# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S282
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

282 Literary Notices.

number of volumes, has a certain independence of its own and is also issued separately. The second part will comprise the epistles to the Galatians and Corinthians and is expected to appear around Easter of next year.

Just published by Sebald in Nuremberg:

Löhe, Raphael, a little evangelical prayer book. 1 Thaler.

Just published in Lugau in Saxony, in the author's own self-publication:

Thoughts on Christian Freedom. By Moritz Robert Engel, pastor at Lugau in the Kingdom of Saxony. First Part: Christian Freedom of Faith. 34 pp., 8vo. This is a wholly excellent little pamphlet, which no one will read without a strengthening of faith. As a sample we communicate here what the author says about the nature of Christian freedom of faith. He writes: What is it, and wherein does it consist? Is it perhaps that strange freedom according to which everyone should be free to believe whatever and however much he pleases? Is it the right to choose, according to one's own judgment and discretion, among the thousand and thousand upon thousand opinions and doctrines of faith, religions, church confessions, denominations, and sects with which the world is full, and which one and all claim to be in possession of the truth? Do we, with this freedom, stand in the midst of the endless tangle of the crisscrossing and contradictory doctrines of men, in order, by our own choice and out of our own supreme sovereign power, to decide for Moses or Christ, for the Talmud or the Koran, for Trent or Dort, Union or Confession, Rationalism or Supranaturalism, Atheism or Pantheism, Materialism or Spiritualism, or even for none of all these, by taking our standpoint, as they say, above the parties, and going, independently and unconcerned about others, our own ways? Does being free in faith mean nothing else than having the right to be able to follow this or that adventurer in the religious field? Is nothing at all settled on this question; is truth not One, but a Proteus of manifold shapes? Are there, in fact, absolutely no limits to this freedom except one's own pleasure; nowhere any footing, any fixed point, any authority in matters of faith; and is even subordination to Scripture in itself, and in every sense, a bondage of the spirit and a servitude to the letter, mindless parroting and retrogression, self-stultification and superstition?

Now it is indeed true that at bottom everyone can believe what he wants. Who would hinder him in it? Who can give another person faith, or take it from him? Must not faith be free, and does it not have true worth only when it is the fruit of one's own experience, when it is one's very own possession, a matter of the heart? Does not Christ Himself indeed condemn those who only say Lord, Lord, and do not do the will of the heavenly Father (Matt. 7:21-22), and are not forced services, undeniably, never and nowhere pleasing to God? We fully subscribe to what Tertullian says (ad Scap. c. 2): "It belongs to the rights of man, and it is a power naturally belonging to all, that everyone must be free to worship whatever his own conviction draws him to, and what religion one holds can neither harm nor benefit anyone else. But it would also be against all religion to wish to force anyone into a religion, since this is not to be compelled by force, but rests through and through in each person's own will; it is, after all, self-evident that sacrifices must be offered willingly." Yet for all that, it is still