# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S147
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something about the Lutheran Church at Frankfurt am Main. 147

held alternately by the French-Reformed pastor, one Lutheran pastor of Frankfurt, and three Union pastors from neighboring Kurhesse, as well as by a retired director of the Gymnasium. This lineup alone already gives a picture of the confessional, or rather non-confessional, orientation of the society, although by far the most of its members outwardly profess the Lutheran church. So too the collections of the mission society go to Basel, and the Basel missionaries find ready welcome here in the furthering of missionary zeal, while a motion by one member that the Lutheran mission also be remembered was coldly rejected. It is no different with the young men's society, where each of the few members has his own private faith and any heresy whatever is sooner tolerated than the decidedly outspoken pure doctrine of the Word of God. How the people here are wholly of the same spirit that in part prevails among the pastors of Frankfurt, the following two incidents may show.

When in 1855 a pastor of the Nassau Lutherans, who in Nassau, because of the authorities hostile to his church, could find nowhere a place to live from which he could serve his little congregation, wished to move to Frankfurt — merely as a private citizen — the authorities readily gave him permission for one year, that is, on the understanding that it could be renewed after a year. But before the residence card was even in his hands, a Lutheran pastor of Frankfurt learned of his presence, and quickly several more did too, and this is said to have been the reason that he was given permission for only three months; and it was God the Lord alone, whose right always wins the victory, who so governed the circumstances that the permission was extended after it expired. Yet the appearance of this "Old Lutheran" caused a great stir in every circle, just as if the guilty conscience of these newfangled Lutherans had begun to trouble them, and this quiet man, who is glad and thanks God that after two years of an unsettled and fugitive existence he can live together with his family again, has become an object of fear, from whom even all believers withdraw themselves, so that he lives, in the midst of a city full of people, isolated as a complete stranger.

He also visited, in order to become acquainted with the Christian people there, the young men's society a few times. At his first visits no one knew him, and people listened gladly to his exposition of the passage then under discussion and were grateful for it, so that they asked him to come indeed quite often. But at the next meeting he already noticed, upon entering, a general ill humor. The members had wished to converse in that hour about the Lord's Supper, and by his appearing they felt themselves disturbed in this and took up something else instead. Afterward, however, he learned that the board of this society had inquired of the Evangelical Society, of which it is merely a branch, whether it should not forbid entrance to an Old Lutheran pastor,