# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 01 11_S79
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

take part in all these "means of grace," in the blind confidence that, through mere participation and going along with what takes place there, they will be saved. They sigh along, they perhaps also shout for joy along at times, but their heart remains unchanged. And if they do not commit gross sins, one cannot expel them. They live and die as good Methodists — whether also as good Christians is, indeed, another question.

"The manner in which a Methodist preacher is to labor is prescribed to him most exactly in the church order. It says there to him, in general: "Remember that a Methodist preacher has to attend to every point of discipline, be it small or great! You will have to use all the care and grace you possess for this. Act in all things not according to your own will, but as a son in the Gospel! As such you are obligated to employ your time in the manner prescribed by us, with preaching, with house-visiting, with reading, meditation, and prayer. Above all, if you wish to labor with us in the vineyard of the Lord, you must do that part of the work, and in the places, which we consider most conducive to God's glory." Concerning preaching, further instructions are given, among others, as follows: "Let your whole bearing be earnest, forceful, and solemn! Choose the plainest text you can find!" This latter instruction the Methodist preachers follow quite excellently. They choose, specifically, texts which deal with conversion, and preach: You shall and must be converted; if you do not do this, you are lost! etc., etc. But to set forth, from various points of view, the true nature of conversion; to demonstrate to people thoroughly, from the Word of God, appealing to their conscience, their estrangement from God and the necessity of conversion; to attack the prevailing sins and vices one by one, and to show, from the general spread of the godless way of life, how necessary a complete change of heart and life is; and along with this, lovingly to acknowledge, after Jesus' own example (John 1:47), the workings of prevenient grace sometimes present in souls — all this is, as a rule, not the Methodist preacher's business. He seeks rather to shake their feelings, in which the hymns of the Methodists, sung in part to the wildest street tunes, serve him well; then to bring the shaken ones to the mourner's bench, and there to pray with them and have them pray so long, until the Spirit testifies to them, or until they imagine the Spirit has testified to them, that they have now found grace and are children of God.

"Should these lines fall into a Methodist preacher's hands, he would exclaim in great zeal: 4000 Germans have been converted through us in a few years; is this not testimony enough by itself that God is with us and that our work is of the right kind? I reply: a troubled heart, when it hears a church melody dear to it, is comforted by it, even if it is sung by rough voices and amid many discordant notes. So too a heart eager for salvation, when it hears the preaching of repentance and forgiveness from the mouth of a Methodist preacher, can, despite the glaring discords of Methodism that directly contradict the Word of God, be thereby converted and reborn. This I do not deny at all. But the credit for this belongs not to your methods and "new measures," to which you so gladly ascribe it, but solely to the time-tested power of the Word of God. But whether many of the rebirths that, according to your own account, have taken place among you, are not rather misbirths, will become manifest in due time. Whatever good you may have done in this respect, it is abundantly outweighed by the far greater number of souls whom you have offended and estranged from the Kingdom of God. And that not through your preaching of repentance, but through your Methodist mischief, as well as through your presumption and your lack of understanding. Oh, how many have I come to know whose hearts could find no peace because of this. They had heard from you that they must be converted, and the Spirit of God had testified to them that this was true. But they had, besides, seen so much offensive in the conduct of the Methodists — namely, as widespread among most of them, a lack of kindness toward others, of gentleness and humility, and among some, moreover, a lack of honesty in business and dealings. They had, further, witnessed the groaning, jumping up, and shouting for joy in their meetings. They could not regard this as a genuine expression of feeling, because they sometimes saw that it seized everyone at once, as if on command, or as if by contagion, so to speak. Now they were in uncertainty whether, since they could not join in this excess, they should nevertheless strive for conversion, and still more, how they should attain to a pure and true conversion. Who, then, is to answer for the pitiable condition of these souls and the constant struggle within them between the feeling that things must change, and the resentment and bitterness against the people who first aroused this feeling?

"From what has been said so far, the more discerning reader will already have recognized sufficiently that a strong Roman breath runs through the Episcopal Methodist Church of North America. That this has already become a powerful driving force is shown in the hierarchical constitution of this church. When the most zealous propagator of Methodism in America, Francis Asbury, first took the title of bishop in 1784, the great John Wesley, the founder of Methodism (who would truly not acknowledge present-day American Methodism as corresponding to his intention), wrote to him as follows: "Your greatness has grieved me. How can you, how dare you, let yourself be called a bishop? I shudder at the mere thought of it. Men may call me a knave or a fool, or even a rogue or a villain, and I am content; but they shall never, with my consent, call me a bishop. For my sake, for God's sake, for Christ's sake, put an entire end to this matter! John Wesley." Besides the bishops, there are in the Episcopal Methodist Church presiding elders, elders (that is, such preachers as have to perform baptism, marriage, and the administration of the Lord's Supper), deacons, traveling preachers, settled or lay preachers, exhorters, class leaders, stewards — only no lay elders! Both at the annual conferences or synods (33 in number), and at the general conferences of the whole Methodist church, held every three years, only preachers are present, and no laymen at all. Not even the settled preachers, who pursue an earthly calling alongside preaching, are admitted to the conferences. The congregations in fact have no rights at all. Their class leaders are appointed for them by the preacher. Their preachers are sent to them by the annual conference. Their weekly monetary contributions flow into the general church treasury, over the administration of which they likewise have no say. While thus the individual congregations stand, as it were, helpless and under age, the totality of bishops, elders, traveling preachers, etc., etc., on the other hand forms so well-articulated a unity, or so complex and yet, in all its parts, so interlocking a machine, as exists nowhere else in the whole world. The unity and organization of Rome is nothing compared to this. Rome can by far not exercise so exact a control as the superiors of the Methodist church do, and the Roman priests would certainly not bring themselves to what all Methodist preachers put up with — namely, going to the annual conference wholly uncertain whether they will be left in their previous place or sent far away, east or west. These transfers, which occur sometimes every year, as a rule every two years, have chiefly the purpose of producing, through the appeal of novelty, again "a revival," or more accurately, a new excitement among the members of the congregation, and even more gladly among the unconverted who live round about.

"A most telling circumstance, furthermore, is that the Methodists are, to a high degree, disinclined to acknowledge as genuine a conversion that has taken place in secret, under the quiet working of the Spirit, whether in the retirement of one's closet or amid daily occupational labor. If, on the other hand, at a camp meeting or at some other heavily attended or highly excited gathering, the call goes forth: Whoever seeks peace for his troubled conscience, let him come here (to the mourner's bench), and he will