# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S191
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 191

that the divine institution of the observance of Sunday is denied in it, and that regeneration through baptism and the true presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper are taught in it, while others, on the contrary, denied this. Mr. Kurtz has apparently learned this mode of argument from the Romanists, for in just this way they prove that the Bible is not the sole rule and standard of faith and life.

II. Abroad.

There died on January 13 of this year at Halle, of consumption of the lungs, the Justizrat Heinrich Aug. Quinque, formerly of Naumburg, in his seventieth year. In him the Prussian Lutheran church loses a faithful and active member.

South Australia. From Ehlers' Kirchenblatt we learn that in South Australia a certain F. A. Altmann has occasioned movements within the Lutheran church there because he rejects every relation of the church to the state and does not want the preaching office in the church to have a position that directs the church and its affairs. It is sad enough that so few know how to find the right middle way between caesaropapism, hierarchy, and ochlocracy. (Of the late Quinque — we note this in passing — it is said in the death notice concerning him: "He believed that it was the sound and right relation of state and church to one another when such princes as were members of the church conducted the government of the church (!); thus that had to appear to him a loss which seems a gain to those of chiliastic mind (?), namely, that we in Prussia, through our holding fast to the confession, are deprived of the territorial-church government." We confess it would interest us to hear the proof for the strange assertion that one must be a chiliast in order to be convinced that it is an abnormality, a sad emergency, if not something worse, when the secular princes "conduct the government of the church.")

Stade. Here a Lutheran society is forming which pursues the aim of the Gustavus Adolphus Society without the latter's syncretism, namely, which intends to organize collections for hard-pressed Lutheran congregations, especially among a Roman Catholic population. The call to form such a society went out on December 10 of last year from Pastors Schöttler in Twielenfleth, Vogelsang in Stade, Wolff in Hollern, and from Collaborator Dieckmann and Peters, and from the school inspector Eickenrodt in Stade.

Denmark. Pastor Grundtvig has recently founded an institution under the name "Folk High School." Its purpose and goal are mysterious; as pupils, older peasants seem to be preferred, who are here to be instructed in Nordic history, Nordic mythology, and Nordic natural science. The school is staffed with one candidate and two seminarians. How far these teachers have entered into Grundtvig's thoughts is shown by the remark of one of these seminarians: that instruction in the natural sciences need go no further than to make the youth acquainted with the Danish laws of nature.

The Eighth Westphalian Provincial Synod. It was held from August 16 to September 1 of last year at Schwelm. From a report on its proceedings which is found in the December number of Dr. Hengstenberg's Ev. Kirchenzeitung, it emerges clearly that in this district too of the Prussian United Church, Lutheran faith and Lutheran life threaten to tear apart the rotten Philistine cords of that wretched piece of union-work. In particular the Minden-Ravensberg men, who would so gladly save their Lutheran conscience within the territorial church, made things rather hot for the poor synod. In the end, however, all those who wish to be Lutheran let themselves be pacified by the declaration that the confirmed — though indeed genuinely unionistic — synodical resolutions were not to impair the right sanctioned to the confession in the All-Highest Cabinet Order of 1834. If only it does not go with those who wish to be Lutheran within the united church as it went with Samson, who did indeed pull down the temple of the idol, but found his death beneath its ruins!