# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S294
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

294 Remarks on the Office.

"In the German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, under the word 'Amt' [office], after some observations on its linguistic history that close with the sentence, 'Scarcely any other German word can claim such worth and be so instructive for the history of our language,' the following is said: 'The present-day Amt expresses chiefly the service, the business, with which someone is charged.' And numerous citations follow for this. Of these I will single out only a few that seem to me particularly noteworthy for my purpose: 1) from the preface to Sebastian Frank's Weltbuch: the novelty, wonder, and manifold variety of the things will nonetheless keep the reader occupied [im Amt] (Grimm adds by way of explanation: held fast in reading). 2) From the same, 219b: it is a very unchaste people, and begins at the age of eight to practice the office [Ampt] of woman. 3) From Opitz's Poeterei, p. 1: poetry, too, was practiced earlier than anyone ever wrote about its nature, its office, and its appurtenances. 4) From Logau 1, 9, 59: although calling and station observe the Sabbath day, his office shall nonetheless always administer Christianity. 5) From the same, 3, 3, 79: to be honest is as much an office as one holds to be the best, and those capable of it are quite scarce in the world. 6) From Simplicissimus 1, 25: that I was robbed of the office [use] of my senses. 7) From Wieland: the hot time of day takes the place of [the office of] night in this land. — I myself will take the liberty of adding, as 8), the following passage from Luther's Large Catechism on the Third Commandment, which seems to me very remarkable: 'This, then, is the plain meaning of this commandment: since one otherwise keeps holy days, one is to arrange such observance so as to learn God's Word, so that the proper business [Amt] of this day is the preaching office, for the sake of the young people and the common crowd.'

What follows from that pronouncement of Jacob Grimm's — who was certainly wholly unbiased with respect to our point of controversy — and from these examples? According to German usage, it belongs essentially to the concept of Amt merely that it be a task assigned to someone, yet in such a way that the assignment itself must be understood in a very broad sense, since in most of the passages cited it denotes a determination lying in the physical or spiritual nature of the subject — in the first passage even merely a commission given, as it were, by the person to himself, a determining resolve of his own to which the doing corresponds.

A certain exclusiveness in the assignment of the activity that constitutes the content of the office does, accordingly, also belong essentially to the concept of office; for by the very fact that a doing is assigned, in whatever sense, to a particular subject, we must of ourselves understand it to be implied that, according to the will of the one assigning it, this doing is to belong to him exclusively, to the exclusion of others, in contrast to others. Only here the "belonging" must not be understood as an entitlement, but must be grasped as an obligation (in other words, not as a being-able and being-permitted,