# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1862 Volume. 39

it has; the church appears as an atomistic heap; instead of the old unity of faith there reigns a disunity such as has scarcely ever been seen before, a truly Babylonian confusion of tongues and of faith; even the Prussian Lutheran church distinguishes itself in this respect only a little from the Lutheran territorial churches, as has just come to light glaringly enough, to the astonishment of those who had not already seen it, in the recently broken-out disputes over church government and the doctrines connected with it — namely, that the Prussian Lutheran church is held together more by the common negation of the Prussian Union than by a positive unity of Lutheran faith and Lutheran doctrine. Even the new journal of which Pastor Fengler speaks, although admittedly most of what is in it is written with skill, vigor, and frankness, by no means belies the condition of the ecclesiastical fellowship within which it was born. Alongside the pure doctrine of the church, much that is indeed quite new, original, and creatively arisen asserts itself in it. We think, however, that the Prussian Lutheran church ought to take to heart what Dr. Münkel, returning from that conference of the Prussian Lutherans in Berlin as a former member of the conferring commission, writes at the close of his report: "It has least of all the task of attempting advances and new formations in doctrine; every significant attempt of that kind threatens it also with the danger of a split." Would to God the Prussian Lutheran church had immersed itself more, in our own manner — may we be forgiven this remark, which sounds only presumptuous — in the writings of our old, faithful teachers of the church, Luther's especially, and had communicated from them what it found there; then without doubt it would have prospered differently and would not now be standing at an abyss threatening to swallow it. Indeed, if it will not first humbly learn from our fathers in the faith, and only then teach and be creatively active, its fate is sealed: it will finally vanish as a mere droplet in the sea of the great new church, for which the old Lutheran name (as the Roman church has claimed the name "catholic," the Union church the name "evangelical," and the rationalist party the name "protestant") will at last be claimed exclusively, casting out the old, faithfully Lutheran church from itself as a "sect."

But be that as it may, we Missourians feel no other calling within us than this: to bring forth again the treasures of our old, truly reformed church — after they have long lain useless as a dead capital in our inherited libraries, where a century-long vandalism has not already destroyed them outright as worthless waste paper — to make them our own through earnest, unremitting study, with heartfelt prayer for enlightened eyes from above, and then to serve the church with the talent so gained. If, in our learned, brilliant, newly creative age, this counts as lowly work, as a menial servant's task — so be it! then let us poor Missourians render the church this