# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1847 11 24_S63
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[illegible]

63

God alone, through His Word and faithful servants, was able to pour a balm of comfort into the torn hearts of the mourners, a comfort the world cannot give. Laubler fled from the scene of his outrage across the Altmarkt, through the Schössergasse, toward the castle, where, amid the pursuing outcry of the crowd — especially of some small pupils of the Kreuzschule — he was seized and captured by the guard. Upon unhesitatingly producing his murder weapon, he confessed, fearlessly and freely, what he had done. Toward ten o'clock in the evening he was already brought, under an escort of 200 soldiers, to the town jail and placed in close confinement. Instead of cursing his hellish deed, he rather made remarks such as the following: "Before carrying out the deed his heart had been quite heavy, but now it was light as a feather." — He often kissed his iron shackles with peculiar devotion, called them "Jesus-chains," and even declared "that he heartily thanked his God for having given him the grace to carry out this important work; that his soul already triumphed here with God, now that he had massacred this seducer of souls and cast down this Lucifer from the heaven of the church; that they might tear open his veins and break him on the wheel, that they might remove one limb after another from him — all this would be his greatest joy." — A veritable martyr of the devil! Once he cried out: "Cut off my head, and you will still find the host in my throat" — from which it was concluded that before committing his outrage he had taken the Holy Communion — like Judas, the betrayer of Christ, once did! His fellow believers excused him on the ground of a melancholy that had shown itself in him for some time; but his whole deed and demeanor betray themselves far too much as the outbreak of a misguided fanaticism — perhaps even one used as a mere tool — into which he could hardly have fallen by himself. Berlin newspapers called the whole affair a little trick of the Jesuits. The murderer was prepared for death and accompanied by the Catholic Father Superior Hartmann, and on the 18th of July of the same year, early at ten o'clock, on the Altmarkt before the town hall, he was broken on the wheel from above with twelve blows, and then his body was braided onto the wheel before the Black Gate — for which act both the city in general, and the marketplace and scaffold in particular, were very strongly occupied with military and civic guards.

The sad end of the blessed Hahn filled not only his congregation — which was devoted to him with heartfelt love, high esteem, and gratitude — with great sorrow and grief, which sought an outlet in countless sincere tears, but it also spread to the whole city and surrounding area. Among the lower classes of the people, too, there arose such an inflamed feeling, and a resulting agitation against the Catholics, that it would in all likelihood have turned into a full uprising against them, had not the then governor of Dresden, a Count von Wackerbarth, with great wisdom, on the one hand taken such measures as kept the mob in check, and on the other, through the mildness and love with which he personally sought to calm people's minds, shown how deeply he too felt the horror of the deed which had aroused the people's wrath.

The then superintendent of Dresden, Dr. Löscher, likewise did his part, through an eloquent and moving address to the people, to preserve calm and peace, in which, by God's grace, he also succeeded. All the wrongs which the mob committed against the Catholics consisted in the smashing of a great number of windows, in scuffles, and in other insignificant acts of violence. And although some innocent Catholics — who themselves loudly voiced a just abhorrence of the crime — suffered somewhat from this as well, still all these unregulated outbursts of the mob's rage are scarcely worth mentioning in comparison with the deed that provoked them. The lifeless M. Hahn was buried on the third day after the murder, early at three o'clock, after he had been laid out under constant guard for the general sympathy and mourning to view him one last time; and here a grateful hearer portrayed him en miniature (in small likeness), modeled in wax, lying in his coffin, as can still be seen, and as the writer of this account himself saw in the year 1826. He was carried by twenty masters, accompanied by an equal number of armed soldiers, and was laid to rest in a vault in the churchyard of St. John's, where his remarkable monument*) — which also honors his wife, who followed him into eternity in the year 1744 — still speaks of his martyrdom.

On the following 6th of June, Superintendent Dr. Löscher delivered the funeral and memorial sermon in the old Frauenkirche on the death of this faithful laborer in the vineyard of the Lord, taking as his text the words of 2 Timothy 2:11–13, and presenting from them the theme: "The eloquent blood of an innocently slain Abel."

We shall single out from it only the following heartfelt words, which we wish to share with the beloved reader in closing:

"And ah! that I should have had to speak with you once more, you beloved of the Lord, you faithful witness of Jesus Christ and of his truth. This has been my wish and that of many others, most fervently, since the pitiful murder of our dearest Herr M. Hahn, for he was torn from us as if in a storm. What could not happen in that way, I shall now be permitted to do publicly. Ah, you Nathanael of our times, you honest soul, who meant so well by God and man; you godly, faithful servant of our God, we look after you with weeping eyes and bleeding hearts. We do not know what is happening to us, and wish to be gone with you, to be torn out of the anguish and judgment of this evil, last age. Yet you had to go on before us, chosen firstfruit; your reward of grace is now with you, and you dwell in boundless honor and joy in the houses of eternal peace. Ah, could we but erect for you an everlasting memorial, we would set upon it, as shining images of virtue, five chief gifts which everyone had to admire in you. Namely: the joyfulness and confident courage which animated you in every circumstance; the untiring patience which accompanied you in all good works; the great readiness to join in and contribute to all praiseworthy things; the sincerity, pleasing to God and man, which never left you; and finally, that great generosity toward the poor which, though it may seem to have been harmful to your dear ones as regards the world and temporal things, will yet bear them such great profit with the eternally rich God, that for it they shall reap goodness and mercy without end."

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they rest from their labors, and their works do follow them. Rev. 14:13. N.

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In Fort Wayne, Ind., available from Dr. Sihler: EPITOME CREDENDORUM by the Rev. Nic. Hunnius, D.D., containing a concise and popular view of the Lutheran church (first edited in 1625), translated from the German by Paul Edward Gottheil. Nuremberg, 1847. Paperbound, 75 cents.

From No. 466 of the Apologete we learn that the well-deserved exposure which the disreputable conduct of Herr Dr. Nast received in the last number of the "Lutheraner" has not been entirely fruitless: Herr Nast is now, after all, willing to take up as much of our article into his paper as we took of his into ours. We are sorry to see, in this connection, that Herr Nast does not give God the glory by confessing his grave transgression, and thus evidently wishes to fulfill his promise at last only for the sake of avoiding shame before men. Herr Nast goes so far as to claim that he committed the censured baseness out of "magnanimity" (!!), and twists and turns, in order to get out of the noose, the matter so as to make it appear that we ought to have given a brief presentation of the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's Supper, and had failed to do so out of boundless stupidity — being unable even to copy it out of the first best textbook — whereas the whole point had only been to refute his idle talk. This conduct on the part of the Methodist leaders is the best key to the remarkable phenomenon that Methodism in America is presently and visibly on the decline, as Herr Nast himself, at last, can no longer deny or gloss over. As long as the Methodists sinned out of simplicity, so long

*) This monument was, on the 21st of May, 1826, the hundredth anniversary of Hahn's death, beautifully adorned with wreaths of flowers.