# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1847 09 08_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper. This latter accusation did Huss an injustice; at least he always taught definitely that Christ's body is essentially present in the sacrament. Our Lutheran readers know this from that hymn: "Jesus Christ, our Savior, who from us..." etc., which Huss composed and Luther rendered into German; in it, the second verse reads thus:

"That we should never forget this,
He gave us his body to eat,
Hidden in the bread so small,
And his blood to drink in the wine."

Thus Pope Alexander V., already in the year 1409, empowered the archbishop by a bull to have all of Wyclif's writings surrendered to him, to set up a tribunal over all his adherents, and to forbid all preaching in private chapels. Sbynko obeyed, and also forbade Huss to preach in the Bethlehem Church. A great, threatening movement arose among the people, who even mocked the archbishop. Huss too went ever further; he distinguished the true from the false in Wyclif's writings, and declared himself ready to condemn the false wherever it was demonstrated to him; but he also declared that he would not, "for the sake of a piece of bread or out of fear of man, abandon the truth which God had granted him to know, especially that revealed in Holy Scripture, but would, in hope of the help of the Holy Spirit, defend it until death." Nor did he now believe he might lay down his office at the Bethlehem Chapel, so richly blessed for the enlightenment and conversion of many; "whoever," he said, "omits, on account of a human ban, the preaching of the true God entrusted to him by the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God, him God himself has excluded from his fellowship; the priest of Christ must obey the voice of the Holy Spirit, and patiently bear the human ban"; and when miracles were demanded of him to certify his call to preach, he replied: "To confess the truth and follow Christ is the most powerful testimony of a divine sending."

So Huss continued humbly in his office and testimony, and, according to the custom of that time, appealed "from the wrongly informed Pope to one to be better informed." But the Pope, John XXIII, summoned him to Rome through Cardinal Colonna. Huss excused himself on the grounds of lack of safety, and sent a proxy. Colonna excommunicated him; when, however, the university and the king interceded for him, the Pope initiated a new investigation, in the course of which the king brought about a settlement between Huss and Sbynko.

But God had determined to set the dear Huss, as a light for all coming times, upon a high candlestick; he therefore had to be drawn, by the same occasion as Luther a hundred years later, into a decisive struggle against the seat of the Antichrist. For in 1412 Pope John XXIII sent to the new archbishop, Albik, a crusade bull against King Ladislaus of Naples, which promised complete indulgence to those who would join the war, and in Bohemia the kingdom of heaven was now sold, through the most shameless preacher of indulgences, to anyone who merely gave money. Outraged at this abuse, Huss not only composed writings against the bull and the Pope's indulgence, but also held a public disputation against it, while his friend Jerome (of Prague) stirred the hearts of the people with a fiery speech. Thus there appeared, in 1413, a papal bull which pronounced the ban upon Huss, and laid his place of residence under interdict (the prohibition of public worship). Huss now solemnly appealed from the unjust verdict of the Pope to the one just, incorruptible judge who could be deceived by no false testimony, Jesus Christ; he also now wrote his important book "On the Church," in which he declares the Church — which needs no other head than Christ — to be the whole company of the elect, excludes from it all the unregenerate, and thus denies that the Church is a visible kingdom. Thereupon the archbishop made the papal judgment known and carried it out. In order not to cause unrest, Huss preferred to leave Prague altogether, still in 1413, and betook himself to Hussinecz.

He now often preached before great crowds of people in the open fields, wrote, in this his Wartburg, like Luther, a postil on the Bible in the Bohemian language (still extant in manuscript at Prague), and encouraged his congregation at Prague in letters, in which his firm faith, his evangelical joyfulness, and childlike submission express themselves most beautifully. Playing on the name Huss, which in the Bohemian language means "goose," he writes in one of those letters: "Because the goose, a tame animal that cannot rise high in its flight, has broken through its snares, falcons and eagles will come after me, who through the Word of God and a holy life will soar higher in their flight, and will draw many away to the Lord Christ, etc. This is the nature of truth, that the more one seeks to suppress it, the more strongly it rises up."

At this time a general church council was to be held at Constance on Lake Constance in Baden, and Huss's case was also to be decided there. Emperor Sigismund therefore summoned Huss before this public ecclesiastical court through his brother, King Wenceslaus, but also sent him a written document by which free imperial safe-conduct there and back was assured to him. Several Bohemian knights warned the dear man against accepting the summons and offered him their protection. But in vain — Huss was determined to follow this important call. In his farewell letter to his Prague congregation he expresses his disposition as follows: "If my death can glorify His name, then may He, my almighty Redeemer, grant me the grace to bear all sufferings with courage. But if it be conducive to my salvation that I return to you, then let us ask God that it may happen without harm to the evangelical truth, so that together we may know the truth more purely," etc. So Huss, accompanied by several knights, foremost among them his faithful Johann von Chlum, set out on his journey, and appeared — in joyful trust in God, and in any case resigned to the will of the Lord — to make a confession of his faith before the representatives of all Western Christendom, on the 3rd of November, 1414, at Constance.

(Conclusion to follow.)

Church Dedication.

We cannot help but share with our friends in the East a piece of news from the West — somewhat belated, though it is — which we hope will give them joy. In Palmyra, namely, a pretty little town of about 1,200 inhabitants, roughly 150 miles north of St. Louis and 7 miles inland from the right bank of the Mississippi, there is at present a small German Lutheran congregation of some thirty-odd communicants. We were kindly invited by them to take an active part in the dedication of their newly built little church. We accepted the invitation and were heartily glad to make the acquaintance of the congregation's pastor, whom we had not until then known personally.

He — his name is Best — had formerly been a teacher in Anspach, in the district of Usingen, Duchy of Nassau, but was removed from his office by his ecclesiastical — or rather unspiritual and unbelieving — superiors solely because he had refused to recant the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper, which he had set forth in a catechetical exercise assigned to him for the teachers' conference. This took place in the year 1833, and became the reason that Mr. Best, with wife and child, but also accompanied by a small band of awakened Christians, emigrated to America, where he, together with some of his companions, finally settled in the place named above. At the urgent entreaty of a small number of German Lutherans there, he accepted the call to become their preacher and the teacher of their children. For a long time, however, worship had to be held in the pastor's living room, until at last, through God's help, a church came to be built. It is of brick, forty feet deep and thirty feet wide, with six-foot-high windows in pointed-arch form. The dedication of the church took place on the eighth Sunday after Trinity. In the morning, Pastor Best gave the dedication prayer and the sermon on Habakkuk 2:20: "But the Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him." From this text he showed how the Lord was present not only in the temple of the Old Testament, but is so even now in the assemblies of Christians, namely whenever there the Word