# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S367
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church in Hungary. 367

...will have nothing at all to do with. For with regard to the saints of the ancient church, those dogmaticians taught nothing other than what the symbolical books teach. But while Löhe thus declares his wish to remain with the confession, he sets side by side — perhaps without being clearly aware of it himself — two things that do not agree with one another. If I am not mistaken, the progress of Lutheranism is supposed to consist in combining the dogma of the Reformation with the works- and renunciation-practice of the ancient church. But that means wanting to graft onto our church a fruit that not only did not spring from the root of its life, but that threatens, in turn, to corrupt that very root of life. For this old works- and renunciation-practice did not itself spring from faith in justification by grace alone. The two may float side by side unmixed for a while, like oil and water — but in the long run it will not remain so; the pure wellspring is corrupted, the practice of works overgrows it, the supposed further development destroys the reformational principle, and the jewel of our fathers' faith goes to pieces before we are aware of it. All this begins, as it always has, with small beginnings that seem harmless to the unwary. But whoever knows history therefore knows what it means to resist the beginnings. Nothing other than this did I intend with these lines.

"To the law and the testimony: if they do not speak thus, they shall have no dawn." Do not pour new wine into old wineskins, and do not put old patches on new garments! Let the Word be a lamp to your feet, not shadows, phantoms, tales, and fantasies. It must not come to this, that you would rather read legends of the saints than the history of the saints of the Old and New Testament — the story of the nun of Dülmen more eagerly than the Passion according to the Evangelists, Thomas à Kempis more than the anointed and sound guides of our believing fathers. And if, at the end of a history of Christian women and maidens, I had to tell you of Olympias, I would copy out everything that Chrysostom preached to her against the excess of her love and reverence for him. For let Jesus Christ alone be your passion. You are bought at a price; do not become the servants of men! —

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The Lutheran Church in Hungary.

Both the radical political press and the unionist neo-believing religious periodicals have of late been zealous in spreading thoroughly untrue reports about the condition of the Lutheran Church in Hungary, and in creating the impression that the movements against the government still repeatedly appearing and ever newly arising in Hungary had their ground, among other things, in a genuine interest for the welfare of the church. What follows, taken from a longer report in the periodical for Prot-