# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S94
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

94 Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

...class. As the most important work, and the one most indispensable in a Lutheran pastor's library, we name the following: "Enforced Instruction Concerning the Ecclesiastical Union of the Protestants, composed out of love for suffering truth by Ernst Salomon Cyprian, D.D., Church and Consistorial Councillor at Gotha. Motto: Sir. 11:7–8. Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1722." The work comes to 930 pages in octavo and appeared for the second time in the year 1726. We already made the acquaintance of its author in last year's April issue, p. 122ff. As for the occasion which led Cyprian to write his work against the union, it was as follows. The well-known learned syncretist C. M. Pfaff, chancellor at Tübingen,*) turned to Cyprian privately, in writing, in 1720, with the request that he render a judgment on his (Pfaff's) union undertakings. Cyprian did so. Through the zeal of a person of high rank, to whom Cyprian had confidentially communicated his answer, it was published in the Leipzig scholarly journal, the Nova Litteraria. Both the enraged Pfaff and the friends of union, particularly those among the Reformed, now set everything in motion to conjure up a fearful storm over Cyprian's head. They succeeded in this to such an extent that even the Corpus Evangelicorum and several Reformed princes made arrangements to chastise the unloving "disturber of the peace" and "slanderer of most glorious heads." Cyprian was thus brought into a status confessionis; he therefore found himself compelled in conscience, precisely now that his confession of the truth was being threatened with severe punishment, to keep silent all the less. And so there appeared his "Enforced Instruction Concerning Ecclesiastical Union," not only in that moderation so peculiarly Cyprian's own — which is the effect of confidence in irrefutable truth and in the unanswerable justice and fairness of the cause — but at the same time in the tone of a faith not easily frightened. The work falls into two parts. In the first, Cyprian demonstrates that an absorptive union of the Lutherans and Reformed is not possible, since the latter, first, erred at the very foundation of the faith, and second, had always shown themselves hostile toward the Lutherans and had made it only too plain to recognize that all their proposals for union and peace had, in the background, the intention of everywhere uprooting and destroying the Lutherans. The second part contains a collection of highly remarkable but rare documents which set the actual doctrine and policy of the Reformed in a clear light. Among these belongs Zwingli's Augsburg Confession (from the first printing); further, documents on the alteration of the theological statutes at Frankfurt an der Oder, the persecution of the Lutherans in Hesse-Cassel and Anhalt, the counsel of the

*) Known in particular for his, in many respects, excellent works on church law; not to be confused with his orthodox father Joh. Christoph Pfaff, d. 1720.