# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S190
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

190

Church and Contemporary History.

I. America.

The Methodists confess ever more candidly. Thus, for example, the "Apologet" of April 9 of this year writes as follows in an article "Our Defects and Their Remedy": "Why conceal it from ourselves? While preachers as well as members spoke and inveighed against learned preachers, we as a church have all too often tried to obtain learned preachers, and for that reason have often let ourselves be deceived and cheated by such quasi-learned men." Here the old proverb proves itself true: Ars non habet osorem, nisi ignorantem. In the continuation of the article cited, the objection that trained preachers are always proud is answered quite correctly: "If there is danger anywhere of becoming proud and haughty, it is in our procedure hitherto. To find oneself all at once, out of a perhaps quite ordinary station in human life, perhaps even out of a position of dependence upon others, overseer and director over the religious affairs and circumstances of often hundreds of people who look to him as God's messenger and the shepherd of their souls . . and to take up this position all at once, without any preparation whatever, however brief — that is for many so great a change that a large measure of the Spirit of Christ is required if one is not to fall, at least for a time, into the snare of Satan and to think more of himself than he has a right to do." (See Apologet of April 23.)

"Historisches Zeitblatt und literarischer Anzeiger." Such is the title of a new periodical which the bookseller Mr. C. Bär in Buffalo has begun to publish. The paper is to appear once a month and to contain especially reports on church and contemporary history and notices of books.

The United Evangelical Society of the West. From the "Friedensbote" we learn that on March 6 Inspector Binner laid down his office at the Society's seminary in Marthasville, Mo., as well as the editorship of the "Friedensbote."

Tennessee Synod. In the April number we reported that the Tennessee Synod had taken ill, and rejected as an unwarranted censure, the judgment of our Synod's Western District concerning the breaking of the bread in the Holy Supper — a judgment which had been demanded by one of that synod's own members and was published only at his express request. From an article in the "Luth. Standard," signed "A member of Synod," we learn with joy that the counter-declaration of the Tennessee Synod printed in its latest report got into the report only through an oversight, since, in consequence of information received about the judgment we had rendered, it had been struck out by resolution of the synod. In the same number of the "Luth. Standard" (of April 29) there is found the first part of a larger treatise in which the dear Pastor H. Weßel (Mount Solon, Va.) promises to establish his agreement with the judgment of our Synod, or rather of the old Lutheran church, on the point in question, and first of all shows that it never occurred to our Synod, by the judgment it published, to arrogate to itself the office of a censor over the Tennessee Synod and thus itself to loosen the intimate bond which has hitherto embraced both sister synods.

Dr. Benjamin Kurtz appears to be in no small anxiety lest the coming deliberations of the so-called Lutheran General Synod, beginning June 14 at Reading, should not have the result he desires. At any rate he does his utmost in his "Luth. Observer" to fan in good time the fire of hatred against the so-called Old Lutherans among the members of that body, and to produce in them the haughty condescension of ignorant and indifferentist men toward the confession of the church. In the number of his paper of May 8 he seeks, among other things, to prove that the Augsburg Confession cannot possibly be adopted as a definite platform, since it is variously interpreted — since, for example, some maintained