# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1862_S197
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the Right Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy. 197

§ 6.
Denial and Abuse of the Spiritual Priesthood.

Through the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass, and of a priesthood distinguished from the common Christian estate, it is not possible for the spiritual priesthood of all Christians, in the Roman divine service, to come in any way to its right and its exercise.
Since, as mentioned under § 4, the priest at the altar acts not as a representative but as a mediator of the congregation before God, the Roman liturgy — and precisely in the sacrifice of the Mass most of all — puts the layman wholly and entirely into passivity, so that he only attends the service, without taking active part in it. To be sure, it puts a prayer book into his hand for this purpose, but by means of it he only prays alongside and for himself, and stands in no living reciprocal relation to the officiating priest — partly because the latter conducts the service in a language unintelligible to most laymen, partly because all the responding and liturgical singing is assigned exclusively to the choir as representative of the laity, and partly also because congregational hymn-singing has no place in the Roman service and is permitted, or rather tolerated, only as an exception, and reluctantly, here and there and now and then, in German popish churches. And even where the Roman Church does grant the laity a certain activity in subordinate devotions, namely in the rosary devotions, the praying-along with the priest can least of all be called praying, but is rather the purest mechanism of prayer, consisting in the most thoughtless and faithless glibness of tongue and outwardness, and setting the essence of devotion in the performance of the prayer-work according to number and measure — an opus operatum of the crudest kind.

Luther, Sermon on Good Works: "How does it stand and agree that we come bodily together into a house of prayer, whereby it is signified that we should call upon and pray for the whole congregation in common, if we then scatter and divide up the prayers so that each one prays only for himself, and no one takes up the other's cause nor concerns himself with anyone else's need? How can such a prayer be called useful, good, pleasing, and common, or a work of the feast day and the assembly? As do those who hold their own little private prayers, one for this and another for that, and have nothing but self-serving prayers, which God is hostile to." (Erl. A. 20, 241.)

The same [Luther], Table Talk: "Praying under the papacy was nothing but a sheer taskmastering of poor consciences, and only a babbling and wordy prattle, no prayer, but a work of obedience. The pope commands three kinds of praying. The first is oratio materialis, the material prayer, when someone recites the words without understanding them, as the nuns do the Psalter; this prayer was only a prayer in that it satisfied the pope. The second is formalis, where one understands the words. The third is affectualis, spiritual devotion and intent. This third kind is the true essence and property of prayer. But this was not what was insisted upon; rather, insistence fell only on the material kind, that one merely