# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S175
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Essay on the Right Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy.    175

-sive, free praying of his own raised to the level of a rule; rather let him pray in the spirit and with the language of the church. For this reason, forms of prayer become necessary. Likewise let the principle of constancy hold good here, since the congregation can truly pray along when fixed, ever-recurring prayers are spoken before it — prayers which, precisely through their simple strength, dependent on no fashion of the time, gather the thoughts of prayer again and again, in their repetition, in spirit and in truth.

Luther, German Mass, etc.: "After the sermon there should follow a public paraphrase of the Our Father and an admonition to those who wish to go to the Sacrament, in this or a better way, as follows: Dear friends of Christ, etc. . . . But I would ask that this same paraphrase and admonition be set, conceptis, seu praescriptis verbis [in fixed or prescribed words] (after a prescribed form), or in some particular manner, for the sake of the people, so that it is not one way today with one man and different tomorrow with another, each showing off his own art, thereby confusing the people so that they can learn nothing nor retain it. For the whole point is to teach and to guide the people; therefore it is needful that freedom be broken off here, and one and the same manner be followed in such paraphrase and admonition, particularly within one and the same church or congregation by itself, whether or not it wishes to follow another for the sake of its freedom." (Erl. A. 22, 240.)

The Psalter.

The Holy Our Father. Matt. 6 and Luke 11.

The baptismal and Mass prayers, together with the collects of Christian antiquity.

The Lutheran service books (Agenda).

§ 10.
Beauty and Propriety.

Although the pure and clear preaching of the Word and the right use of the holy Sacraments give divine service its proper spiritual adornment, this does not thereby exclude outward beauty and outward adornment from the form and manner of divine service, but rather includes them, since these belong to outward order and decorum, and can be conducive to the exercise of the Word and the administration of the Sacrament and serviceable to devotion, just as, conversely, their lack can become more or less a hindrance. In any case, it is indeed the joyful spirit of the faith of the congregation of the saints that fashions for itself a form in worship, in which it also appears outwardly before the Lord in festive garb. Beauty and propriety are therefore to be taken into counsel in all liturgical arrangements, and, quite especially here, the beautiful gift of God that is art is to be taken into the service of the kingdom of God. The order of the whole liturgy for the various divine services, its symmetry and its composition, is determined, according to the standard of pure doctrine, by the law of beauty and of propriety, by means of which divine service at the same time also bears the stamp of solemnity