# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up? 39

as to the relationship in which it stands here, also with regard to its government, to
the civil authority.

There is here, indeed, to be recognized as an inestimable benefit of God — and
one for which he is justly to be thanked from the heart — that in this land there
exists a principled separation of church and state, that the civil
authority does not in the least meddle in the governance of the church, and
only intervenes defensively when, amid disputes arising
in matters of the outward affairs of the church, as for example over the maintenance of
incorporated congregational constitutions, over the rightful possession of church
buildings, and the like, its external legal protection is sought, or when,
through fanatical and enthusiastic aberrations on the part of individuals within
this or that religious party, the civil laws are violated
and the common welfare and the temporal peace are damaged.

Now someone might indeed say that this is, to be sure, an undeniable
fact, and that the tyrannical encroachments of civil government
upon that of the church, to the point of danger of the church's being swallowed up and transformed
into a spiritual penitentiary and a spiritual police institute of the
state, are impossible here. On the other hand, however, from that
very principled and total separation of church and state in this land, the
opposite and abominable evil arises.

For because here no religious party needs the legal recognition and
confirmation of the civil authority in order to practice its worship,
this unlimited freedom is the cause that, within the
outer bounds of the Christian church, precisely here the frightful vermin
and swarming plague of countless monstrous and adventurous fanatics
and sect-mobs mill about in wild and buzzing confusion, sending their deceitful
laborers and false apostles crisscrossing the land, who, as
spiritual mountebanks and quacksalvers, hawk their so various yet all
"infallible" old and new universal
pills and elixirs of life, said to make one spiritual and holy, as unbidden ranting preachers, praising themselves to
young and old, and unhindered and unpunished poison and ruin many a soul, perhaps even to
death, with their remedies.

Let it serve as an answer to this that such fanatical
carrying-on by all sorts of legalistic, work-righteous partisans, swarm-
and mob-spirits, whom the arrogant devil, posing as the Holy Spirit, sends crisscrossing
the land here, is indeed an undisputed fact and a lamentable evil;
yet the pure Word of God is just as little hindered from attacking them,
laying them low in victory, and exposing them openly in the shame of their nakedness,
while, sadly, such honest and upright combating of these errors with
the spiritual sword of the Word of God is, through the intervention *) or

*) Thus, for example, a lawsuit was brought against the Supreme Church Council of the Lutheran church in
Prussia, or rather against its chairman, Herr Dr. and Professor Huschke, because
he had written entirely in accordance with Scripture, and hence truly, concerning the Roman church.