# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S284
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

284 Miscellaneous Church News.

...were permitted to possess, churches with towers and bells have already arisen in a number of places.

The Lutherans within the Union. The Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung writes: "In Prussia, on occasions that have arisen, the principle has been stated that men of a strictly confessional bent may not be admitted to certain positions, because they might estrange the minds of the young from the union."

Baptist Martyrdom. A Baptist preacher has been sentenced by the court at Aurich to three months in the workhouse, because he had said in a sermon: "Baptism and confirmation are works of the devil and elements of Satan." — What lamenting will there now again be among the Baptist gentlemen over the grievous sufferings they must supposedly endure for Christ's sake! — We have just now read the remark of Dr. Hengstenberg in this year's preface to the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung: "— — There remain only a few isolated cases of alleged persecution of the Baptists, in which closer investigation will mostly show that the actual source of the intolerance is to be sought in this sect itself, and that the intervention was called forth by their own presumptuous encroachments. Indeed, even abroad, intolerance is not seldom found on quite a different side from that which is accused of it. When a colporteur harangues those coming out of the church on the steps of one of the cathedrals of Belgium and distributes tracts among them, then he has provoked the blows he receives for it, and the source of the intolerance is to be sought in him. We learn that, unfortunately, such provocations on the evangelical side are not uncommon in France either."

Bunsen's "Signs of the Times." On the occasion of the latest piece of hackwork by a man formerly celebrated — even in America (by Dr. Schaff in the "Kirchenfreund") — as a pathbreaker of a new church era, the "Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung" writes, among other things, the following: "Whoever knows more closely the earlier writings of Privy Councillor Bunsen, especially his "Future of the Church," could not for a moment doubt that solid foundations were lacking in him, and that he thus belonged to the great number of "creatures of the moment," whose further development depends on mere accident." The "Signs of the Times" are "two volumes filled with the east wind of mere phrases, with words behind which there is nothing, with empty breath and vanity — two volumes in which nothing is proven and from which nothing can be learned, a work which, viewed from the standpoint of scholarship, proves just as worthless as it does from that of faith." The reviewer goes on to show that the book, like the "Hippolytus," preached nothing other than naked pantheism; of the attacks on the Lutheran Church occurring in it, he says that they "can only be, for it, in the highest degree honorable." Bunsen says, among other things: "Lutheran (!) churchdom is the pettiest and most barren churchdom in history."

"The Darmstadt Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung," so writes Hengstenberg, "has now set up a Christian program. But little of the upright nature that is in Christ is to be sensed in it. One sees everywhere in the background the old rationalist standing, who knows how to bend and to accommodate himself, but who will never give himself over to a complete dying. Sometimes one wishes a Röhr and his fellows back again. Then, at least, one knew with whom one had to deal, and might hope that a Saul would become a Paul, whereas the lukewarm hirelings who now so often confront us offer, humanly considered, little hope — although, indeed, nothing is impossible with the Lord."

Dr. Ebrard in the Rhenish Palatinate (Bavaria) recently declared (according to Hengstenberg's report) that in his office and preaching calling he submits, with a free and good conscience, to the limits which the legal provisions of the Palatine union draw around the coming forward of confessional points of difference. "Only for this reason," he writes, "am I able to eat this Church's bread. It is understood, however, that I have not thereby sold my subjective-theological" (strictly Reformed on the doctrine of the Supper) "private conviction, and that the right remains unimpaired to me to assert the same in scholarly theological writings." Hengstenberg remarks on this: "It does not sit well with us that, in place of the: 'I believe, therefore I speak,' of the psalmist and of the apostle, there should now step, even if only within a limited sphere, the: I eat bread, therefore I speak, or I keep silent. The opinion, widespread and deeply rooted, called forth by rationalism, that the preacher in the pulpit speaks otherwise than he thinks in his heart, might easily gain new encouragement through this. The more hypocrisy has, in fact, been practiced in earlier times, so that the Church (?) bears no small share of guilt for this opinion, the more dangerous it is now to set up such a principle anew. The distinction between esoteric and exoteric doctrine the Church has always rejected, mindful of the word of the Lord: 'What I tell you in the ear, that preach upon the housetops.'"

Hengstenberg himself writes of himself in the preface to the 1856 volume: "It has often been reproached against the editor of the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, that he has