# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S181
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Confession-Addresses.    181

But as for how I can have the Spirit — that they will not let me have. Now, how can I obtain the Spirit and believe, if no one preaches to me the Word of God and administers the sacraments? I must have the means, for faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the spoken word, Rom. 10." (Erl. A. 36, 226-229.)

The same: "God has never wanted to have his worship in the world without outward means. In the Old Testament he gave the Jews a way by which he was to be found. There was a certain place — the tabernacle, or the tent of meeting, the altar, the lampstand, the Levites — and God did not let himself be found without outward means and manner. He always set before them some outward means, so that they should indeed find him; he did not let them wander about in error without a way and outward means. But just as our fanatics now run off and abandon this way which God has given us in the New Testament, so too the Jews abandoned that same way and sought other paths. God cannot be our God unless he gives us something outward by which we may find him, namely, the spoken Word and the two sacraments. If I do not lay hold of God through outward things, how then can I ever meet him? (p. 229, 230.)

(Submitted by Pastor Keyl.)
On Confession-Addresses.

Confession-addresses were, at the time of the Reformation and for a good while afterward, customary only here and there. The Lutheran church retained, in most places, the Saturday-evening Vespers, just as this had already been customary early on in the Greek church and had passed from it into the Roman church. Attached to this Vespers was the confessional service, as a preparation for the forenoon service of the coming Sunday or festival day, which only became the chief service through the Communion — this Communion, indeed, being customarily held on every such day, and not merely in larger towns, but even in the smallest village churches. At Vespers a biblical book was expounded — for which purpose, in Wittenberg, the Gospel of St. John was appointed — or a Scripture lesson, chiefly from the Old Testament, was read aloud, after which followed the act of confession, consisting of catechetical examination (Exploratio), private confession, and absolution.

The Union church orders — as also happens in some otherwise doctrinally sound ones — let the Vespers drop away entirely and retain only the act of confession, at which an address on confession and the Holy Supper was directed to the penitents, or a set form for this purpose was read (the finest being the one composed by Dr. Bugenhagen in the Pomeranian Church Order). Even where, instead of the confession of individuals, the pastors read out a general form — as happened in some South German congregations, and also under the second Pomeranian Church Order of the year 1563 — the absolution still had to be given to each