# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S349
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Church News. 349

afterward were absent, were nevertheless gathered with it in spirit. The full
report will appear in "Der Lutheraner." Here only this much: the assembly
was one abundantly and richly blessed, and its outcome justified the hope
that a good foundation had thereby been laid, by God's grace, toward the
final union of all faithful Lutherans of North America. Next year a second
conference of this kind is, God willing, to be held on the fourth Thursday in
October.

The Miami Synod held its annual assembly at Tarlton, Ohio, in the first
week of June and declared unanimously that it accepts the original Augsburg
Confession only insofar as it (the synod) at the same time rejects the
approval contained in it of certain ceremonies at the Mass, the private
confession and absolution taught in it, the denial expressed in it of the divine
obligation of the Christian Sabbath, and the doctrine contained in it of
regeneration through baptism, and of the real presence of the body and
blood of the Savior in the Eucharist!

The Hartwick Synod of the State of New York, in its latest, this year's
assembly, issued the declaration that it holds fast to the doctrinal basis of the
so-called General Synod and therefore acknowledges that only the
fundamental doctrines of the Word of God, and these too only insofar as they
are set forth in a substantially correct manner in the doctrinal articles of the
Augsburg Confession, are to be received. As such fundamental doctrines it
declares the articles concerning God, the Trinity, the Godhead of Christ,
human depravity, the Son of God and his mediatorial work, repentance,
justification, obedience as a proof of our faith, the resurrection, the future
judgment, and a state of reward and punishment in a future life. Other
articles the synod is willing to accept if they are rightly understood and
interpreted; but it rejects "the Roman (!) doctrine of the real presence, or of
transubstantiation, and with it the doctrine of consubstantiation, the Mass
and its peculiar ceremonies, the power of the sacraments ex opere operato,
or that the blessings of baptism and the Supper can be obtained without
faith, auricular confession and priestly absolution — holding instead that
there is no priesthood on earth but that of all believers, and that God alone
can forgive sin; it holds fast to the divine institution and the obligation of all
Christians to keep the Lord's Day." — That these gentlemen still refuse to see
that, with such a partial and hedged-about acceptance and rejection of
Lutheran doctrines, they have as little right to call themselves Lutherans as
do the Reformed, the Methodists, or any other Protestant party! O honesty,
where art thou?

In the West Pennsylvania Synod a minority report was recently adopted
as the expressed opinion of the synod, one which moved for the abolition of
the licensing system. God grant that it also come to be carried out, for like a
cancer this system has for a long time now eaten away at the body of the
Lutheran church in the United States.

Our South. As if it were not enough that a distinct American Lutheranism
is wanted here, people are now further bent on establishing a distinct
Southern American Lutheranism as well. From Newberry in South Carolina
(the 10th of September) it is written: "At a conference of the Lutheran
church, which assembled in St. Paul's church in this district on the 29th of
August, the resolution was passed to establish a religious journal more
Southern in its principles than the 'Lutheran Observer' is, which is published
in Baltimore. The occasion for this was the sharp rebukes in the 'Observer'
regarding the conduct of the honorable Mr. P. S. Brooks in his dispute with
Sumner."

The Augsburg Confession (so the Pilger a. S. reports) is presently being
printed in Prague in the Bohemian language. A Roman priest, H—ka, was
recently received formally and legally into the Lutheran church there.