# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From a Review, Etc.                    17

...means of grace, know anything of the fact that the true, the classical Lutherans lived 1500 years before the Reformation; they do not know that the carpet-maker who stood before Emperor Nero was Lutherus ante Lutherum [a Luther before Luther] (the original of the Reformer), and that the Augustinian monk who answered for himself before Charles V was Paulus post Paulum [a Paul after Paul] (the copy of the Apostle); the original text of the Confession presented at Augsburg in 1530, which in their opinion has been lost, they seek in the German imperial archives — in vain, for Moses and Isaiah, Peter and John, together with their prophetic and apostolic brothers in office, have had it in their keeping to this very hour, and kept it safe even before Melanchthon was born and the Holy Roman Empire was founded. They do not know that the Lutheran Church has existed since the creation of the world, — nor that millions of people have lived on earth who never heard Luther's name spoken, never read a line of his, and yet were incomparably better Lutherans than many of those who constantly have this name in their mouths and can all but recite the whole of Walch by heart, — nor that in all other religions and confessions only that is true, Christian, and salutary which is Lutheran, while everything un-Lutheran, by contrast, is false, anti-Christian, and pernicious; — in short, they know only of a Lutheran sect that arose in the sixteenth century after the birth of Christ, but not of a Lutheran Church that has existed from the beginning, that exists everywhere that men teach, believe, and live evangelically, that is, in a Christian manner, and that, according to Christ's promise, will continue to exist, persecuted and oppressed but not overcome by the world, death, and hell, until the end of days, — they know nothing and have no notion whatsoever of the "ecumenical" Lutheranism to which Guericke professes himself, and which he demonstrates, through the entire course of church history — not, admittedly, for those born blind — to be the spiritual salt. For everyone who holds fast to the ecumenical character of his ancestral Lutheran faith, it is exceedingly comforting, encouraging, and strengthening, already in the first volumes now before us of the "Handbook," where there is as yet no talk at all of the Reformation, to meet nonetheless everywhere — even in the most degenerate periods, people, and phenomena of church history — figures who bear the genuinely Lutheran stamp on their brow, even if the sealing-wax is, understandably, not always of the same kind and quality as the Wittenberg sort. But what will the "Handbook," in this most important respect, be to the Lutheranism of 1817 to [18]30? Hardly more, one fears, than something incomprehensible, if not indeed a stumbling block. It is precisely this wretched state of affairs that makes me fear the open adversaries will exploit the "ecumenical Lutheran" all the more to Guericke's "personal" disadvantage. Were there standing behind our esteemed church historian a Lutheran host possessed of the old church's strength of faith, certainty of faith, and joy of faith, it would at least shield that ecumenical predicate from the reproach of being a mere idiosyncrasy. As things are, however, even the author's "irenic" disposition, precisely because it rests only on his ecumenical