# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church and the Union. 141

gracious heart has thus forgiven you all your sin; and Christ pays him such a heavy, dear debt for you by giving up his body and blood, and grants you such a treasure as a pledge of the forgiveness of your sin, and, for the sake of your faith, lets you be with him a child and heir of God unto eternal life. Dear one! be content, then, and let God deal with you as with his own dear child, according to his fatherly will; whether he lets you live here longer or takes you from hence and bids you go to sleep with all his dear holy patriarchs, prophets, martyrs, and beloved children — then say: Father in heaven! thy will be done, and I commend myself into thy hands. Amen.

The Lutheran Church and the Union.

F. J. Stahl — in Schwarz's judgment the most intellectually significant of the orthodox dilettanti — published a work last year under the title, "The Lutheran Church and the Union," whose appearance the Ev. Kirchen-Zeitung calls "the event of the past year in the field of the Union." "The effect of Stahl's work," says the same journal, "has up to now been an extraordinary one. It has been read in the widest circles, not only of theologians but of laymen as well, and from all sides notices reach us of the deep impression it has made, of the revolution in men's ways of thinking which it has brought about. A highly placed church official, who had exercised the most influential activity in introducing the Union, warned his ordinands against this book as a very dangerous, almost enchanting one, and admonished them to read no more than a few pages of it daily, lest too strong a dose of the poison prove harmful to them." — "The whole aim of the book," reports a review of this work in the Erlangen Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche, Feb. 1860, "is to show that a Union in the full sense of the word between the Lutheran and Reformed churches is not possible, because a different spirit is present in each; but that in the Prussian church such a Union has nevertheless not actually been carried out, that the Lutheran Church has not yet forfeited its right there, and that a Lutheran may therefore, under certain conditions, remain with a good conscience in the Prussian territorial church."

In this work there are found, alongside much that is excellent, unfortunately also errors and repeated misapprehension of Lutheran doctrine and the Lutheran Church. We give below a few selected passages from the review mentioned.

Stahl distinguishes, within the reformatory movement, two main tendencies — a movement out of an evangelical spirit and one out of a natural spirit. Luther belongs to him purely and undividedly to the former tendency. "His formation and outlook, his motives, were purely Christian-religious, purely evangelical. He knew humanistic learning and