# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1861_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ecclesiastical-Contemporary Notes. 283

sin and disgrace." For the other assertion the gentleman appeals to Luther's words: "Our opinion, however, is this: that the body is so with or in the bread, that it is truly eaten with the bread, and that everything the bread effects and undergoes also applies to the body of Christ, so that one may truly say the body of Christ is carried, given, received, and eaten. That is what the words mean: This is my body." But so that the conclusion Mr. E. K. draws may become clearer, he adds: "In the German original, as Luther's Works give it (Halle edition XVII, page 2486" [should read 2190]) "it says still more graphically: '''Thus that — the body of Christ — is eaten and chewed with the teeth.'''" One sees from this that the writer does not even know that these latter words are not those of the original at all, but of a corrupted translation! Moreover, even if Luther really does use similar expressions elsewhere, this is merely a sacramental manner of speaking, by which he nonetheless decisively rejects the sense that writer attaches to it. Thus, for example, Luther writes in his great "Confession concerning the Lord's Supper" of 1528: "Just as John says that he saw the Holy Spirit when he saw the dove, as has been heard: so henceforth it is rightly said that whoever touches this bread touches the body of Christ, and whoever eats this bread eats the body of Christ, whoever crushes this bread with teeth or tongue crushes the body of Christ with teeth or tongue; and yet it remains always true that no one sees, touches, eats, or bites the body of Christ as one visibly sees and bites other flesh. For what is done to the bread is rightly and properly ascribed to the body of Christ for the sake of the sacramental union." (See Works, Walch edition XX, 1294.) It is much the same with the reproach that Luther believed, and that all Old Lutherans must therefore consistently also believe, that all newborn children are possessed by the devil. This gentleman opponent proves by this reproach only that he is not capable of understanding Luther's bold language. Luther, far from any love of innovation as he was, retained the old manner of speech as a strong expression for the misery of original sin, in which indeed all newborn children lie. That is the short solution of the whole riddle. Rudelbach judges likewise. He writes: "When Luther first issued his little baptismal book in 1523, he retained the double exorcism, following the main principle that guided him here too, that one ought not abolish anything by force through which the Gospel might suffer harm. His standpoint was entirely the Augustinian one, according to which 'being possessed by the devil' and 'being a child of sin and disgrace' counted as one and the same thing; he understood the whole adjuration as a movable complaint of the church, which sought to wrest a new member, in the person of the one being baptized, from the kingdom of the evil one and to offer it up to the Lord." (See Die Sacramentsworte. By Dr. A. G. Rudelbach. 2nd ed. Nördlingen, Beck. p. 37.)

The Synod of Iowa had, at the close of the year 1860, as we learn from Löhe's Mittheilungen, 25 organized and 4 not yet organized congregations, 22 preachers, and 3 schoolteachers. Pastor Schieferdecker's congregation at Altenburg is given as consisting of 272 souls.

Concerning the Cause of Our War, a correspondent of the "Missionary" of August 15 expresses himself, among other things, as follows: "The calamities that have been brought upon our land for the sake of slavery remind us that God regards it as a great national sin, however small a thing we and our rulers may consider it. He has no respect for that sort of thing which we call 'constitutional rights,' where those rights collide with and violate the rights given by God to the least of his creatures, and he will not allow us to take refuge behind such a flimsy rampart. We have sinned as a nation in that we have established a national constitution that transgresses and declares invalid the great law of Jesus Christ.... We have sinned like Pharaoh, when he declared: I will not let the people go. As a nation we have said the same thing in that clause of the Constitution on which the Fugitive Slave Law is founded; and it may be that all this treachery and the crimes accompanying it, this great war and all