# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1861_S347
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Romanizing Tendency of the Volksblatt für Stadt und Land. 347

nor is it right to charge even the Roman Catholic Church of our own time
outright with a spirit of work-righteousness. It is true that we must,
though with a bleeding heart, admit for truth's sake that in this
church's teaching as well as in its practice much has crept in that lends
support to the notion that man could stand before the eyes of the holy
God by a righteousness planted in him by divine grace, yet still
imperfect and stained by sin. Alongside this, however, the early
Christian, genuinely catholic traditions of this church are so powerful
that we cannot regard the element just mentioned as belonging to its
essence; it is, rather, something accessory, a layer of dust that has
settled on the sanctuary — the foundation is still sound. Through the
whole Roman Church, in many of its ecclesiastical customs, ordinances,
devotional books, and so on, runs the firm conviction that man — however
holy, yet always still a sinner — can stand before God's judgment only
through trust in the bloody merit of the Savior." — And soon afterward we
even find these words: "We are not accustomed to say: without faith one
is not saved, but rather: through faith alone one is saved. But here the
symbolic expression on the Catholic side seems to be more correct than
our own." — In the year 1861 there is found a commendation of celibacy,
in which, among other things, it says: "It may be doubtful whether Rev.
14:4 sets up virginity itself as the highest degree of purity, or only as
an image of it. But even if only the latter were the case, it is thereby
already made an object of admiration and aspiration. — — It surely
deserves notice that the Redeemer, while he sanctified the other
relations of life by entering into them himself, gave us no example for
married life. — — Truths which the Roman Church confesses, even if in
corrupted form, have been entirely lost to our Protestant Christendom.
Amid the struggle against the glaring abuses of the church system of that
time, the reformers lost sight of the true relation of Christian
celibacy. — — One may expect that some custom would have developed of
choosing the higher and highest Protestant clergy from the number of
these unmarried men. — — Because Protestantism sets up, against the
overstraining of Roman Catholicism, an overstraining in the opposite
direction, it becomes incapable of fulfilling, rightly and successfully,
the calling historically marked out for it — to protest, on the ground of
true catholicity, against the errors of the mother church." — Finally, it
says there, concerning the primacy of the Pope: "One sees from these
(previously related) anecdotes how little founded is the common
reproach, that the Roman bishops arrogated the primacy to themselves out
of lust for power. On the contrary, it was forced upon them (which is, in
fact, something new). — But enough of this apology — I will not say
apotheosis, worthy of a Jesuit — for the anti-Christian papal church, from
the pen