# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S55
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something on Collegialism. 55

well-ordered books [methodici libri] like Philip Melanchthon's Loci, which were altogether excellent, by which a theologian and bishop could be splendidly and superabundantly equipped, so that he might be mighty in the preaching of pure doctrine. His own books, on the other hand, were composed in no (systematic) order, so that they still formed a kind of rude et indigestum Chaos [a crude and unformed chaos], which even he himself did not find it easy to put in order. — Yet, lest after his death the confusion should be made still greater by other editors of his books, since they no longer knew the occasions and differing dates of things, the urging of others moved him to let them go to press. Above all, however, he points everyone to Holy Scripture itself, which is now in everyone's hands and in almost every language. After he has then related the history of his ministry down to 1521, he concludes: "He was, as Augustine says of himself, one of those who advanced by writing and reading, not one of those who at once become the foremost out of nothing — though in truth they are nothing, have neither labored nor been tested, and have experienced nothing, but wish to have drained the whole spirit of Scripture at a single glance." From this it is clear enough that he, in the year 1545 (a year before his death), does not direct us to explain the Augsburg Confession out of his own writings, and out of his own writings alone. *)

Shame on such a pseudo-Lutheran, who can so basely misuse and misconstrue the blessed Luther's great modesty for the purpose of weakening, degrading, and casting suspicion upon his writings and upon the testimony of truth contained in them — a testimony so clear and definite, and for that very reason so hateful to such wretched perverters of it. Let him rather go, sooner today than tomorrow, to where he actually belongs — to the Jesuits, who up to now have been almost alone capable of such sycophantic tricks.

* * *

Something on Collegialism.

In the Dieckhoff-Kliefoth journal (the September issue of last year) there is to be found a treatise by Dr. Kliefoth: "On the Relation of the Territorial Rulers, as Holders of Church Authority, to Their Church Authorities," in which an attempt is made to show that the preservation of the territorial-ruler church government is to be desired, not only because it is an arrangement compatible with the Word of God and with the welfare of the church as well as of the state — an arrangement which, adopted for good reasons and presently standing by right, has through the course of the centuries brought blessing to both church and state — but also for the prevention of the grave evils to be feared from its abolition. The treatise contains much that is instructive and worth taking to heart. It readily grants that princes do not possess church authority as an emanation and as something inherent in their territorial power,

*) The sense of the Formula of Concord, when it bids us take the correct understanding of the symbols from Luther's works, is thus, according to Grabau, in sum and substance this: that this understanding is NOT to be taken from Luther's works! L. u. W.