# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Church Legend Concerning the Holy Apostles, etc.    187

only Lutheran church order surviving from the 16th century which, untouched by the shifting doctrinal and canon-legal currents of the times, has retained the force of law — not merely in a legal sense, but in actual practice — throughout its entire content, touching alike the constitution of the church and the life of the church. It still forms today the foundational law for the territorial church of Lauenburg, is accordingly an integral part of the Lauenburg territorial constitution, and precisely for that reason its reprinting has become an unavoidable need. Distinguished by its strict Lutheran correctness, it contains, in the partly biblical and partly historical grounding of its provisions, many peculiarities of its own, and certainly deserves to become more widely and more fully known than it has been able to become abroad through the excerpt contained in the well-known work of Richter (The Evangelical Church Orders of the 16th Century, Weimar 1846). It is, according to the statements of the late Superintendent Catenhusen, the finest, most thorough, and most complete of all the church orders that arose out of the Reformation, in that it took up into itself the total results of the Reformation only after that Reformation had been entirely finished and fully concluded. It shines forth as the noblest pearl among them, and it is precisely for this reason that it has drawn, and continues to draw, the eyes of many in the German Lutheran lands, and has become the object of manifold desire of late."

The Church Legend Concerning the Holy Apostles
Completely translated from the sources
by
Franz Otto Stichert.
Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1861.
Pp. VIII and 319, octavo.

This work has been sent to us for review. Having gone through it in its main sections, we can recommend it in good conscience, particularly to preachers, and also to such laymen as feel the need to become better oriented in the partly apocryphal history of the early church. Whatever is to be found at all in the oldest written records concerning the holy apostles, the author has indeed, true to his promise, rendered in full and in a thoroughly faithful, literal translation from the Greek and Latin sources. Abbreviations occur only in a few places, and there with a statement of the content of what was abridged. According to its title, the work is written "for clergy and non-clergy of all confessions" — which might otherwise arouse the suspicion that the author, to the detriment of the subject, had tried to accommodate every subjective taste; in fact, however, Stichert holds himself