# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S62
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

62 Miscellaneous Church News.

hand is the most essential part, and yet the mechanism itself must be entirely sound and in correct working order, if the hand is to render its service — so it stands with the whole compages (framework) of the heavenly doctrine of salvation. If one continually presses so upon a sensitive feeling of the power of Christ's blood, it ends at last in something affected, in that one person takes another as a model, and what the latter says the former at length manages to produce by his own effort." (Same work, p. 523.) Finally Bengel briefly characterizes the Herrnhuter with these words: "Thus, out of the whole doctrine of the Godhead there came to be the single item concerning Christ, and out of the whole doctrine concerning Christ the single article concerning his suffering — as it affects the senses the most — and out of the whole order of salvation the blood-feeling was taken out." (P. 9.) That Bengel's portrayal still holds true today is shown by the above citation.

California. In the "Luth. Obs.," a Mr. A. H. Myers of Alameda in California writes, under date of Nov. 19, 1855, that almost every other denomination, German as well as English, has its missionaries in this land — only not the Lutherans!

A Mission Society in Debt. In a circular, the administrative board of the Mission Society of the Episcopal Methodist Church reports, among other things, the following: "The mission bills that will fall due before the conferences assemble this year, together with our fund's present debt, amount to $45,000. If we compare the income of 1854 with that of 1855, we find a deficit of $31,000. If this deficit is not covered by the time of the next mission committee's meeting, on Nov. 10, 1856, we shall have to reduce the mission appropriations for the coming year so significantly that some of our missions will have to be discontinued and the missionaries recalled." (The reference here is not so much to the needs of the heathen mission as to those of the so-called home mission.) Since a member of the Methodist community now gives, on average, 25¼ cents annually, Mr. Nast in the "Apologete" makes the following remark on the above: "Were the members of the Methodist Church to lay their finery and trinkets, their gold and pearl jewelry, upon the altar, they could easily give $1.00 instead of the average 26 cents per member annually for missions." — We share this not out of malicious pleasure, but as a sign of the times, and as a warning and encouragement to us Lutherans as well.

Roman Broad-Mindedness. In the New York "Kath. K.-Zeitung," a correspondent writes, in the issue of Jan. 17, 1856, in an essay intended to set forth the true meaning of Cyprian's dictum, Extra ecclesiam est nulla salus (outside the church there is no salvation), the following: "Socrates, the sagacious heathen, I should miss among the lambs, when the Good Shepherd leads us home over the ruins of the transitory!" — "Those who in good faith hold their error to be the truth .. the devout, truth-thirsting, conscientious Protestant, who had the misfortune to know nothing of your truth" (the writer here addresses Christ declamatorily), "of your institutions, of your means — him you ought to turn away, you who were even gracious to a Canaanite woman?" — From this one sees, in the first place, how the papists lie into their own conscience when they otherwise profess the belief that salvation is to be found only in the "Catholic" Church, and that only the true faith, which belongs to them alone, saves. In their hearts, meanwhile, lives the conviction that all this is not so; that man can be saved in any religion, provided only he has not become convinced of the particular excellence of the papacy and nevertheless remained apart from it. — Another lesson to be drawn from that utterance is this: that he who admits that outside the visible Lutheran Church too there are children of God who will be saved has by no means thereby proven that he does not "popify" in his doctrine of the Church. That lies in something quite different. Surely no one in the world will easily be so mad as to believe in earnest that precisely he and those who hold with him alone will be saved. — Incidentally, it always astonishes us that Mr. Oertel, who so gladly plays the role of a strictly orthodox Catholic, has taken up that essay, thereby betraying so plainly that he, together with his correspondent (Father W. of Utica, N.Y.), at bottom believes nothing, and only for some reason or other champions the papal religion and seeks thereby to make proselytes. Presumably such