# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S189
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 189

restraint — "not an unwarranted aversion to the Reformed [Church], but
rather a justified preference for one's own Church" — that determined him.
Preachers who were recognized by the Lutheran community as a whole
as false teachers he has passed over; that he did not, however, apply
this latter principle to Major, still less to Amsdorff, needed no
justification. So we bid this most praiseworthy undertaking heartily
welcome, and do not doubt that many, particularly among practical
clergy, will share this welcome, and we wish that the learned and
diligent author may find the necessary time to complete, according to
his plan, a homiletical composite portrait of the Old Lutheran Church
(with "Old Lutheran" taken in the truly historical sense, not in the
perverse sense of our own time, which calls out-and-out New Lutherans
"Old Lutherans"), and thus to let two further volumes follow this first
one — which indeed already lets the greatest witnesses speak — namely
Lutheran preachers from the second half of the 16th and from the 17th
century, in their own time. (G.)

Church and Contemporary History.

Abroad.

The United Church of Prussia. The following is written about it by
Dr. Luthardt in this year's preface to the Saxon Church and School
Gazette:

It is true, the ecclesiastical situation in Prussia has somewhat changed. But I do
not believe that the Evangelical Alliance has dealt a lasting blow to the Lutheran party
within the United Church. For that it has too greatly discredited itself. The further
one goes in this direction, and especially should Bunsen obtain some official
ecclesiastical standing again, the more untenable the Union becomes, and the more
likely a withdrawal on a large scale. Then it will be a matter — as Hengstenberg
reminds us in the preface to his Ev. K.-Z. of 1857 — not of a withdrawal of 10,000
and 20,000, as has perhaps been supposed, but of quite different numerical
proportions; and indeed of the withdrawal precisely of the most vital members. There
are, to be sure, some who feel little anxiety about this. General Superintendent
Hoffmann declared: he feared and lamented a separation from the territorial church,
but even the greatest separation would not deal the Church so deep a wound as an
abolition of the Union would. One would then have five churches. — One sees how
seriously this possibility is already being reckoned with. That the remaining
members of the Supreme Church Council do not take it so lightly as Hoffmann, but
seek to prevent it through concessions which they show themselves inclined to make
to Lutheranism within the Union, is shown by the decree of July 7, 1857, concerning
parallel liturgical formularies, which may indeed be described as a further step on the
path toward a loosening of the Union. For to a high degree the confessional need is
here taken into account, and the Union is at bottom restricted to unity of church
government and to the admission of the Reformed to the Holy Supper by Lutheran
congregations, granted out of free love. The development of ecclesiastical affairs in
Prussia will, with inner necessity, continue on the path toward a dissolution of the
Union. For this reason Superintendent Stier at Schkeuditz has also taken up the
cause of the endangered Union and has founded a united pastoral association of the
Province of Saxony which, as the newspapers report, is said to have grown to about
150 members, founded in the spirit of J. Müller's Consensus-Union. But precisely
thereby, in the very stronghold of the Union, in Halle, the struggle against it has been