# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From a Review, Etc.                    15

it makes itself out to be holy, believing, God-fearing, in order to dampen him with cunning. It bows down to the very tips of its shoes before the Redeemer and can scarcely muster words enough to extol him and the gospel; — but let you once become earnest with your confession of Christ and his Word, and then guard your skin against its spitting venom. For the pious, holy world does not vent its wrath on your Lord and Master — God forbid, him it honors far too highly; — nor on the Christian Church either, for that is exactly what it wants to be itself, — no, only on you, Cajus, Titus, Sempronius, and whatever else you resolute confessors of Christ are called; you it eyes with anger, but by no means on account of your Christian faith — only on account of your obstinacy, your passionate blindness, your troublemaking, and who can count and name all the "personal" snares it lays for the disciple in order to catch the Master? How can our highly esteemed church historian, given his resolve to be and remain "an earnest and steadfast, an ecumenical and irenic Lutheran, as long as there is breath stirring in him," ever escape "personal" persecution? For the world can only understand those Lutheran epithets as four grave "personal" charges against him (and against everyone else who professes them of himself). These four qualities form, after all, the basic character of the evangelical-Reformation past, and to vilify that with all one's might belongs to the innermost nature of the faith of the day. The whole legion of heads that do not even agree among themselves, let alone with the gospel and the Reformation, yet none the less, in heart-melting, believing good-naturedness, confess one and all together to the Augsburg Confession (of 1530 or of 1540, whichever one prefers) — this legion must surely shriek in unison when, into the frivolity of their religious murk, there falls the living testimony concerning the "earnestness" of the fathers, who did not permit a confession of faith to be treated as a weathervane, as a waxen nose, as a battle-standard of the discordantly-united Cretans, as a tail-tether of Samson's firebrand foxes, or anything of the kind; who, in particular, swore to the Augustana not with the reservation of one's own arbitrary interpretation, with the quatenus consentit cum pia persuasione nostra so familiar to our generation, but with the quia of holy Scripture, and likened it to a bell that becomes wholly worthless and unusable through a single crack. To treat matters of faith with earnestness, rigor, honesty, and fidelity to truth is something our contemporaries are simply not accustomed to; they hold these moral demands to be just as tiresome as they are superfluous, indeed even harmful to their piety. They think one must not take spiritual things all that precisely; whether Martin seeks salvation in faith in the gospel, Johann in faith in the hidden ways of providence, Ulrich in faith in his own reason and strength, Benedix in faith in the Church — that, they say, should not disturb religious unity, — are not all four "brothers in the faith" all the same! do not all four know how to speak so edifyingly of the way to life! In this, out of sheer spirit,