# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something on Collegialism. 57

...incitement to faith and to Christianity. But the third way, which was to have the true form of evangelical order, ought not to happen so publicly in the marketplace before all sorts of people; rather those who in earnest wished to be Christians and to confess the Gospel with hand and mouth should enroll themselves by name and gather, say in some one house alone, for prayer, for reading, for baptizing, for receiving the Sacrament, and for the practice of other Christian works. In this order one could recognize, discipline, improve, expel, or put under the ban — according to the rule of Christ, Matt. 18:15ff. — those who did not conduct themselves as Christians. Here one could also lay upon the Christians a common alms, which each would give willingly and which would be distributed among the poor, after the example of St. Paul, 2 Cor. 9:1, 2, 12, etc. In short: if one had the people and persons who in earnest desired to be Christians, the order and manner would soon be made. But I neither can nor may as yet order or establish such a congregation or assembly. For I do not yet have the people and persons for it; nor do I see many who press toward it. But should it come that I must do it, and am so driven to it that I cannot in good conscience refrain, then I will gladly do my part and help as best I am able. Meanwhile I will let it rest with the two ways already named, and will help promote, alongside the preaching, such worship publicly among the people, to train the youth and to call and incite the others to faith, until the Christians who mean the Word in earnest find themselves and hold together — so that it does not turn into a mob got up out of my own head. For we Germans are a wild, rough, raging people, with whom it is not easily done to begin anything, unless the utmost necessity drives it." (Luther's Works, Halle ed., X, 270–72.)

Luther showed the same disposition a year afterward in his judgment on the reform order drafted at the Homberg Synod of October 20, 1526. This order, as is well known, rests — in this respect standing almost alone among all the German-Lutheran church orders — on the recognition of the rights of the spiritual priesthood of the laity, and thus carries this Lutheran-biblical principle into practical execution in matters of church government as well. When Luther was then asked by Philip the Magnanimous for his opinion on the matter, he knew of nothing in it to object to, but he did not wish to take it upon himself to proceed all at once so radically. He wrote, among other things: "Because such an order might go abroad amid the outcry that my counsel too had contributed to it, this is my faithful and submissive counsel: that Your Princely Grace not yet permit this order to be published in print.... For I well know, and have also well experienced, that when laws are set forth too early, ahead of practice and use, they seldom turn out well; people are not so ready for them as those suppose who sit by themselves and paint it out in words and thoughts how it ought to go.