# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1862_S203
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the Right Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy. 203

Note. So it had to be, and remain, as long as there was agreement in teaching
and confession. But it had to take shape differently with regard to the church orders and
the liturgy in general, in the application of the principle of freedom and
love, wherever the unity of doctrine and confession was either
endangered from without, or was already inwardly giving way, and the
wild boars, Ps. 80:14, together with the great and little foxes, Ps. 63:11,
Lamentations 5:18, and Song of Solomon 2:15, gave out everything liturgical as one great adiaphoron, in order the more unhinderedly to be able to lay waste the vineyard of the Lord under cover of it. One need only think of the history of exorcism
on the one hand, and compare with it, besides the citations from Art. 10 of
the Formula of Concord and Luther's writings in the Report of our Middle
District, 1859, p. 36-38, also pp. 40-42; — and on the other hand, of the
storm against the church orders (Agendensturm) in the 18th century, of which Rudelbach, in the work
cited, p. 11-14, sketches a picture not to be lost sight of,
which shows at the same time how, under the pretext of Protestant freedom,
the rationalist gentlemen consistory-councillors and pastors exercised both the
greatest arbitrariness and the most shameful tyranny.

§ 3.
Kinds of Divine Service.

The Lutheran liturgy divides divine service into chief service and
subordinate service. This distinction, however, is produced not by the importance of the Sunday or
festival day, nor by the time of day, but
by the sacrament of the altar. Following the pattern of Scripture, Acts 2:42, and
1 Corinthians 11:20-21, and as the reciprocal relation of the preaching of the
Gospel and of the sacrament of itself gives rise to, a service
becomes a chief service by this, that the proclamation of the
Word is joined with the administration of the sacrament,
and this forms the goal and the capstone, whereby, then, all other
services, in which the administration of the sacrament is not intended from the outset,
become subordinate services. In agreement with the view and arrangement of the ancient church, the
Lutheran church accordingly also called the service joined with the Lord's Supper
by its ancient name, Mass, and, following 1 Corinthians 10:16-17,
Communio; likewise it called the "office" (Amt), and the sermon held in connection with it, the
"office-sermon" (Amtspredigt), and for this reason also regarded the chief service, at which,
for want of communicants, the celebration of the Lord's Supper must be omitted,
as an incomplete one. On the presupposition of a sufficient desire present
for the sacrament, the Lutheran church orders accordingly arrange the
chief service for Sundays and festival days so that the Holy Supper
forms a chief part of it, and, without wishing to make a law of it,
that Communion must without fail take place, they nevertheless give corresponding provisions for its
omission, in that, by an exhortation to be read for this purpose after the
sermon, they seek to remind the people of the lack and
to stir them to a proportionately more frequent use of the sacrament.
It is otherwise with the Reformed Church, in which one service is raised above another
only by this, that on its day no work is done, and the other
services are held on working days. By this the Reformed church realizes