# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Something About the Lutheran Church at Frankfurt am Main.

-ful, merely to read the cradle-hymns which, according to this, are to be sung at Holy Communion, Baptism, etc. Everything nicely polished in free-imperial-city fashion, and every doctrine of Scripture that might in any way give offense falsified away out of the old core hymns of the Church; morality and virtue extolled, as for example thus (No. 660): "God wills that we rejoice in youth and in every season of our life; for even cheerfulness itself is virtue; only, O my heart, enjoy it purely! Enjoy the pleasure of the earth — God wills it — only take care, my heart, that no pleasure turn to displeasure for you, and never your joy to pain."

A similarly sad history has the catechism experienced in Frankfurt. Its introduction, on account of the many struggles which the Lutheran Church here had to withstand with the Zwinglians, took place only in 1557, and much care was devoted to its proper handling in church and school by J. Ph. Fresenius, Pritius, and especially by Spener, who, though heavily burdened with business, himself set his hand vigorously to the religious instruction of the young, as indeed also his "Simple Exposition of Christian Doctrine According to the Order of Luther's Small Catechism" was published by him for this purpose in 1677, as likewise the catechism tables. Yet otherwise, as it seems, the religious instruction of the children was always left entirely to the schoolmasters, and even today there is not a single school in which a clergyman gives it; even in the Gymnasium under the Lutheran consistory, it lies in the hands of the philologists. Whether these are not such as that Frankfurt Gymnasium teacher who, in the year 1725, being asked whether he was a Lutheran — for people indeed doubted it — replied that he was no Lutheran, no papist, no Reformed, but a Ciceronian, that is, in plain German, a heathen —? (The Romanists indeed do it better; they send their pupils in the Gymnasium one of their own priests for instruction.) So the dear youth of Frankfurt, apart from the short period of confirmation instruction — to which, incidentally, many parents send their children for two consecutive years — is wholly cut off and neglected by the pastoral office. But has one, then, no catechetical services for children? the reader may perhaps ask. Answer: No, these were entirely abolished in the year 1836, and with them Luther's catechism, too, was carried entirely to its grave. Indeed, so far as is known to us, there is not a single pastor left among them all who would set it forth plainly in his confirmation instruction; rather, most of them have their own compositions, sprung from each one's personal belief. It is therefore no wonder that one meets countless so-called Lutheran Christians in Frankfurt to whom the Small Catechism is a wholly unknown thing.

(Conclusion to follow.)