# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S95
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church News of the Day.    95

though, to be sure, it has separated from this body not on account of differences in doctrine, but on account of dissatisfaction with the church government. It bears the name: "The Conference of the Independent Methodist Churches in the United States," and came into being at New York through the coming-together of six pastors, who ordained and received among themselves a seventh. From the reasons given, which they advance in justification of their withdrawal and their new organization, we see that the episcopal government of the Methodists is indeed a costly affair, in that the six or seven bishops, together with the "presiding elders" who govern the church, cost it nearly a quarter of a million dollars annually. And since these same men have not only the exclusive right of ordination, but also the privilege, on their quarterly visits to the congregations, of alone being allowed to administer the Lord's Supper, to the exclusion of the local pastor, this is at any rate burdensome. The demand of those who have withdrawn is also just — that the laity should have a share in church government; then their disputing of the necessity of a threefold church office, an office of deacons, elders, and bishops; further, their objection to the continual arbitrary transferring of the pastors. Yet the corrupted doctrine, unfortunately, remains the same, and if several of those who withdrew took this step because a large part of the Episcopal Methodists will not renounce slavery, that is indeed perverse. The radical temper of these people, who cannot deny their origin, also shows itself in the assertion that every distinction and every superiority of one pastor over another is Romish. Finally, the broad, Methodistic loving heart is also not lacking, which permits brotherly fellowship with all other bodies of evangelical Christians. Broad-hearted in doctrine and narrow in constitution and other external matters — so, indeed, our topsy-turvy age will have it. — C.

II. Abroad.

From Mecklenburg, December 20. The former professor Dr. Baumgarten of Rostock has been sentenced by the academic court there, on account of the press offenses contained in his writings "The Ecclesiastical Distress in Mecklenburg" and "Is the Mecklenburg Territorial Church to Go to Ruin?" against Consistorial Councillor Krabbe, against the supreme church council, against the Mecklenburg pastors, and against Consistorial Councillor Krabbe's father confessor, to eight weeks' imprisonment and a fine of 100 thalers. It is also ordered that the copies of both writings not yet passed into private possession be destroyed. (A. Kz.)

"Freimund." The hitherto excellent editor of this interesting, substantial, and truly popularly written paper, the Reverend Pastor Wucherer, takes leave of his readers in the last issue of this paper for the previous year. A Dr. Weber of Neudettelsau will take over the editorship from now on. Only the monthly political review and survey will still be supplied for the paper by Wucherer.

Vienna. How matters stand here with the so-called Lutheran congregation may be inferred from the fact that the congregation, in order to refill its first preaching post, which has become vacant, has put forward five candidates, all of whom are Rationalists; among them is even the notorious deacon Sulze of Osnabrück.

"Löhe on the Symbolical Books, etc." On this subject the "Kirchenfreund" brings a longer excerpt from Löhe's "Kirchliche Briefe," in Vilmar's pastoral-theological papers. This excerpt, to be sure, contains nothing new, but testifies once again to the author's unfortunately already well-known questionable position toward the confession of his own church. What is remarkable here is only the great perfidy with which he expresses himself on this point — certainly a heartbreaking grief for all faithful sons of the church, especially for those who, like the writer of these lines, owe him much from an earlier, better time. Quite orthodox is the sentence with which he begins: "I agree with the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church, not so far as (quatenus), but because (quia) they correspond to the divine Word." But what a sophistical equivocation follows immediately afterward, like a limping messenger, twisting the sentence into its very opposite, into the most shameful, most arbitrary, most unmeasured "quatenus"! "But if I agree with them — the symbolical books — because they correspond to the divine Word, that does not mean that every word in them corresponds to the divine Word, or every turn of phrase, every presentation; rather it simply means that the resolution of the points of controversy pending between the churches in the sixteenth century — that is, the properly symbolical propositions — correspond to the divine Word." But which these "properly symbolical propositions" are is, quite deliberately, not said, and thus ample latitude is left for rejecting, under this pretext, any doctrine however clearly attested therein, on the grounds that it is, after all, no properly symbolical proposition. That this trick is a real one, and not merely