# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S256
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

256 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

The canon or papal law, whose burning is now held against Luther by certain Lutherans as a reproach, is a kind of civil law — call it, if you will, ecclesiastical-state law, the thing remains the same. It is through and through political, and wherever it is asserted it always produces the striving not only for independence from secular power but also for dominion over it, which the Jesuit order — that most faithful expression of the Roman church — betrays most plainly. But the papacy was already on this path long before Pepin, and it was only a wholly natural impulse that it stretched out its hand for a secular crown, in order to become wholly what it already was half. If one wishes thoroughly to strip the papacy of its secular power, one will have to let it creep back into the egg out of which it began to hatch in the third century; or one will have to transform it so that it is dissolved. But that is not at all Döllinger's intention. He has in view the German bishops, who are supposed to have only gained in spiritual influence through the confiscation of their principalities. Now even granting that it is undisputed that the bishops, restored to their spiritual calling, have also exercised greater spiritual influence, still the influence upon the masses of the people and upon the public powers has at the same time shrunk enormously. That is why the bishops have been so eager to conclude concordats that would secure their ecclesiastical-political standing; and where these plans failed, they have played quite a pitiful role. Look at the Papal States itself — how pitiful it looks there, since the pope's power has fallen! This world-church needs external force to attain its goal; and the more it is driven out of its old strongholds, the more surely it is driven toward a transformation heavy with consequences."

The Upper Church Council of the Lutheran Church in Prussia, which for some years had carried on negotiations with the Mission College in Leipzig over the question of altar fellowship — negotiations that threatened to dissolve the connection hitherto existing between the two bodies — has accepted the "final concession" of the Mission College, in which the latter declared itself to the effect that, while it must decidedly hold sacramental fellowship among the students, for weighty reasons close at hand, to be desirable as a rule, it would nevertheless not only always show a delicate and considerate treatment of conscientious scruples regarding participation in a communion at which, with the pastor's knowledge, Unionists or Reformed also take part, but would also, under certain circumstances and in a spirit of pastoral consideration, permit a student to have his confessor elsewhere. Only it must presuppose that the right of decision in individual cases remain reserved to it altogether. When now the O.-K.-C. for its part gave the declaration that it would, to be sure, for its own part also hold an exceptional admission of Unionists to the Lord's Supper — as is widely the practice in the territorial churches — to be questionable, and could not cease bearing testimony against it; but that it would not demand of the Mission College explicit assent to this its basic view as a condition of its remaining in the Leipzig Mission; it would only wish that the principle "communion fellowship is church fellowship" be generally recognized, and that accordingly the vulgar-unionist communion practice which denies this principle be rejected — to this the Mission College answered: it would truly have departed wholly from the foundation of a Lutheran mission were it not decidedly to disapprove of a sacramental administration in which "as a matter of principle, knowingly, and publicly, Unionists or Reformed are admitted promiscuously," or in which the principle of such admission is officially proclaimed; and it did not know how it had deserved that anyone could doubt this even for a moment.

Death. On April 20 of this year, the former general superintendent and cathedral preacher Möller in Magdeburg died after a four-year illness. At his own wish, his funeral sermon was preached on the words: "Let it be enough for thee, that thou hast My grace."