# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 The Lutheran and Missionary.

the communion guests beforehand. — The objection — that all who draw near to the holy altar surely have a longing for it, and are certainly good people, so that one must not be narrow-minded but must, out of love, feed the hungry — is a sweet, but purely human, delusion. And that sentimental philosophizing and humane show of love, when it runs counter to God's will, is an abomination to the Lord, is well known enough from the history of Saul. It is precisely such a philosophy of love that meets with the verdict: "Thou hast rejected God's word, therefore I will also reject thee." — We take confession registrations, and can assure the reader that from time to time people register who would indeed also gladly go to the Holy Supper, but who live in open sins — greed, unforgivingness, a broken marriage, etc. — and are therefore provisionally turned away until they come in repentance. That nothing of the sort occurs in refined, cultivated, distinguished English congregations is surely not something one will wish to urge against this. For distinction, as is well known, is no safeguard against sin. — Can we then, with a good conscience, without sin, recognize as Lutheran brothers in the faith those who, against Scripture and against the confession of the Church, throw away the barriers set by God himself around the communion table — who not only do nothing to prevent poor souls from partaking unworthily of the body and blood of the Lord and so eating and drinking judgment to themselves, do nothing so that the sanctuary is not thrown to the dogs and the pearls to the swine, but who even set up this shameful disorder as a principle of their churchly order, indeed even boast of it as a further development, an advantage of American Lutheranism, over the old, narrow-minded, hidebound German Lutheranism?

It is, moreover, well known to be the practice of the General Synod to admit members of other denominations, who deny the true presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper, to the Lutheran Supper, and occasionally then also to go, in turn, to the Lord's table among them; and this too seems to be asserted, as a matter of principle, in the above sentence of the "Lutheran," as belonging to the essence of American Lutheranism. — Nor does one wish to set any barrier against open deniers of the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper. — But if the editor-in-chief of the "Lutheran" thinks that such a procedure is in keeping with "the spirit of genuine old Lutheranism," he is very much mistaken indeed; and we would like to call his attention to a statement of Luther's, which shows unambiguously and clearly how deeply the faithful, upright mind of the Reformer, enlightened by the word of God, was outraged at such a union at the Supper, and which strikingly proves that in the old Luther there truly was a different spirit than in modern American Lutheranism: "And in sum, that I may come away from this point, it is dreadful for me to hear that in one and the same church, or at one and the same altar, both parties should receive and partake of one and the same sacrament, and one party should believe that it receives mere bread and wine, while the other party believes that it receives the true body and blood of Christ. And I often wonder