# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S233
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the True Mean of the Lutheran Liturgy. 233

weary, as in monasteries and chapters, they burdened themselves with donkey's labor before now. . . .

But even if perhaps not the whole congregation could wait out such a daily service, the priests, and pupils, and above all those hoped to become good preachers and pastors, should do it nonetheless. And that one should admonish them to do this freely, not out of compulsion or unwillingness, not for reward, temporal or eternal, but solely to the honor of God and for the benefit of their neighbor." (Erl. A. 22, 154, 155.)

German Mass and Order of the Service, 1526: "Well then, in God's name. In the first place, in the German service a plain, simple catechism is needed. Now catechism means an instruction .... This instruction, or teaching, I do not know how to arrange better or worse than it has already been arranged from the beginning of Christendom and has remained until now — namely, the three parts: the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer. In these three parts stands, plainly and briefly, almost everything a Christian needs to know.

This instruction must now take place in this way, since there is as yet no particular congregation established: that it be preached on the pulpit at certain times, or daily, as the need requires, and at home in the houses, evenings and mornings, recited or read to the children and servants whom one wishes to make Christians. Not merely so that they learn the words by heart and repeat them, as has hitherto been done, but that one ask piece by piece and let them answer what each part means and how they understand it." (E. A. 22, 231-232.)

The same: "On Monday and Tuesday morning there takes place a German lesson on the Ten Commandments, on the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer; on baptism and the sacrament, so that these two days maintain the catechism and strengthen it in its right understanding." p. 235.

See also Dr. Luther's prefaces to his two catechisms.

§ 6.
The Act of Baptism.

Among the ecclesiastical acts that exist in their own right — attached rather to the secondary services than woven into them, and in part, as regards their time, often held quite apart from the regular service — the reporter singles out, at the close of his report and for its purpose, the act of baptism. Not only is it a sacramental act in and of itself, but as such it is also distinguished, through its liturgical arrangement with respect to origin and structure, above all other acts, and is determinative for one of them, confirmation.

a. In the reformation of the baptismal liturgy as well, Dr. Luther, as is well known, proceeded just as conservatively, in Christian freedom and love, following the pattern of pure doctrine and the liturgical sense arising from it, as he did in the liturgy of the Mass — so that we have not a new baptismal liturgy but a purified one, and therefore, as with the Mass, so with the act of baptism