# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1862 Volume. 3

God showed then, for once, what a high measure of knowledge could exist even in a man enlightened only indirectly through the written word, when He was pleased to fill him with it. Already the hour of midnight seemed to have broken in, and nothing more to remain but the LORD's coming to judgment — behold! there was yet fulfilled the prophecy of the prophet Zechariah (14:7): "At evening time it shall be light." The mystery of the wickedness of the Antichrist seemed already to have become impenetrable, so that the Church appeared overcome by the gates of hell and even the elect to be led astray — behold! unexpectedly the wicked one was revealed and destroyed with the spirit of the mouth of the LORD (2 Thess. 2). The Church seemed already to have become an aged and barren old woman, but behold! by the power of the divine promise she bore an Isaac. Just when the voice of the last witness of pure truth seemed to have been silenced with Huss, behold! there happened what had already been shown in a vision to the seer of the New Testament: "I saw an angel fly in the midst of heaven (of the Church), having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters" (Rev. 14). Not the temporal, perishable message of vain human doctrine, but an everlasting gospel — the pure, unadulterated, unchangeable, and imperishable word of the Most High — did he proclaim. His calling was not only to break this bread of life for the little flock at Wittenberg, but to bring back to every nation and kindred and tongue and people that gospel, once corrupted by ever-shifting error, in its purity and unalterable form. He was, without doubt, also the last messenger of God to all nations before the day of judgment.

If, now, the time of the Lutheran reformation of the Church was the time of a great divine visitation of grace, through the restoring of the divine doctrine in apostolic purity and through the kindling of the heavenly light of right knowledge in its original clarity, then this time of visitation is by no means yet past. That Reformation, with its great gifts, was and is the great, general visitation granted to the Church "in hac mundi senecta" (in this old age of the world), as the princely confessors express it in the preface to the "Concordia pia et unanimis." We too still stand within this time of visitation, and it will, according to divine prophecy, continue until the end of the days.

How vividly did the teachers of our Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries recognize this time, in which they had been graciously visited by God through the awakening, endowment, and work of Luther! How humbly and sincerely did they all confess — however brightly their own gifts shone, and however blessed