# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

46 The Church Informatorium.

...everyone." That is, according to the testimony of the Holy Spirit, now the Missourian future."

What sort of a god, and which numbered "holy spirit," this may be that has flung the sanctity of such speech into the mud of slander and of crude mockery — he is certainly not the one who forbids us to cast pearls before swine. Let the writer of this blasphemy, however, if he has such good confidence in the truth of his dread-inspiring prophecy as he gives us to understand in these words, wait for the time to come. The curse he once sent our way would truly have been enough. Is he so impatient that his god still makes no preparations at all to press the seal upon his prophet's forehead — the seal that might make him terrible in the eyes of the Missourian preachers?

We indeed must first see signs and wonders, and even that does not satisfy us: the doctrine must first be pure. Otherwise, according to Luther's teaching, we may listen to no prophet who, without a call, wishes to make hell hot for us.

Our loving counsel, therefore, is that the editor of the Informatorium, together with his co-workers, instead of uselessly burning powder in this belligerent season, might practice the doctrine of the call a little and take upon themselves the trouble of putting the second and eighth commandments into practice.

We pray and hope, so long as it is called today, that God may put the devil's cunning to shame in the Reverend Synod of Buffalo, and may open the eyes of its members to the misery into which they willfully plunge themselves if, before a spirit such as pervades the Informatorium, they will not cease to bow the knees of their hearts. But under the present circumstances, fellowship with such people is forbidden us, until they furnish thorough proof that they have become sober, free of the devil's snare — of him who has said:

"But if a prophet presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die."

"And if thou shalt say in thine heart: How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?"

"When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, and the thing does not follow, nor come to pass, that is the word which the LORD hath not spoken; the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him." Deut. 18:20–22.

R. Röbbelen.