# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S63
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary Notices. 63

Otto Glaubrecht, the well-known popular author — his real name is Rudolph Oeser — formerly pastor at Lindheim in the Wetterau, born on October 31, 1807 at Gießen, died on October 13 of last year.

"Reading-Sermon." Under this heading there is found in the Saxon Church and School Gazette of November 3 of last year a presentation of how it is a holy duty for the church to take care, as such, not only for the hearing but also for the reading of the Word of God on the part of the people. It says there: "What, then, should first be done for this in the evangelical land of Saxony? I think: a great book and art establishment ought to be founded by church bodies. It would publish, buy, exchange, and sell, like the Bible society — like the Zwickau Popular Tract Society, which already easily obtains the endorsement of the church government for a small good gift — so that it may be hoped such a bookselling house would obtain full support there, perhaps also through advances at its founding. Christian merchants must undertake the execution. In every city — in many a village, church-minded spirit will set up agencies and partnerships. Conferences will mediate. Then many colporteurs with peddling licenses would have to travel about with good writings; their arrival would have to be announced from the pulpit with the most emphatic recommendation. The fairs, too, would have to be supplied with Christian literature. Then Christian church-minded forces should again produce a people's paper that, with moral earnestness, addresses the questions of the day and gives book reviews. It could also serve as a weapon against the impudent press, which finds it so easy to mistreat the defenseless. Such papers are pulpits of immense reach. Ten times 10,000 readers present themselves before the pulpit of just such a paper." — The thoughts expressed here are certainly worthy of all attention. How much the Roman church achieves by itself taking into its own hands the provision and dissemination of religious popular literature lies plain to see; but how great a ruin is thereby wrought among the Lutheran people, in that the satisfaction of their reading needs is left simply to private individuals and, so to speak, to chance, needs no proof.

Melanchthon's Day of Death. Concerning the secular commemoration of this day, the Brunswick Church Gazette of the month of October last speaks in a manner quite similar to the Münkel Gazette. It says there, among other things: "We should wish that this memorial observance not take place. Our territorial church is a purely Lutheran one; it does not live on the fable of an originally Melanchthonian church. Melanchthon is a wholly unpopular personality; in religious-historical instruction in the schools he will always be remembered as the friend and helper of Luther, as the author of the Augsburg Confession, but he will also soon be forgotten again by the people; his memory does not live among the people, who know as reformer and as father of their faith only Luther. Melanchthon's merit for our church ends with the composition of the Confession and the Apology; his activity in the second half of his life is only ecclesiastically confusing and dissolving; in place of a firm, settled faith and confession, he sought to substitute the pliable language of scholarly mediation and ambiguity; so many of his steps are proofs of his uncertainty, his timidity, and his deviation from the Lutheran confession; the well-known alteration in the Augsburg Confession was not to be approved — the Confession had become the ""church's own work,"" solemnly and publicly delivered, signed by the Protestant estates; it was no longer a private undertaking, and to issue it again in altered form and yet under the same signatures was unwarranted. Were a memorial observance to be arranged, the instruction of the congregations would have to confine itself to highlighting Melanchthon's merits in the first half