# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S276
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

276 Old Hartmann's Faithful Counsel, That Preachers, etc.

...concentrates the antichristian enmity of the beast, just as Daniel too (8:8) sees the Antichrist arising out of the Roman world power. Of the seven heads, now, one receives a mortal wound — but we say: it is precisely this sixth head, which in Apoc. 13 is the most important, that receives the wound, for the context of the chapter (v. 3, 4, 12) allows no other appearance than that it is precisely the head that has been healed which receives the worship of the earth and blasphemes God. This mortal wound, however, we know of no better historical way to interpret than through the fall of the Roman Caesar, and the healing of the wound is then nothing other than the revival of Roman world power in the papacy, which has indeed received the worship of the whole earth, has blasphemed God, and has persecuted the church as the true Antichrist.

————

(Submitted by Prof. C.)
Old Hartmann's Faithful Counsel, That Preachers Should Have Their Delivered Sermons Judged by Fellow Ministers or by Other Christian People Versed in the Matter.

(Translated from Hartmann's Pastorale Evangelicum, p. 437 etc.)

Further, the preacher should seek and demand from his colleagues a judgment on his sermons and ask for a critique; or, if he has no colleagues, critiques of the sermons should be arranged at the pastoral conferences, which the individual members will deliver in turn at the conferences. One may also hear and seek the judgment of other pious people who are equipped with knowledge and particular experience in sacred matters, and who have a zeal for the advancement of Christ's kingdom — such people as, by God's grace, are still found here and there, even amid the otherwise so great mass of atheists, of ignorant and malicious people.

The benefit of such critiques would be excellent and incredible, provided that both those who pass judgment and those who are judged conducted themselves rightly in the matter. For that love innate in us, according to which each of us is too much inclined toward himself, causes us never to be able to judge rightly about ourselves. Something of the same sort happens to us as happens to those who view something through a glass, or through vapors, or through a spyglass, to whom things always appear and seem larger than they actually are. Often we think we have made our work excellent and splendid, while in truth we have gone, and continue to go, hopelessly astray.

Not infrequently, too, we do indeed acquit ourselves fairly well of the matter, but there still clings to it some small flaw which so disfigures our speech or action or the matter itself that it takes away much from our full praise, and which is, so to speak, a blemish or a wart on a fine and beautiful