# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S378
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

378 The Lutheran Church in the North of Europe.

„Antiquitates biblicae et ecclesiasticae“ is his most significant production. The latter work falls into two parts; in the first it treats: 1. of the churchly offices in the Old and New Testament; 2. of the public acts of worship of the Old and New Testament; 3. of the idolatry of the Israelites and of the origin and progress of the veneration of saints, relics, and images in the Christian church; 4. of the holy places among Jews and Christians; 5. of their holy seasons; 6. of Jewish proselytism and slavery; 7. of the ban in the Old Testament; 8. of the various names of Christians and the grades among them; 9. of the lapsed, of excommunication, penance, and their readmission into the Christian church. The second part treats of the civil order among the Jews and contains in an appendix a presentation of the customs of the Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians at their burials.

(To be continued.)

(From the Saxon Kirchen- und Schulblatt.)

The Lutheran Church in the North of Europe.

The Lutheran church in the North is beset and imperiled on all sides. To be sure, in the German Baltic provinces of Russia churchly consciousness and confession, represented and cultivated for a considerable time by the theological faculty of Dorpat, are no small power, and there is a synodical life which many churches might well envy the church of those provinces. But what the disposition toward our church is there, and what wishes are cherished with respect to it in other quarters, became evident several years ago in the seduction of thousands into apostasy to the Russian church. In a state such as the Russian, unity of religion and of worship necessarily belongs to the system. But so also does the avoidance of every act of violence that would drive the churchly conscience so into a corner that it would have to raise open protest. But precisely this is the most dangerous thing about the situation, that the occasion for such steps is avoided, and yet one has the constant feeling of how more and more the church and its life are pressed back from their boundaries, the arteries tied off, and the circulation of the blood confined to narrower circles, so that one could calculate almost mathematically by when our church will be reduced to such a measure that the considerations hitherto observed will no longer be necessary. It is a tragic sight to have to watch a church inwardly well ordered and living shrink more and more outwardly. May God dispose it! — Worse still does it stand in the interior of Russia, because here that decisiveness of churchly consciousness which we meet with there is in many places lacking. It will be found intelligible if we, within