# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S123
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library. 123

teaching of the Gospel he wished to die." Thereupon, into the hands of
those witnesses, he laid down this confession: "I have indeed never lived
in open sins and vices; I have also not made myself deserving of the
devil's kingdom; nevertheless I am still a sinner, and seek no
righteousness through my own works. But I know, and am certain, that
through the merit of my Savior I have obtained grace with God. I confess
and believe all that is written in God's holy Word and has been revealed
to me for my salvation. I accept the symbolical books of our church, and
subscribe to them, not quatenus, but quia, etc. I curse all atheism; I
curse all indifferentism; I curse all syncretism; I curse all fanaticism.
On this my confession I will live and die." This resolve of the dear man
was all the more important because the last part of his life fell in the
time in which that flood of ruin first poured itself out over our
Lutheran Zion in Germany, which finally all but wholly overwhelmed it. He
himself wrote to the Coburg senior of the ministerium, Erdmann Rud.
Fischer, *) in the year 1741: "I fear that after a hundred years we shall
have no visible Lutheran church. Atheism, naturalism, and fanaticism have
brotherly joined together for the destruction of our church." Cyprian's
zeal for orthodoxy is, moreover, all the less suspect since it was joined
in him with just as great an earnestness for the furtherance of a truly
Christian life, as is attested, among other things, by his untiring labor
for the introduction and strict exercise of church discipline — in which
this upright servant of God drew upon himself much enmity, especially
among persons of rank, whom he spared no more than others. **) As for the
work noted above against the papacy, it was composed by Cyprian because
in his time the Roman party had again begun to stir up great disturbances
in the German Empire — not only declaring null and void, in writings, the
rights granted to the Protestants in the peace treaties, but in many
places even employing military and police force to subject Protestant
territories once more to their episcopal jurisdiction. To this was added
that at that time not a few Protestant rulers had grown wavering in their
faith through the many Jesuit polemical writings then appearing.

*) It is the same man who published biographies of both Cyprian and
Johann Gerhard — the former in German (Leipzig 1749), the latter in Latin.

**) As evidence, the fine work of Cyprian serves: "Brief Report on
Church Orders. Coburg 1713." Quarto. Likewise the valuable book of the
same author: "The House Church, or Edifying Writings, Which May Be Used
for the Domestic Exercise of Godliness. Gotha 1739." Octavo. This latter
work Cyprian sent to the above-named Fischer with the words: "I am
sending you a little book which will displease all who are worldly
minded, but which will please you and the rest who are born of God. Never
have I so pleaded for divine help in the composition of a work of mine
(and, as I hope, obtained it) as with this small book."