# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the Volume of 1860. 35

no way let it be lacking through you. On the other hand, if you (as the
proverb says) should wish to maintain your position and contradict, and
set yourself against, your godly and rightly believing colleagues (which
your piety forbids us to suspect of you): what else could one surmise
from that but a dangerous and threatening, indeed a thoroughly
disastrous schism, begun not by your colleagues but by you yourself?..
We say nothing of the fact that, if you were unwilling to give your assent
to the judgment of your colleagues, which is in every way agreeable to
the Word of God and the Formula of Concord, you would certainly run
the risk of losing the position you now hold, and that, once driven from
it, you would scarcely ever afterward obtain a similar one, since a
sensible government will hardly take on a theologian whom it sees to be
so quarrelsome, so inaccessible to admonition, and so unbending that he
would rather stir up a disastrous war in the Church (whose beginnings
are often small) than improve his manner of speaking and imitate that of
the orthodox. But we think we have already gone too far in our opinion.
For we must not think or fear that you, who (as we confidently believe)
agree entirely with us in the matters themselves, will bring about a
separation from us for the sake of mere words; nor that you, who have
until now been a thorn in the eye of the devil and his instruments, the
Calvinists and Jesuits, will, by a change in your endeavors, commit
something which that evil spirit might in some way misuse for the
corruption of the happy seed of the Gospel. Given on December 8,
1593.*)
When this admonition, and the negotiations of several commissions
appointed by the Elector, also failed to move Huber, he received his
discharge the following year along with 200 thalers for travel money.
When, however, now living privately in Wittenberg, he sought to sustain
the unrest that had arisen, he finally received an order from the court to
vacate Wittenberg within eight days. Revealing himself to be a
misguided spirit, Huber now maintained once again what he had already
conceded to be erroneous and had recanted, and sought to gain a
following, among whom a Württemberger named Caspar Hirsch
particularly distinguished himself, and who was for that reason
dismissed and banished from the country. But when Huber died in 1624,
the storm subsided forever.**)

Another remarkable example of the doctrinal discipline within our
Church after the adoption of the Formula of Concord is furnished by the
proceedings against Johann Melchior Stenger, deacon and inspector
of the Gymnasium at Erfurt, born there in 1638.†) This was a man

*) See the letter, in Latin, in the Unschuldige Nachrichten, volume 1730, p. 568ff.

**) See Walch's Introduction to the Controversies of the Ev.-Lutheran Church, I,
176ff. See also the Consilia Theologica Witebergensia I, 537–656, where all the
writings issued by the Wittenberg theological faculty in the Huberian controversies
are collected.

†) He was the son of the good theologian Nicolaus Stenger, senior of the Erfurt
ministerium and later professor of theology, d. 1680.