# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S53
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Secret Societies etc. 53

heathens still living tribe by tribe; but that is no dominion of force, but of spirit. The author himself raises the question whether his conception is in agreement with the confession of the church, and reassures himself and his readers with the thought that our Church's confessions oppose only the notion of the establishment of a purely worldly kingdom at the end of days. We hold this to be a self-deception. To be sure, the Augustana (Art. 17) is directed in the first instance against the fanaticisms of the Anabaptists, and the German wording speaks of a "worldly kingdom"; but the general designation of the expressly rejected Jewish opinion, quod ante resurrectionem mortuorum pii regnum mundi occupaturi sint, ubique oppressis impiis [that before the resurrection of the dead the pious would take possession of the kingdom of the world, after the godless had everywhere been suppressed], fits — unless one wishes to force a contrived distinction — completely also the author's own opinion; the rejection of a purely worldly state and of a rule of force does not yet make that dominion of believers which the author asserts into anything other than this regnum mundi. By a mere refinement the matter is not essentially altered; worldly, as opposed to the purely spiritual, is what the kingdom of Christ, as ruling over the heathen peoples standing outside it, will always be under the arrangement given, just as we too call the Roman hierarchy worldly even where it employs no force. The main point, on which everything depends, is the assumption of a first resurrection a thousand years before the Last Judgment; but the Augsburg Confession knows strictly only a general resurrection of all the dead on the Last Day; and with that chiliasm stands in plain contradiction. So too has the Lutheran Church understood it at all times, and the chiliasts have been combated with decisiveness — though not exactly as heretics.*) (Dr. A. Wuttke.)"

The Secret Societies
in the Light of Mere Natural Reason.

As is well known, there are even preachers who wish to be counted among the believers, yet who nonetheless believe, with a good conscience, that they can be members of certain secret societies. These are generally of the opinion that only a certain narrow-minded hyperorthodoxy makes participation in such societies a sin; the rightly understood Word of God, they say, is by no means against it, still less unprejudiced, sound reason. From this one sees that there now exist so-called "believing" preachers

*) Walch, Introduction to the Religious Controversies of the Lutheran Church, II, 586ff. (Repertorium.)