# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S379
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church in the North of Europe. 379

keep within the bounds of a rather suggestive generality. The accession of the present emperor has begun with a series of reforms in every field. Given the peculiarity of Russian conditions, however, one may be permitted to doubt whether they will be attended with real success or will not rather amount to decorative painting. The strongest expressions concerning the moral corruption from top to bottom and the dangers it entails reach us. How necessary it would be, then, that the church should stand there as a firm refuge and let her light shine brightly. „Our church“ — so one writes, in substance — „which unmistakably occupies a providential position in our land alongside a state church that lets itself be carried by the world in a comfortable, self-satisfied repose and is sated and dead in head and members, cannot unhappily ward off all the evil influences that flow to it out of this ecclesiastical system; and the spirit of the world in its God-hostile perversity knows how, through its clever children, richly to exploit this dangerous position and to bring about ever more questionable mixtures, so that the notions of what is the right doctrine and the right walk before God grow ever darker and more confused. Our church is unceasingly exposed to the poison of an indifferentism which approves everything that, under the firm name of peace, enlightenment, culture, tolerance, takes account of the spirit of the age and serves the flesh. But unhappily she also cannot master the temptation, at any show of favor, to flatter herself with sanguine hopes and to take false steps, to let herself be satisfied and to make concessions, where she ought to consider that she could soonest be helped by holding still and by the right cross. Hence the joyful and fearless confession becomes so hard for her; hence it almost vexes her when she sees false and true doctrine held apart like black and white. The intertwining of protection and pressure seduces her, confuses her, so that she too is faint and sick in head and members. Everywhere witnesses are lacking who, like Daniel and his friends, fear neither the furnace-heat of a brave contest nor the lions' jaws of enmity. The older, the more venerable and estimable some chief representatives of our church appear in their personality, and the more deeply their theological consciousness and Christian view of life is rooted in that time when the church had scarcely rid itself of the shallow enlightenment of vulgar rationalism and had lost itself in the sweet chiaroscuro of supernaturalism, until indifferentism and sentimentality tenderly united and begot the Union, which prepared the most dangerous mixtures of truth and falsehood — so much the more dangerous are those men to our own time and to the youth grown up with it. This youth, founded on the confessions of the Reformation, called into the office of witness, sees itself over against the gray head which is haloed by a long and widely proven repute and borne up by great amiability, is forced into silence, and lets itself be bribed and won over, and yields one point after another which the new standpoint, the clear