# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S316
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

316   Church and Contemporary History.

...region, in the strip of land between Eppingen and Bretten on the Württemberg frontier toward Heilbronn. Time and again smaller and larger companies of men and women attended our services in Bretten. Several declared themselves resolved upon going over to our church; Pastor Eichhorn was invited to come to the village of Z. in order to hold a conference with those who had decided upon going over. He followed the invitation and held a conference and examination lasting several hours. During it the mayor and the united-church pastor of the place went about and spoke of arresting and deporting the Lutheran pastor; but this time they did not venture upon acts of violence. In the evening and during the night crowds of people surged back and forth before the house and made themselves noticeable especially by jeers and laughter, and soon also by curses and imprecations, which they hurled against the Lutheran pastor, so that at any moment his maltreatment was to be feared. One man who had likewise joyfully resolved upon going over was, when he came home, very badly treated by his father, who belongs to the Union and at the same time also to the pietistic conventicle, and by his wife, and was to be compelled to remain in the Union, from which his heart is turned away. The work of the Lord shall not be suppressed, not even held back; on the first day of Pentecost the firstfruits from that region were solemnly received into our church at the service in Bretten. Others will follow, and there is hope that in that outwardly so richly blessed region, in which rationalism still plies its parching trade, the banner of the Lutheran confession will be unfurled in several places. "Nevertheless the city of God shall remain fair and glad with its little brooks, where the holy dwellings of the Most High are. God is within her, therefore she shall surely remain; God helps her early." Psalm 46.

Death. On the 29th of June of this year Dr. Grossmann Sr., superintendent at Leipzig, died after long suffering. The Saxon Kirchen- und Schulblatt says of his last days: "But the great joy of all true Christians is that his last days bear witness to the ever more complete break with the rationalistic past, into which Grossmann's whole period of education had also fallen — and to the breaking through of a personal faith of experience which, when all else gives way, can comfort itself with this: I still have Christ; who will take Him from me — which can rejoice over death as over the open door of heaven. We praise God through our Lord Jesus Christ in the hope that He has of grace given our venerable chief shepherd" (Grossmann was the second preacher of the land in rank) "the victory through faith."

Doctrine of justification. From the Saxon Kirchen- und Schulblatt we learn that a certain Pastor Euen has, in theses at the conference of the Lutheran association in Pomerania, described the doctrine of justification as no longer fundamental; at the time of the Reformation, he says, it was indeed in order that the doctrine of justification formed the center of the proclamation of Christianity, but now we have to do with other tasks — because with other antitheses; the other thing which is to step into the center is, he says — the sacraments!

Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate. Here, writes the Saxon Kirchen- und Schulblatt, the consistory has now got into conflict with the rationalists and the raw-Protestant "liberals." It is known to our readers how Ebrard, after he had entered the consistory at Speyer, first began a struggle with the Lutherans in this united church and forbade them to set forth the distinctive Lutheran doctrines concerning the Lord's Supper. One must acknowledge that he had a certain formal legal basis in the deed of union, which meant to establish not merely a union of constitution but a union of doctrine, and which attempts to remove the doctrinal difference concerning the Lord's Supper in a general — that is, washed-out — conception, or rather formula, in which Ebrard of course, with wonderful exegesis, finds the Melanchthonian form of doctrine. Nor can one properly blame him for having had the Augustana of the year 1540 raised to the union symbol of that church. For thereby he has