# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1861_S346
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

346 The Romanizing Tendency of the Volksblatt für Stadt und Land.

heart — but not the element that actually rules within the organism;
there, rather, it is necessarily the majority that rules, more or less —
that is, this mutilated form of the state, the republic, in which it is,
apart from some special miracle, a matter of chance how far Christ holds
sway. The Protestant church can only be governed by a miracle (sic!)." —
— Indeed, in a regrettable ignorance of the doctrine on both sides, he
can, in a later essay, even express himself thus about the doctrine of
justification: "It would be an untrue and unjust claim to say that the
two — the Catholic and the Evangelical Church — do not agree in this: that
we can be redeemed from sin and made righteous before God only through
his grace in Christ, who has purchased us with his holy blood. A
divergence between the two arises only where the question is asked how
man is to comport himself toward that grace — grace apart from whose free
gift (on this both agreed) we would be utterly lost. And where, on the
Catholic side, works come into consideration, it should be well noted
that, in theory — as the Catholic confessional writings most emphatically
stress — the works in question are not at all works which man can perform
by his own power (works of the Law), but rather, solely and exclusively,
works which not he himself, but the freely given grace, works through
him. That through every deed accomplished in the strength of Christ — for
instance, self-conquest, etc. — the soul grows somewhat in perfection, we
can readily grant. The Catholic view, however, is that this growing
perfection, which necessarily follows from true faith, is itself a
condition of salvation (in that only through it do we come ever nearer to
God); whereas it is Protestant doctrine that true faith alone, and fully,
conditions salvation, though of course this progressive perfecting and
sanctification in good works must necessarily follow from it — as
confirmation that the faith is genuine, as thanks toward God, and as its
fruit. — On this basis it seems to me, in fact, that the opposition is
not so fundamental (sic!), insofar as the practice one must rightly draw
from the one teaching as from the other, and the whole conduct, feeling,
and striving of the soul, must be the same under the one as under the
other. I say: rightly applied — so it will all come down to the
application (only that?)." — And once before this: "It is not the
kernel of faith that separates us from Rome, for that is the same Son of
God; rather it is the method (the manner of appropriation). We find much
to criticize in the method of the Roman side — but are our own methods
really so narrow that they can bear no comparisons at all without
breaking?" — Further, from the year 1858, on the cult of Mary: "Just as,
in preaching, the person of the Virgin Mary ought once more to be given
more honor within the wreath of God's saints, so, in my judgment, she
must also take a more prominent place generally in our worship services."
— And once more from the year 1859, on the doctrine of justification:
"And righteousness seems to require