# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S45
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The New Periodical on Us Poor Missourians. 45

it is a motley, patched-together sample card under the Lutheran name, full besides of all sorts of anti-Lutheran ills, such as coarse and refined rationalism, churchly and princely popery, Unionism, pietistic confessionalism or its opposite, and whatever else there may be of the sort.

The worst of it, however, is that this our so-called mother church of Germany no longer hears and takes to heart the voices of the few faithful sons of the true mother church of the Lutheran Reformation, but rather smiles down on them condescendingly and lays them contemptuously aside. It fares with these faithful witnesses and prophets just as it did with Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who were likewise hissed at and mocked by their own people, while the wretched, deceived masses flocked to the false prophets in droves, like water.

So there now sit, evidently, false teachers in honor and dignity in Lutheran academic chairs, deceiving and corrupting, as veritable counterfeiters and poison-mixers, the studying young men, the future shepherds and teachers of the people; and no one asks about it. So year after year false preachers preach from the pulpits the thoughts and deceits of their own hearts, but not Christ crucified, and keep the unconverted captive in the power of unbelief and in the snares of the devil, while at the same time withholding nourishment from the believers. For decades they have been thieves and murderers of souls dearly bought by Christ; and no one asks about it.

Truly, from this terrible and prevailing decay of church discipline in the Lutheran territorial churches it is unanswerably clear that the true power and standing of the ecclesiastical confession has likewise miserably collapsed and become a dead form within them. Where, then, is the true mother church, the church of the Lutheran Reformation? To be sure, there were also faults and infirmities in her, even at times cruder scandals here and there, just as the church of Christ in general is always covered with such things and even in this bears the form of the cross. But the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, was wielded quite differently then against friend and foe alike, and the power of the ecclesiastical confession and the chastening discipline of doctrine were then something quite other than they are today, when error and falsehood, entrenched far and wide among the public teachers of the church against the truth, are tolerated, indeed nourished and honored, and receive formal sanction; for as to the pantheistic deification of this or that natural gift and power, of this or that partial learning, the giving and taking of honor, man-pleasing and fawning flattery, in short the cult of genius and of official position — of none of this is our dear German mother church lacking at present either; rather she has an abundance of it, and gladly mixes in, in good pietist fashion, the little personal self into the matter.

But whence comes all this misery, this chaos of differing doctrinal opinions, this hatching of private pet notions among the philosophizing theologians, this warming-over and asserting of long-refuted popish errors