# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S287
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Church News. 287

...gazette" writes, the following answer is said to have been given to Prussia: "If one were really so hostile to intolerance, one ought first to sweep it out of one's own house, and, for instance, no longer forbid, against all right and order, the Lutheran congregations to ring their own bells, which they have procured for themselves out of their own poverty."

The Secret League of the Old Lutherans. The "lutherische Kirchenbote" of Gettysburg recently brought word that a secret league has presently been founded among the Old Lutherans in Germany, having the purpose of gaining for them the most influential positions in state and Church. The wretched messenger had taken this piece of news from German papers hostile to God and to Christ. The "Lutheran Observer" of course promptly copied the delightful report and attached to it its own American-patriarchal warnings. From the "Freimund" of June 12 of this year we learn what gave the enemies of Christ occasion for their slander, as ridiculous as it is malicious. It says there: "On the Wednesday and Thursday of Easter week, several men of our Lutheran Church — von Harless of Munich, the Doctors of Divinity Thomasius and Hofmann of Erlangen, Kliefoth of Schwerin, Huschke of Breslau, Kahnis and Besser of Leipzig — met by prior arrangement at Reichenbach, in the Saxon Vogtland, in order to come to an understanding among themselves, as briefly as possible and by word of mouth, on the needs and questions of the time, and also concerning one another. They had not thought it advisable to make any statement about the subjects of their conference, and when the news of it spread like wildfire through the local papers, and even the Leipziger Landeszeitung made simple mention of the matter, an eager questioning went round on every tongue, yet no one could give any information as to what the gentlemen might have been doing there. — Then all at once the Dresdner constitutionelle Zeitung supplied the explanation: "A kind of Jesuit league, called 'Boniface, to the German Oak,' has been formed since last year, for the very purpose of bringing Germany back under Rome, and thereby restoring the aristocracy once more to full power, and so completing the reaction that has been stirring since 1819. By means of this fact, it is believed, the meeting of these theologians can be accounted for and explained." — That is the ghost story." The old proverb, Fama eundo crescit (rumor grows as it runs), proved true here too. By the time the bogeyman arrived in America, he was already considerably shaggier and more frightful than in his homeland, and made a splendid specimen for the museums of Messrs. Kurtz and Anstädt.

Saxe-Altenburg. The religion teacher at the Gymnasium in Altenburg, Dr. Fr. H. R. Frank, Licentiate in Theology, recently exposed, in a pamphlet, the unscriptural content of the Altenburg hymnal, of which a new printing was just then being prepared. Thereupon the consistory, incredibly, took the path of a criminal charge against the author! The consistory was, however, subsequently induced to withdraw the charge again, especially since the author was able to produce four expert opinions (from the theological faculty at Erlangen, and from von Harless, Kahnis, and Ohlfeld) in support of the inviolable right of his testimony. In the meantime, however, a number of pastors (of which class is easy to guess), particularly from the diocese of Altenburg, exerted themselves, in a petition to the church government, with the assistance of embittered enlightened newspaper writers, to defame Professor Frank's name. — When one reads such things, one is again and again reminded of the heavy responsibility resting on the preachers here, whom no one can compel to accept an impure hymnal, and who nevertheless, despite the churchly freedom granted them here, voluntarily bow their necks under the yoke of such a hymnal, for the sake of human favor — as, for example, the local "United" hymnal is.

Köstlin's writing: "The Nature of the Church, examined according to the doctrine and history of the New Testament." Stuttgart, published by Liesching, 1854. (128 pages, large octavo.) Of this work, Ströbel says the following in a review contained in the Rudelbach journal (3rd quarterly issue of 1856): "Two classes of readers will decry this little book as pernicious: the Romanists; for 'what a sharp contrast to that Catholic tendency which presses for form not merely with equal but with far preponderant weight, and which cannot repeat often or loudly enough the word "Church," understood in such a sense, as the magic word of life and as the Alpha and Omega of doctrine!' — and our own churchmen of the "office" who are engaged on a penitential pilgrimage to Rome, to whom a Köstlin might well repeat that Cassandra-question: why didst thou send me hither, into the city of the eternally blind, with an opened mind? — We others, however, as many of us as agree with the title-motto, 'It must be spiritually discerned!' and who do not long to go back to the fleshpots of medieval Egypt, wish sincerely to thank the excellent author for his fine gift, and to glory and rejoice in the illumination which the Gospel has poured out also upon the article concerning the Church." The Church, Köstlin quite rightly writes, as it presents itself to Protestantism out of the Word of God, may, according to its concept, be difficult to grasp for the dull natural understanding, and in its historical shaping often inconspicuous, and even offensive to our little faith; but in truth she is that congregation on which also