# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S188
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Church News. 188

...Lutherans of America! Even the magnanimous, learned Reformed come to the tenderest aid of your stupidity. Now, despite your lack of your own "insight," you cannot go astray —), "that they thereby give themselves captive under the old yoke of the Formula of Concord and load the Old Lutherans upon themselves as drivers — he ought indeed to realize what, in the end, the consequences of such a delusion will be! The new Platform movement would thereby truly not be struck upon the head, but rather all the more helped onto its feet, and given a legitimacy which it could never before claim." (A curious counsel! We are, then, supposed to subscribe our own confession itself only conditionally, so that those who have already done this through their Platform may not get onto their feet! Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes! [I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts!]) — In the number of May 23, the "Lutheran Observer" of Dr. Benj. Kurtz, too, has finally spoken out concerning the proposed free Lutheran conference; how? is easy to guess. To communicate something of it to our readers, the number in question says: "The object (of the conference) is, if we understand it rightly, to unite and consolidate the symbolical Lutherans more completely, and then to put the American Lutherans formally and solemnly on trial and perhaps to excommunicate them ... And yet there are among us those who think there is no cause to raise an alarm over this; that this controversy concerning Old Lutheranism is unnecessary, etc. We are of a substantially different opinion, and think that those who say, "'Peace, peace, there is no danger,'" are the persons who are in error, while others will later thank us that we sounded the alarm in advance." — How the Buffalo Synod may think about the conference is likewise not hard to guess. A writer in the "Informatorium" says: "One must justly fear that only selfish and ambitious purposes are being pursued by this ... On the contrary, he (Walther) appears, through these conferences, to be seeking only a strengthening of his party against the Synod of Buffalo, and an opportunity to spread his erroneous (!) doctrines of church, ministry, ban, and Christian church discipline, and to win new adherents in the various synods." The writer further says that the Buffalo Synod could confer on doctrine with the members of the Missouri and the New York Synods only if the latter synods would first undo the wrong which they had committed against the Synod in practice. The reader sees: these are the old suspicions (which, to be sure, will soon melt away) and the old principles — that first life, and then doctrine, must be reformed; that one must first be condemned, and only then be tried — which the gentlemen of the Buffalo Synod bring forward once more. May God have mercy on his poor Church, and himself show a way out to a general peace with those who are of the truth! For our part, we cannot depart from the conviction that it must go according to the prophet's, or rather God's, order: "Love truth and peace!" We wish gladly to come to an agreement with those who now come to meet us with the same confession of faith, and gladly to forget the injuries we may formerly have suffered from them. For the change in life follows from the change in doctrine, not the other way around.

Romanizing Lutherans. How friendly the Romanists feel toward these Lutherans, and how much the still not entirely abandoned struggle of these Lutherans against the Papacy contradicts that friendliness in the eyes of the Romanists, is evident from the Munich Historical-Political Papers, that organ of the most extreme Ultramontanes, in which, among other things, it says of these Lutherans in the first number of last year: "And yet, they forge our weapons, and we understand their language as our own! The distress of the age and of men's spirits has forced upon them the question most dangerous to their own position; they torment themselves over the concept of the church and the ministry, and they will have to torment themselves over it all the more, the more sharply the masses of both the negative and the positive Union set themselves against them. But it is, in the end, an intellectual despair, arising by natural necessity, out of which, amid these contradictions, there is only one rescue ... In truth, had Luther carried their view of the church and the ministry in his heart, then