# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S124
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

124 Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

The more shameless and impudent the assertions set forth in it were in
favor of the alleged good right of the papacy and against the legitimacy
of the evangelical church, and the more the Jesuit gentlemen in it showed
themselves masters of bewildering false conclusions, the greater grew,
among many high-placed persons (who all too often were strangers to their
own religion and its history), the danger of being dazzled and letting
themselves be persuaded that it would be no worse counsel for the worldly
rulers than to re-enter the ranks of the so-called Catholic powers. Woe
to the Lutheran church, had it not still had faithful watchmen on its
battlements at that time! Such a one was our Cyprian. No other short work
against the papacy can be set beside his writing, let alone that any
other should surpass it. It is an ornament of our church. Well aware of
what he was thereby asserting, Cyprian himself writes in the preface: "My
book is irrefutable, seeing that I have drawn it, to the best of my
knowledge and conscience, from Holy Scripture and from such records as
the Roman church must either hold in honor or else must change its
principles." And so it is. In twenty-four chapters the author proves,
with irrefutable arguments, that the papacy has its foundation neither in
Scripture nor in the ancient church; how it arose and grew little by
little, and how ruinous it has become, among other things, for civil
society, and still is. In a second part of the work there follows, in
twelve chapters, a vindication of the Reformation and of the Lutheran
church. Whereas all too often polemicists, to the harm of the cause, pay
regard almost solely to their friends, Cyprian, far more, aims above all
to compel his opponents to assent, by striking them with their own
weapons. We therefore hold Cyprian's writing to be a work which, before
all other polemical works against the papacy, ought to be studied here in
America, where polemics against the Antichristian system, carried on
through the ignorance of the enemy — an ignorance all too customary and
unpardonable here, worn openly on the brow — often does more harm than
good. Of Cyprian's work Buddeus testifies in his Isagoge: "Everything in
it is grounded on the choicest and best-attested records; in particular,
the 17th chapter is worth reading, where Cyprian speaks of the origin of
the papacy." (p. 848.)

(To be continued.)