# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S192
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

192 Church and Contemporary History.

The Evangelical Alliance will be held from September 10 to 16 of this year at Berlin, and Court Preacher Dr. Krummacher of Potsdam will deliver the opening sermon on the occasion. In the December number of Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung there is an article in which this assembly, announced with great pomp and supposedly representing all of evangelical Christendom over against the papacy, is stripped of its halo. Hengstenberg remarks on the article sent in from northern Germany: "It grieves the editor to have to open a polemic against an association of men with whom he knows himself to be one in faith in Christ as the Savior of sinners. He has deliberately avoided it so long as they kept away from our borders. But now, since they wish to extend their activity to Germany as well, it becomes the inescapable duty of church papers to warn against their questionable tendencies. They have known that this struggle, which in fact is nothing but self-defense, awaited them, but they have nevertheless not been willing to desist from their undertaking. So let them now also accept the inevitable in Christian love and gentleness. What is at stake for us is the true treasure of the German Reformation, which has been entrusted to us as a deposit to faithful hands." In the article itself the following, among other things, is quoted from the report of a non-Puseyite Englishman concerning the Evangelical Alliance: "The bond which unites its members with one another is, on the one, the positive side, a narrow-hearted, bigoted Calvinism — and that not in the form in which Calvin himself or any of the confessional writings of the sixteenth century present the system to us, but as a sugary sentimental antinomianism; and on the other, the negative side, the bond that is really displayed and living is an ingrained spirit of contradiction against all churchly order, against every principle of sacramental grace, against everything that distinguishes the Lutheran system from the Calvinistic."

The papacy in France. Thus the Roman Catholic "Wahrheitsfreund" is written from Paris under the date of April 8: "Emperor Louis Napoleon has taken up a position opposed to the spirit and usage of the church; the Council of State decided against the Bishop of Moulins for abuse of his power and based this decision on laws which were published by Napoleon I as an integral part of the Concordat with the Holy See, but of which the Pope neither saw nor heard anything until they appeared in the Moniteur. That the bishop transgressed against these laws, the product of deceit and force, no one denies; on the contrary, the French church has never recognized or observed them. More than half of all the bishops of France have made themselves guilty of the same offense . . The men of the Council of State have worked systematically toward annihilating the authority of the church." — Wherein the crime against the "holy rights" of the "holy church" consists is not stated. Probably it has to do once again with — dear money and temporal goods.

Sweden. The "Wahrheitsfreund" expresses itself very indignantly over the fact that the Swedish court which is to give effect to the principles of toleration held by the present "liberal-minded" Swedish king, together with the clergy and the nobility, shows no inclination to do so. When Romanists preach toleration to Lutherans, we are reminded of the fable of the fox who went about and brought the hens the glad tidings that an eternal peace had been concluded throughout the whole animal kingdom, and who therefore urged the good hens to take courage and come out of their places of refuge into his arms, so that he might press them to his heart for the celebration of the peace festival. Heartily as we wish to see religious freedom granted everywhere to everyone, in Sweden too, it nevertheless makes a strange impression, and one opposite to that intended, when the papacy itself calls for toleration while it is still licking its jaws, dripping with Protestant Christian blood.