# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1862_S202
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

202 Report on the Right Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy.

3) the introduction of the sacred hymn of the people (Volkslied) as an essential
part of the liturgy, along with its splendor and richness, which find
no equal in the church history of the New Testament era;

4) the richly anointed church and festival prayers, which are the immediate
product of the Reformation church and the church after the Reformation,
together with the collects, which have been added to the Germanized
ancient-church ones and, through their reception into most agendas, have become
common property;

5) the insertion of a number of feasts and festival days into the purified
festival cycle, as for instance the Reformation Festival; but above all

6) the standing which, alongside preaching, the catechism has received
through the Reformation. See here the citation following § 5, sub 6.

In these respects the Lutheran liturgy retains, alongside the measured and necessary change in forms, the constancy and objectivity indicated in I, § 9, 3, likewise also through the alternating and the fixed hymns of the church.

§ 2.
The Lutheran Church Orders (Agenden).

How much the entire Lutheran order of worship rests upon the principles of freedom and love set forth in I, §§ 4
and 5, is proven by the citations adduced there. A glance at the church orders of the
16th and 17th centuries, moreover, shows fully the faithful realization
of these principles. While the Saxon and Low German church orders,
on the one hand, and the Austrian along with the Franconian, on the other, attached themselves as closely as possible to
Luther's precedent in his liturgical writings, the Baden, Andorf, Hanau, Worms, Strasbourg, and Hohenlohe orders, for
all their firmness in the Lutheran confession, deferred to the formulary of the
Reformed manner of worship. (Cf. the two tables contained in Löhe's liturgical formularies,
Nördlingen 1839.) And yet even the latter do not entirely disown
the Lutheran type. In like manner, however, while
in the church orders of the former kind the whole liturgy in its forms
and its composition strictly preserves the Lutheran type and thereby shows the
greatest possible uniformity, people nevertheless did not bind themselves
slavishly and pedantically in particulars, and allowed themselves, even in the
formula of consecration and distribution, a diversity within the
unity of the confession. (Cf. Rudelbach's Sacr. WW., p. 10 and 11,
and Löhe's Formularies, Part III, p. 30, sub 1.) Thus the church orders of that
period, on the one hand, hold fast to the given unity of the spirit within uniform forms and
a greater or lesser preservation of the Lutheran type, while, on the other hand, they
in fact reject any wish to enforce uniformity, for the sake of establishing unity of spirit,
through greater or lesser difference in ceremonies, and thereby put into practice the "It is enough" of the Augustana.