# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S194
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

194 Editorial Correspondence.

there lived a man who once, now almost twenty-two years ago, emigrated to America with us Saxons, but after a two-year stay there returned again, whose heart, however, remained with the Church in America, and who was, here in Germany, the most intimate friend and advocate of our Synod, with which he was in complete accord in spirit and in faith: it is Mr. Franz Adolph Marbach, Royal Saxon Councillor of Finance, Knight, etc. When I first came, on my tour from Hamburg to Leipzig, I found him, although he stood in the sixty-third year of his life, still almost youthfully fresh and strong in body and spirit, and he refreshed and strengthened me in every respect through fellowship with the dear man. When I touched Leipzig the second time and followed his urgent invitation to lodge with him, I found him suffering from periodic headaches, yet in his pain-free hours still mentally lively and productive. In the hope that the trouble would soon be relieved, I now made an excursion for a few days, after the completion of which I hastened back in expectation of being able to enrich myself further, now without hindrance, through fellowship with the man named. But behold! God's thoughts had been altogether different. Already on the day before my return, on Wednesday, June 6, he — my most intimate friend in the old fatherland — had fallen gently asleep in the confession of Christ, the sole hope of his soul. This alone was still granted to me: to press the hand of his dear corpse and to follow it, on Saturday, June 9, to its resting place, where I heard a comforting, splendid funeral oration, which his father confessor and friend, the Reverend Pastor Dr. Ahlfeld, delivered to the departed on the words, "Whoever confesses me before men," etc., portraying and depicting from his life the departed as a faithful confessor of his Lord, blessed even unto death. The more painfully some had felt, during his lifetime, the open and decided testimony of the departed for the pure truth and against all false doctrine and impure conduct, the more gratifying were the testimonies, spoken and written aloud after his death by men of the most various ranks — as much from the learned as from simple laymen, as much from the highly placed up to princes as from the lowliest servants — that the deceased had been to them light and salt, and to no small degree himself the instrument of their rescue out of this wicked world; of what he had been to the state and to society as a statesman of eminent knowledge, richest experience, deep discernment, rarest skill, incorruptible fidelity, and tireless activity, even in the times of the worst confusion, there is no need to speak here. His memory, as that of a righteous man, though much misjudged in life, will remain in blessing. —

May I now, given the complete want of events to report, express here what my heart felt at the meeting with a great number of church workers and church members here: I must confess that this was, above all, the unity in doctrine and faith that