# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S78
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

78             A plea for the Augsburg Confession etc.

Many doctrines which up to now have not seemed particularly important to us might, after a while, come to be regarded by us as true treasures. In the present case, however, it is not so much a matter of private opinions as of the alteration of a public confession; if we were to alter it now, there might be no end of altering, to the great harm of our Church. We ought rather carefully and with prayer to examine the confessions of our fathers, and consider well that among us, their contemporaries, there is no one who could with honor sit in judgment against Luther and Melanchthon.

After these preliminary remarks, Pastor Mann proceeds to the individual points of doctrine which the mutilators of the Augsburg Confession put forward as errors.

"The Augsburg Confession approves the ceremonies of the Mass," so the authors of the "Outline" assert. Pastor Mann shows that when the Augsburg Confession, in Article 12, speaks of a celebration of the Mass in the evangelical churches, only the celebration of the Holy Supper is thereby meant, and that, according to Article 24, the confessors of the Augsburg Confession have done away with the Roman abuses connected with this Mass or celebration of the Supper — namely the teachings that bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, that the Holy Supper is a sacrifice for the living and the dead, and further the practices whereby the priest administers the Holy Supper without the congregation present, whereby he alone, and not the laity, receives the cup, and whereby all manner of processions and pomp are attached to the celebration. To be sure, Luther and his fellow believers retained, in the celebration of the Supper, a number of ceremonies which we perhaps no longer observe, but only such as are not contrary to God's Word, and this in agreement with the principle of evangelical freedom set forth in Article 8 of the Augsburg Confession, which belongs among the noblest ornaments of our confession. Luther himself, who as early as 1526 published a form of service under the title "German Mass," never thought of turning it into a law. The Augsburg Confession is thoroughly misrepresented when the authors of the Outline assert that it approves the ceremonies of the Mass.

The "Outline" calls the account given by the Augsburg Confession of the practice of private confession and absolution existing among the Evangelicals a false doctrine. This is the second charge. Against this, Pastor Mann shows, from Article 25 of the Augsburg Confession, that our Church does not mean by "private confession" the Roman auricular confession; rather, it counts that very practice among the Roman abuses, and rejects it. Nor does it recognize any priesthood in the sense of the Roman Church, but rather holds all believers to be priests of God, and when the preacher in the evangelical Church receives confession and speaks the absolution, he thereby does, in public office, what according to Matthew 18:18 every Christian can do privately, with the same comforting effect, to his neighbor in need of comfort. For the sake of the grave threat which God's Word pronounces against unworthy