# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S30
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

30 Church-Contemporary-History.

set forth, a Jew who, without the clergyman being able to prevent it (?), had stood as godfather,
expressed disapproval of the baptismal act: if all the preachers did so,
then no Jew could any longer stand as godfather."

"D. Gottfr. Olearius's Instruction for the Care of the Sick. With
some introductory sentences and provided with 2 appendices. For young clergy, etc., published
by W. Löhe. Nuremberg (Raw.) 1856." (77 pages. Price 5 groschen.)
Of this new edition of the excellent book by an old, faithful Lutheran theologian (a
section from the larger work "Guidance for the Spiritual Care of Souls"), Guericke says:
"What Olearius says on the subject is indeed, through spiritual soundness and
evangelical acuity, praiseworthy; what Löhe has added only hampers, insofar as, the success
of Olearius's presentation (which it otherwise variously supplements with many important and penetrating
observations), inasmuch as it proceeds from and is carried by the deadening clerical-hierarchical theory
of the pastoral office."

Dr. Th. Harnack, professor at Erlangen, in his conference address given last year at Leipzig,
says the following, among other things, concerning the ever more widespread delusion that in the
Lutheran church there have always existed two equally valid tendencies, the Lutheran and the
Melanchthonian, from whose more intimate fusion the Union necessarily
sprang: "When the modern Union spreads the tale that in the
16th century, from the single source of one and the same reformational movement, two streams
of religious communal formation arose, of whose common origin no one had
at first doubted, and which, only briefly estranged from one another by a lively exchange of words,
soon drew near again in order to flow together into one great ecclesiastical body,
and persisted in this union until Luther's death, despite a few
flashes of anger from the hot-blooded Reformer — then history contradicts, page
for page, such a distortion of the facts. This reformational (?) move-
ment of the 16th century notoriously stems from two different, mutually
independent sources; it developed in thoroughly different ways; and therefore had
to produce a different result. ... It is precisely the origin, the
driving force, the interest that differs on the one side and the other, so that Luther was right in saying:
vos habetis alium spiritum quam nos [you have another spirit than we]. ... If the principle of our church
is not grounded in the truth, if in it the
clarity of God in the face of Jesus Christ is reflected only one-sidedly,
clouded and distorted, then the church of Christ needs more,
far more, than a union; then it must labor toward a new,
thoroughgoing reformation. A mere union then helps it
nothing, but rather entangles it only more deeply in error and
ruin. For the truth cannot be welded together out of two half-
truths. It falls to us either whole, from
a single casting, or not at all. Now, the Lutheran church can let this new reformation
approach it calmly and leave the care for it to those who consider it
worth the trouble to build upon their so-called ""church of the future."" We wish
by God's grace to hold all the more firmly and faithfully to the church of the scripture-conformed confession,
to which the past belongs and to which the future must also fall, because it may
claim for itself the promise: I am with you always."

The Song of Songs. Already in the year 1855 a work by a certain E. F.
Friedrich, Dr. phil., appeared, which sets itself the task of establishing the poetic
form of the Song of Songs. In it, however, the author renders the following
judgment on its content: "Solomon is in it the tempter, who seeks to draw a country maiden away from the fidelity
of her bridal love, who wishes to bribe her simple heart with his royal
splendor, but who in the end must concede the prize to the shepherd youth." — We cannot
understand how in Germany believers among the learned praise this scandalous
book, as happens in Rudelbach's journal, on the ground that it allegedly reveals the beau-