# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S41
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1862 Volume. 41

selves than our fathers did, what we cannot do, we would nonetheless, by our own testimony, only bring the Lutheran doctrine more into discredit than commend it and further its acceptance. Our age indeed prides itself greatly on having at last emancipated itself from dependence on human authorities, but it is only too evident that now, more than ever before, the question asked first of all is who says a thing, rather than what is said. A theological celebrity can boldly write what, had it flowed from the pen of some minor light, would be laughed at as nonsense; yet behind his strange lines people still scent deep truth. Exempla sunt odiosa. What are we, then, that in such an age we might hope to be heard, when we must and will bring back into recognition, as Lutheran doctrine, what is often no longer held to be Lutheran either by theologians or by the people!

To this is added, further, that we have opponents here who wish to be the strictest of Lutherans, who pursue us continually with their curses and anathemas as enemies of the Lutheran church and doctrine, now as papists, now as Union men and fanatics — opponents who, for all their insistence on Lutheran orthodoxy, believe and teach the very opposite of what Luther and his faithful successors believed and taught, and who therefore wretchedly deceive and mislead the people under the false name of Old Lutheranism. What can we do now, if we do not wish to look on calmly while the Lutheran people are deceived and misled under a Lutheran mask, crypto-papists are taken for pillars of Lutheranism, and the old, pure, evangelical-Lutheran doctrine that we confess is held to be fanatical rubbish — what else can we do than demonstrate, in black and white, from the writings of Luther and his fellow workers and successors themselves, what the doctrine of those men of God, for whom our opponents hypocritically build tombs (tombs, indeed!), actually was? If the latter employ all manner of arts to deceive the ignorant people, whereby they torment even the sun-clear testimonies of a Luther, a Chemnitz, a Gerhard, and others, until these are made to say the opposite of what they actually said, how easy a game it would be for our opponents to present us to the people as anti-Lutheran heretics, if we, in order not to fall under suspicion of mere parroting or, as Pastor Fengler puts it, of "reciting all sorts of quite correct, excellent articles of faith," were to deduce everything only in our own manner from Scripture! Had we not here awakened the fathers of our church from the dead and let them speak for us, a confusion would long since have arisen here among the people, in which often even the most upright would have been deceived by the pseudo-Lutherans, and we, with our pure and unadulterated Lutheran doctrine, would have been shunned as apostates by thousands who now believe with us heartily and confess joyfully. Great is the blessing with which our testimony has been accompanied in this land — be it loudly praised to God's honor — but we will never forget that a chief cause of this blessing is, by God's grace, precisely this practice of ours: that it is not ourselves, but our teachers, whom we here