# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S331
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Rationalistic Attempts at Life in Saxony. 331

nevertheless: the men of Jena, whom people called and still call "Flacianists" and "fanatics," were after all the bearers of the historical truth. Even granting that Flacius, in his controversy with his colleague Victorin Strigel, uttered an error in his assertion that original sin belongs to the essence of man, this much still stands firm, that in his struggle against Melanchthon's synergism (that good works belonged to salvation), against his leaning toward Calvin's error concerning the Lord's Supper, and against laxity in the matter of adiaphora, he was in the right. How right he was too, together with his friends, when at the Colloquy of Worms they expressed themselves thus: "Secondly, we declare, as a warning to ourselves and to others, that in causa confessionis (in the matter of the confession) one is not to look to human, political, and courtly wisdom, authority, and other things, but solely to God's Word, and that in the time of persecution and of the cross the confession should be made as well as one has done with mouth and pen in times of peace. — Fourthly, that the posteritas (posterity) may be warned and may take good care in a like case, and may not make a regulam out of evil examples, to eternal disadvantage and harm. For if the good examples are abused, it is easy to judge what harm evil examples can bring, particularly in those cases in which the confession brings with it a burdensome, heavy cross." —

What "atonement," then, are present-day Lutheran-confessional theologians to render for such "rabies of those theologians," according to the words quoted above? Is that not a superficial, unionistic piece of chatter? It is only the Union that does not know how to hold fast to the doctrine of the fathers, which it does not understand how to value; therefore it builds them "tombs," and exerts itself to want to document by a mere semblance its oneness with them.

(From the "Freimund.")

Rationalistic Attempts at Life in Saxony.

Rationalism has more than once already been declared overcome and dead; in Saxony too people would gladly have held it so, but precisely in Saxony it naturally has the toughest life, because here it not only, as elsewhere, keeps surfacing again and again along with the old man as that man's theology, wherever it once seemed to have been drowned, but because, as has often been indicated, it appeared in Saxony in a more respectable, finer, more scientific form than elsewhere — which we probably have to ascribe to our late chief court preacher Reinhard, who knew how to keep the spirit of scholarship very lively and communicated to the clergy his own lively striving after true culture, and himself also gave in his own performances the example of the noblest form. But rationalism is all the more dangerous and all the more firmly entrenched the more, equipped with learning and noble form, it carries the semblance of