# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S160
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

160 Church and Contemporary News.

but everywhere clarity and truth." To our great surprise Ströbel then discusses, "by way of appendix," two pieces from the "Lutheran Village Church Gazette" by Räthjen and Diedrich, as "testimonies kindred in spirit and in substance, genuinely evangelical, from the Lutheran church of Prussia," and closes the whole with the words: "In that American and these two Prussian products of the mind, more that is good and useful is stored up in a small space than is otherwise to be found in a hundred voluminous volumes of theological daily literature."

Melanchthon. Of him Hengstenberg himself says, in his preface to this year's volume of his Ev. K.-Z.: "It was not just, and rested on a defective self-knowledge, when Melanchthon laid the blame for everything he had to suffer upon his strictly Lutheran opponents, when he wished to be delivered "from this gigantomachy, from enemies full of hatred, lies, and sophistry," or from the "fury of the theologians." These "rough zealots" had the duty and mission to resist him, and their zeal, whose excess was for the most part called forth by the fact that they were oppressed by authority, that they were placed under a head who was unable to function as a head, has been the instrument in God's hand for preserving to the Lutheran church, to Germany, the noblest jewels, above all the deeper apprehension of the sacraments."

Our German Classics. Hengstenberg quotes in the same place the following remarkable judgment of David Strauss, the notorious author of the Life of Jesus, which the same man pronounced in his work "Conversations of U. v. Hutten," published last year, when he says: "It is held against the pious of today that they condemn the bearers of our great literary epoch as heathens and warn against their writings. I confess I can only find this behavior of our orthodox believers to be in order. In their sense, indeed in the sense hitherto customary, not one of our classic authors since Klopstock has still been a Christian. — — They know no revelation beyond that in the human heart, in nature and history; no miracle but the laws of nature themselves; no salvation and no reconciliation but that which the human spirit creates within itself through purification, through renunciation, and through love. At the Schiller celebration those pious people naturally looked on with an exceedingly sour face, and it was mere policy, so as not to spoil things too badly with the public, on their part, that they did not speak out even more strongly against it." One sees from this that even to unbelievers, Christians are an object of nothing but contempt, whenever the latter, for the sake of their reputation with the world, still scatter a little incense before our irreligious so-called classic authors.

That a synodal-presbyterial constitution in the Prussian Lutheran church was bound to meet opposition and become suspect is shown by a citation which Hengstenberg makes from a "memorandum on Lutheran church polity submitted to the minister" by Scheibel in the year 1831. In this memorandum the signatories express the hope of obtaining "protection for a constitution" "which the Holy Spirit has ordained in His kingdom, just as the order of God the Father in the world is a work of His power, wisdom, and goodness." Every constitution, even the most salutary otherwise and the best suited to the nature of the church, becomes an object of dread to every Christian conscience, whenever it claims a divine origin for itself and wishes to be the sole legitimate one.