# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literature. 187

resist us, in whom both all ability and all will wholly fail to
understand and appreciate our faith and our doing. —
So we remain to this day, as before, misjudged, despised, reviled,
and trampled underfoot, and shall continue to be so as long as it pleases
God, until the hour comes when he goes into judgment with his and our
gainsayers. Until then we are, as heretofore, as outlaws; where we are
let alone, we hold our divine services in peace, and where it pleases the
police authorities, every wrong done to us is permitted and accounted
right, and we must go secretly and at the hour of night to baptize the
little ones in our congregations, to visit the sick, or to gather in remote
back rooms and in the lonely forest (as recently happened) to celebrate
our divine services. Yet we may boast to the praise of the Lord that we
have felt no weariness or encroaching coldness up to this hour in our
congregations, nor has the slightest prospect shown itself that the hope
of our opponents might be fulfilled, that through the continued system
of pressure they might in the end squeeze us out. On the contrary, the
Lord has granted us, at the beginning of the new church year, a special
Advent joy, namely the conversion of several persons to the Lutheran
Church, high up in our Westerwald, in a part of our land that had
hitherto stood quite remote from us and that, moreover, in old times was
purely Reformed, and where now, so far as there are still Christians
among the people, only the pietistic tendency prevails. So we have now,
for the first time in our Nassau territory, come into closer contact with
adherents of this latter tendency, whereas formerly we had always had
to do only with the blind and unconverted world, out of which our
church members have been awakened, won, and gathered into Lutheran
congregations through our preaching.

I reported to you earlier that in our Nassau Union territorial church
a new union catechism is intended to be introduced, a composite of the
Reformed Heidelberg Catechism and our own small Lutheran one. But as
one hears, it will hardly come to that, since even such a union catechism
is still far too orthodox and confessional for the pastors, and an almost
universal opposition to it is said to have arisen on the part of
rationalism. Whether one will now remain quietly in the old comfortable
peace concluded in the union year 1817, or contemplate other plans,
remains to be seen. Otherwise I would not know what to communicate
to you from the domain of our territorial church.

(Freimund.)

Literature.

The following review of a recent important publication in the field
of homiletics, of which the Rev. Prof. Dr. Guericke is the author, and which we