was founded also through his cooperation, and undertook therein the instruction in exegesis, dogmatics, homiletics, pastoral theology, logic, psychology, the German language, aesthetics and rhetoric, geography and world history, even in drawing. The Lutheran congregation at St. Louis, acknowledging this his manifold labor performed without any fixed salary, expressed this by gifts of thanks and the bestowal of the title of Professor. After the departure of Pastors Walther, Bürger and Keyl from Perry County he had also taken over the care of the congregations at Dresden, Selitz, Frohna and Wittenberg. He lived to see the joy of seeing two of his pupils, Pastors Biltz and Müller, enter the ministry; his elder son he heard in the year before his death not only preach, but saw him also already designated by the congregation of Frohna as his assistant; his younger son also he saw growing up to his joy under his own instruction and that of the assistants. For three years in succession he helped, by undertaking distant and costly journeys and taking part in the deliberations, to initiate, found and strengthen the synodical union of the Lutheran Church in the West of the United States, and thus served with his gifts now also in wider circles. In August of the year 1847 the first general preachers' conference was held in his hospitable house, which will remain in unforgettable remembrance with all who took part in it. At the synodical assembly at St. Louis in the year 1848 he delivered an excellent sermon on the care of souls, which has already been communicated in the "Lutheraner."

When the blessed man had now completed his fiftieth year, he felt the gradual decline of his bodily strength and wished to be relieved of the heavy work at the seminary, in order to be able to attend better to his pastoral office in the congregations. He was also deeply shaken and moved by the outbreaks of the general revolution in Europe in the year 1848, as well as by the news of the death of his elder brother occasioned by it. On the other hand, faithful God granted him a great joy in the same year, when he publicly blessed his only beloved daughter in holy matrimony with the cantor of the Lutheran congregation at St. Louis, Mr. Theodor Bünger, in his spacious and beautiful church at Altenburg, consecrated three years before. In May of the year 1849 he undertook, in company with the writer of this, the ordination of his brother in the ministry who preceded him so soon, the blessed Buttermann, at Chester. Ah, it was the last journey that we made together! Soon after his return the cholera broke out also in Frohna and Altenburg. He did not flee then like a hireling, but spent his strength in the hot season in visiting the sick and dying, and spoke over and over again at the grave words of comfort and exhortation. —

After the Lord of the Church had thus accomplished through him all the service for which He had endowed and called him; after He had, in Germany, in some high families, through him pastured some of His lambs and had let a powerful testimony of the truth be given; after He had, in the Duchy of Altenburg, in the land where the bones of his fathers rest, in this former hereditary land of Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast, John Frederick the Magnanimous, and Ernest the Pious, let the light of the Gospel shine once more for fourteen years also through his confession in preaching and walk; after in the whole newly reviving Lutheran Church of Germany many souls had been counseled, instructed, warned and comforted by him orally and in writing; after He had borne him on eagles' wings over the wild wide sea and had let His Church be planted and built in the primeval forest wilderness of this distant West also through our Löber: now the LORD willed to give him rest from his labor.

In the midst of his hot day's work the last illness overtook him on the 1st of August, a chest fever, which soon passed into a mortal nervous fever. His last sermon, like the farewell address of the holy Paul, Acts 20., was on the Gospel of the false prophets. His last examination he held on the evening blessing, as if he had himself for a blessed falling asleep