# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Vilmar's Doctrine of the Office and the Church, etc. 19

The laying on of hands, to be sure, is not to be a sacrament, "but still
less an empty ceremony; in the New Testament it is to be an impartation
of power, which the Lord granted to the apostles, an exercise of power
by which the Holy Spirit was imparted together with his charisms."
And this impartation of power was propagated by the apostles further.
And Herr Vilmar says further: in order to carry out that exercise of
power, we ourselves must possess the Holy Spirit: "We are in this case
no dispensers of a sacrament, on whose worthiness or unworthiness the
efficacy of our action does not depend; the Holy Spirit is this time not,
as in Holy Baptism, given over to the element, bound to the Word (of
institution), or, if one prefers, tied to it, but is united with our own
spirit and passes through the organs of the spirit — the soul and the
body — over onto the spirit of the other. This time it is our own self, in
the most personal manner, that is involved in the impartation of the
Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands." Of the clergyman he says
(p. 90): "from him, from his soul, all these souls demand life and
blessedness; they demand it — he cannot conceal this from himself —
rightly." "And if one asks whence this right, whence the power
corresponding to this right? — That one source is Christ the Lord
himself, who set him — however weak, however entangled in sins
himself, however sick with sins the poor man may be — in His stead into
the office of the Word and the sacraments, which office is directly and
immediately His own office, can be His office alone in the most immediate
manner, because from this office alone the truth goes forth, the way is
shown, the light shines down into the congregation." "Only out of this
security, out of this certainty, it goes on to say, that the office is
represented directly by Christ, . . . there flows for us the unconditional
inflexibility amid the storms of the world and amid the temptations
which even the believers and saints suffer . . . the power to cleave the
head of sin with a single word, the power also to descend into a soul
into which the evil enemy has sunk the night of madness, and, through
the deep darkness, to cast the ray of light, ' "Christ is coming!" ' — All
that the congregation cannot do, not even the congregation of the saints;
therefore it also cannot for that reason bestow power, commission,
mandate, and strength. Above all, it is not able to look into the devil's
wrathful eyes . . . Only we do not startle and do not fear, for he who cast
out the prince of this world has set us before the devil's bleak
serpent-eye, before his blaspheming and scornfully laughing mouth, and
before his countenance twitching with hellish rage." — The clergyman
also has, by virtue of his office (not as a charism), "the power of
spiritual sobriety and self-possession." Finally, the clergyman has, by
the strength of his office, the power not merely to proclaim to the
individual the forgiveness of his sins, but to forgive him these his sins
himself.

But what notions are these of the spiritual office and the clergyman —
what more could a Catholic say of it! How poorly does he think of the
spiritual office who supposes that it has only the