# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S384
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

384
Miscellaneous Church News.

whatever still resists will soon feel forsaken and isolated, and will fall prey all the more to its own wisdom, if it does not yet turn back in time. — To the "'signs of the times'" truly belongs also the "'turning back.'" If the Union was formerly allowed to appeal to its own time, now the time, at its very zenith, is undeniably on the path of return to the historically grounded church, however much public opinion may vent itself in protests against this and appeal to majorities: only let us not, perhaps trusting in the good signs of the times, become secure, and, before we are aware of it, nevertheless succumb." — When one hears such voices from out of the prison-tower of the Royal Prussian Union Church, it does indeed make one's heart quite heavy to see how eagerly people here strive to break anew the path of error, unfaithfulness, and ruin that was recognized, in the old fatherland, by the most earnest and purest of men. Here a union church, which does not even possess the semblance of life and the semblance of zeal found in the other sects, must in the end run out into rationalism, sooner or later, and though it may now fill its barns with sheaves of others' labor, it carries within itself, in its indifferentism, the seed of death. Every other fellowship has better prospects of enduring, for, even while it holds its error to be truth, it still clings to the principle that a church ought to have only truth; should it come to recognize the error, then it is helped. The union church, on the other hand, has not only the error but wants to have it as well. Whatever may come to be manifest as truth, it does not touch her; it is all the same to her. She cannot be helped, unless she give up herself, by abandoning the principle of the union of those of differing faiths.

"The Friend of Israel." We recently received a few issues of this paper, published in Basel and devoted to the mission to the Jews. It is full of the saddest testimonies of where the hope finally leads that a general conversion of the Jews, through a special miraculous power of the Lord, is at hand even before the Last Day. One example may suffice. Thus speaks, among others, Pastor Rein from Baden in an address at the 25th anniversary festival of the Society of Friends of Israel: "Seven great world monarchies have passed away, and this people, whom God scattered among all nations as a punishment, stands there and has outlasted them all; it still stands waiting. Yes, poor Israel, though you have not accepted your Savior, you are nevertheless a faithful people! We Europeans, of the seed of Japheth, have moved into the tents of Shem, and have dwelt there for centuries; but we have long since begun to forsake our Lord again, and it is said among us: we do not want this one to rule over us. Nine-tenths of Christendom are moving out of the tents of Shem again, with sack and pack. These are the signs of the times. But Israel — has kept its eye fixed unwaveringly toward Zion (??). Wait yet a little longer, you do not wait in vain; wait only, you brethren of Israel, until you shall say: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! If everything does not deceive us, we are drawing very near to the time when Joseph's heart will break over Ephraim, and this Joseph will take his brother by the hand and lead him home in great peace into the promised land of their fathers — in so great a peace that the aged and the sick and women in childbed may journey along." — Is it any wonder if, given such a portrayal of the present and future condition of the Jews, Christians should feel a desire to become Jews? — A few years ago several previously strictly orthodox Lutherans, after having fallen into chiliasm and into the delusion that a general conversion and glorification of the Jewish people was still to be expected, actually had themselves circumcised. 2 Thess. 2:10–12.