# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1858_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90

The Last Anointing.

Even this institution is being reinstated in our own day by the
Romanizing Old Lutherans. From the Nördlingen Correspondence Sheet,
published by Bauer in Neuendettelsau and Stirner in Fürth, we learn that
Mr. Löhe has done this. He indeed appeals to a saying of Luther's, who,
according to this saying, was willing to let it be that, alongside other
attending to the sick person, that same person also be anointed with
oil. But if Luther, out of his great level-headedness, granted the
papists leave to retain this, provided only that they set no [doctrinal
significance] in it, then from that it can hardly even be made to look
as though it were in Luther's sense for Lutherans now, when the omission
of that ceremony can no longer possibly offend a single Lutheran, to
reintroduce this ceremony. It does not occur to us to impute to Mr.
Pastor Löhe the already fully developed doctrine that the last anointing
is a sacrament; but that its reintroduction on his part proceeds from a
certain sympathy for a cult like the Roman one, and that, however
innocent the matter may seem now, it could easily become the seed of the
most dangerous climbing weeds in the garden of our church — of that we
have no doubt. Had Mr. Pastor Löhe a truly Lutheran spirit, it would not
occur to him to commit such extravagances, and indeed such as trample
underfoot, with unparalleled disregard, the feelings of all Lutherans,
indeed of all Protestants. History also teaches that most of the
abominations of the Roman church began very harmlessly at first. One
need not paint the devil on the wall; he comes by himself.

We let the relevant matter follow here, recording it as a sign of the
times, from the December issue of the Correspondence Sheet of the year
1857:

(From the Correspondence Sheet of the Society for Home Missions in the
Spirit of the Lutheran Church.)

The Apostolic Visitation of the Sick.*)
A Liturgical Attempt.
The introduction follows entirely the first edition of Löhe's Agenda,
p. 221 ff.

The pastor enters the room with the words:

Peace be to this house.
Answer: And to all who dwell within it.

Thereupon the pastor goes to the sick person, greets him in a friendly
manner, and speaks with him pastorally according to need. At the close
he exhorts the sick person to turn himself toward the rite that is now
to be performed upon him. — Then he begins:

Kyrie — Eleison.
Christe — Eleison.
Kyrie — Eleison.

or: Christe, hear us.

*) This liturgical attempt, which is founded on the scriptural word
James 5:14–16 and on ancient forms of the Christian church, with the
removal of every unevangelical and unscriptural addition, owes its
origin to a particular case that occurred not too long ago in the
congregation of Neuendettelsau. A sick woman of higher rank, who,
afflicted with a protracted, hard-to-cure illness, was cared for in the
local deaconess house, desired — in sober conviction and without any
blameworthy enthusiastic hope of [miraculous] success, and after prior,
thorough, pastoral discussion and instruction — to be treated on her
sickbed entirely according to James 5:14 ff.