# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S230
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

230 Report on the True Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy.

for the exercise in prayer through hymn, psalmody, and oration is essentially an exercise in the Word as well.

3. The secondary services surround the chief service, in that they in part prepare for it or introduce it, and in part refer back to it or conclude it. Depending, then, on whether they precede or follow it, or depending on the particular exercise of the Word and of prayer that one intends to undertake in them, they differ among themselves, even given the same constituent parts.

4. The relation in which the secondary services stand to the chief service which they surround is presumably as follows:

The secondary services preceding the chief service are the Saturday Vespers and the Sunday Mette. Guided by correct principles — according to which the pre-Sabbath begins with Saturday afternoon, and the best preparation for Sunday is confession of sin and absolution — the former became, from the beginning, the Confession-Vespers, in that private confession, with an introductory general confessional exhortation, was appended to it as a second part, to which the hymns, prayers, and lection of the first part were then related. The latter, by contrast, regarded as an hour of praise and thanksgiving for the sending of the only-begotten Son into the world, and therefore adorned with the Te Deum or the Benedictus, introduces the chief service after the dawning of the day of rest and festival.

The secondary services that refer back to the chief service are the Sunday Vespers, and the daily Mettes and Vespers. In the former, preaching was given either on the Epistle or on an Old Testament book, or it was used for catechetical instruction, or both took place, preaching and catechetical instruction. The latter especially shows how, through the Sunday Vespers, the Sunday and festival-day service is not only meant to come to its proper conclusion, but also how, through it, what was learned from the Word in the chief service, and what was received through Word and Sacrament, is to be impressed still further upon the mind, and the knowledge of pure doctrine supplemented and broadened. But because the common exercise in the Word and in prayer does not conclude with Sunday, it finds its continuation, according to the measure of time, strength, and need, through the remaining days of the week in the daily Mettes and Vespers, out of whose circle those of Wednesday and Friday stand out through the special weekday sermon, while those of the other days were held more by the young and for the young, as already mentioned.

5. Through this relation of the exercise-services to the chief service, through their general purpose — exercise in the Word and in prayer — and through their beautiful, lovely arrangement, simpler in correspondence with their relation and subordinate position to the chief service as with their purpose, those same principles to which the reporter referred in the previous section, in speaking of the chief service, are realized also through them and in them.