# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S264
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

264 Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

"Confessio Catholica" is concerned, it falls, after a proemium, into four parts. The proemium treats, 1, of the use to be derived from the work, which consists in this, that along the path taken, a) the truth is confirmed, b) the vain boast that the Roman church is infallible and united in faith is destroyed, c) the papists, who often appeal to the testimonies of Lutherans, are met with the same sword, d) the accusation that our church is a heretical and new one is refuted, and e) the question so often put to us, where our church was before Luther, is answered. In the second chapter of the proemium, the papists are then deprived of the pretexts under which they might deny the evidentiary force that lies in the testimonies drawn from Roman Catholic writers on behalf of the evangelical truth. In the third chapter, Gerhard then gives notice concerning some of the writers he cites in the work, so as to bring into the light the weight of their testimony. In the first part, there is treated, 1, the principle and the means of our truly catholic religion, and, 2, the principle and the means of the papal religion; in the second part, of the Word of God, of Christ, of the Pope, the councils, and the church; in the third, of the clerics, monks, laity, purgatory, of blessedness and the veneration of the saints, of the sacraments, of baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, and the mass; in the fourth, finally, of penance, extreme unction, ordination, and marriage, of the grace of the first man, of its loss and the state of sin, of grace in general and free will, of justification and good works. Under these headings, then, all the points in dispute between us and the Roman Catholics are treated by the method indicated above, and not only the dogmatic and moral points, but also all other controversial points of any significance. Thus the work contains, for example, its own chapters on the prophetic predictions of the work of the Reformation, on the causes that occasioned it, on the character of the instrument (Luther) that God made use of in it, on the tributes that members of the Roman church have themselves paid to ours, on the means by which Lutheranism has been spread, etc. The theses together with their ekthesis alone form an excellent dogmatics in nuce, not only a quintessence of the Loci theologici, but in many articles a completion of it. The various prefaces and dedications to the individual volumes contain, as exceedingly valuable additions, most interesting excursuses — for instance, the first dedication a historical excursus on the Waldensians, as an answer to the question where the Lutheran church was before Luther. We confess that, when we think of such works as the Harmonia Evangelica, the Loci theologici, the Examen Concilii Tridentini, and our Confessio Catholica, it seems to us that through these works the chief labor in the field to which they belong has now been done for all time