# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S32
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

32 Ecclesiastical-Contemporary Chronicle.

of God, but rather either a pure work of men or of the devil, and that the men entrusted with directing it were either deceivers or deceived, misled either by pure human imagination or by satanic influence. This declaration they were to make sub fide sacerdotali (that is, on oath), in writing and signed with their own hand, with "yes" and "true," and to be ready to confess it publicly (that is, from all the pulpits of the diocese). No attempt at mediation was accepted; only the choice between unconditional submission and excommunication was left to them. But even the first proposition — that outside the Roman Church there is no salvation, so that the many who belong to the Eastern Church forfeit it just as much as the members of the other Western churches; that these, despite baptism, faith, and so forth, are eternally lost; that therefore outside the Roman Church the Holy Spirit neither works nor can work, and the like — this they could not, in good conscience, acknowledge. They believed they had to hold fast to this: that baptism and faith, in whatever church it might be, make one a partaker of salvation, and that the Holy Spirit, especially in our own day, is unusually active even outside the Roman Church. It was as an effect of this that they in fact regarded that work.

Thereupon the excommunication followed.

But they were not content merely to excommunicate these Irvingians and to remove the priests from office; the cathedral chapter also called in the police against the latter. At the request of the ordinariate, Pastor Fernsemer of Augsburg and Dean Fischer of Neu-Ulm were expelled by the police and each confined to his home district in such a way that neither of them may take a walk into a neighboring village without being seized and transported by the police like a common criminal. From this, as from the further instructions given to the police authorities regarding the surveillance of those of Irvingian sentiment or of Irvingian agents, one can see that the episcopal ordinariate does not regard and treat the danger threatening from that quarter as a contemptible one.

We hear of a widespread agitation among the younger clergy in the Swabian district of Bavaria. Whether Irvingian leanings underlie it is unknown to us. But Irvingianism is for that very reason not without danger to the Roman Church, because it shares with her the fundamental views of church, office, priesthood, ordination, sacrament, and so forth, and thus does not involve a complete change of principle but only a partial modification in the application of principle; while for the oddities whose acceptance it demands, it compensates by the elements of truth that it brings. Without doubt, however, the new Marian dogma is a factor in that movement, and it may perhaps yet prove, to good effect, that instead of strengthening the Roman Church it has rather contributed to shaking it.

Löhe has received a letter from a member of the Frankenmuth congregation, which he has included in his Mittheilungen. Among other things it reads as follows: Do not be vexed that I write of nothing but such matters as are of little worth to you! Of church affairs I write nothing, because I know that you are informed of them far more fully from other quarters than I could manage. As for myself, I live with our dear Synod in one confession; what befalls it befalls me too, what gladdens it gladdens me too. Yet one thought weighs on me and is mingled with a deep sigh, when I consider that you stand so far from us and from our Synod. *) I can, indeed, do nothing else but pray a Lord's Prayer for it, and sing with Paul Gerhardt: "So grant then Thy grace for peace and bonds of love, and join together in every land what has been sundered." As a simple layman I can find nothing better for my part than to hold fast to the confessional writings which our fathers acquired for us at so dear a cost. I will neither add to them nor take from them; nor will I wish for a fairer heaven than my fathers had. I will live and die in their faith, as God gives grace, and stake goods and blood upon it if need be, and so fulfill the promise I made to you twelve years ago, when you said to us and gave us, as it were, for the road: Depart not from your confession, not even by one jot. God help us to that!

*) Apparently so! (Löhe's remark.)