# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

110 On the Sacramental Conception of Confirmation.

wipes out the servant's reluctance in willing obedience toward him who is Lord of lords and of slaves." We surely have reason to wait and hope that the Gospel, even if slowly, will accomplish its work, provided only it is preached faithfully and zealously and not rendered ineffective — to the heaviest accountability before God on the part of the agitators — by a false admixture, an evil leaven of pressing and storming, for the poor slaves and for their masters. It has indeed worked wonders in this very field and shown itself to be a power from on high. Everywhere still, wherever Christianity has penetrated, slavery has not been able to maintain itself; it has been abolished, in substance and gradually also in form, in the very measure that the slaves have shown themselves capable and worthy of freedom.

The brethren from North America — so we read in a report on the Geneva assembly of the Evangelical Alliance — were deeply bowed down by the heavy misfortune that had befallen their fatherland, and still more deeply by the vivid and undoubting awareness that this misfortune was one only too well deserved, and nothing other than a judgment of God upon their people's pride, greed for gold, and materialism. Such a way of viewing things, which led to the observance of a day of penitence and prayer in North America on the 26th of September of last year, is certainly a most gratifying one, and an incitement for us to a like humbling. We ought, in this connection, to bear in mind the solemn word in Luke 18:3. But alongside the more remote causes, one ought not to have forgotten the nearest one. It seems, however, that the "earnest insistence on the liberation of the Negroes in the slave states" has been credited to oneself merely as a merit, with no perception whatever that here too there might lie a guilt. C.

(Contributed by Prof. Crämer.)
On the Sacramental Conception of Confirmation.

Under this title we find, in the fourth number of last year of the Erlangen "Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche," an essay directed against Vilmar's "Pastoral-Theologische Blätter," which advocate the sacramental character of confirmation. We see from this that Vilmar and his party continue to advance ever further along the path they have entered upon toward Rome, and indeed, unfortunately, in the perfidious manner that always pretends to be fighting only for the honor of the Lutheran church, and to be working solely toward this end, that the glorious — though admittedly in many respects deficient — work of the Reformation should at last be made complete, while it is precisely the Lutheran truth that is in many ways being denied, and Roman filth, long since separated out, is being led back into her pure stream. We are glad that the Erlangen journal raises against this the voice of testimony, and cannot forbear communicating some of it to the readers of "Lehre und Wehre," so that