# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S93
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library. 93

...already overcome is a wholly illusory and impossible one. To be sure, a "Lutheranism" that knows itself to be separated from Calvinism only in the doctrine of the Lord's Supper and a few other articles of faith will soon feel at home in the United States. But whoever has grasped Luther's well-known word at Marburg — "You have a different spirit than we" — will also grasp that the Yankees can hear and endure it as little as Zwingli and Oecolampadius were willing to hear and endure it. He will feel himself breathed upon with hostility by the North American spirit and its manifestations great and small — from the Jewish observance of the Sabbath and the unscriptural prohibition of wine, all the way up to the unhappy substitution of work-righteous faith in place of the faith that brings salvation. Nor will he prophesy any other fate for the newly founded Lutheran emigrant churches than what the older ones have already found: a gradual sinking into the general Calvinistic mush, even while retaining Lutheran forms of doctrine and worship. The spirit of the evangelical Reformation many or few individuals may well be able to and will represent — for that the convictions of many a genuinely evangelical emigrant, living on among us still in gladdening memory, above all those of the faithful, stalwart pastors, already vouch — but a genuine evangelical-Lutheran church of the true stamp present-day North America will at most see only in passing, and will then either smile at or persecute the idiosyncrasy of this abnormal "denomination." — The political "Union" of North America cannot help but assert itself as an ecclesiastical one as well.

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

(Continuation.)

c. Having already, as regards polemical theology, named the most necessary works against the papist and Reformed false doctrines, we now turn to the polemical literature concerning the united church. However new this church now is, our church nonetheless possesses many excellent writings by old, tried and tested theologians who, in them, bore testimony against the union efforts already stirring in their own time, and thereby held back, during their lifetimes, the flood of the latter days — the confusion-mixing of religions — which has now, after the faithful watchmen were carried to their graves and almost all the public chairs of the orthodox church had come under the sway of rationalism, poured itself out over a great part of Protestant Christendom by means of cunning, deceit, and raw force. We name here only one work of an old, tried and tested theologian, and reserve to ourselves the right to open up, when we come to present the theological writings of the second