# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S284
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

284 Church News of the Day.

and unrest, unless the contrary should come to pass through God's dispensation. For the Lord has threatened that to those who have not received the love of the truth, that they might be saved, He will send strong delusion, that they should believe a lie (2 Thess. 2:10-11; 1 Tim. 6:3-5; John 5:43).

(Conclusion follows.)

——

Church News of the Day.

I. America.

The General Synod. The "Lutheran" of Philadelphia, in its issue of August 14, remarks in the face of attacks on the General Synod: "If the opponents of the General Synod would attach themselves to it and devote to its improvement the energy which they have expended in the attempt to injure it, it would long since have been freed from the dangers of radicalism. But it would not only have received good, it would also have imparted good." — A fresh proof of how an American absolutely cannot help asking first of all whether a thing is right. and only then whether it is advantageous.

Plagiarism. The German Reformed charge the Union-Evangelicals here (that is, the "Kirchenverein des Westens," the Church Union of the West) with claiming to have compiled a hymnbook of their own, when in fact this hymnbook of theirs is at bottom none other than the one published by Dr. Schaff. And indeed, according to the evidence which the German Reformed bring forward for their assertion, the gentlemen of the Union have, in publishing their hymnbook, committed so brazen a plagiarism that one can only marvel. The Reformirte Kirchenzeitung speaks of this quite plainly; it writes: "This evangelical hymnbook owes its existence to an unevangelical confusion of concepts between mine and thine."

II. Abroad.

Materialism. Dr. Wille in Leipzig sums up the main substance of the doctrines of the newer materialism of a Moleschott, Carl Vogt, Louis Büchner, and others in the following propositions: "Just as the function of the muscle is contraction, just as the kidneys secrete urine, in the same way the brain produces thoughts, endeavors, feelings. Just as the brain does not give itself its own form, but, dependent on outward influences, is always merely the necessary effect of determinate causes, so too the will is only the necessary expression of a condition of the brain conditioned by outward influences. Free will does not exist, and with it neither responsibility nor accountability. Man is the sum of parents and wet-nurse, of place and time, of air and weather, of sound and light, of food and clothing. Speech and style, experiment and conclusions, benefactions and crimes, courage and cowardice and betrayal — all of these are necessary natural phenomena and inescapable effects of causes. Man is at no moment master over himself, over his reason, over his powers. God is not to be thought of, and it is proven that there is no other life."

The present position of the followers of Löhe is expressed so plainly, once and for all, by a letter which the Inspector of the Mission Institute at Neuendettelsau, Mr. Friedrich Bauer, wrote to Pastor Brobst and which the latter published in his periodical, that now everyone knows where he stands with those gentlemen. After Bauer has declared himself willing to exchange Pastor Brobst's paper for the Löhe-ite one, he continues as follows: "The exchange of papers is indeed also a slight rapprochement of the separated parties which call themselves after the Lutheran Church. The greater the fragmentation within it becomes, the more diligence one ought to apply to uniting — which does not happen through false unions and indifferentism, nor through one direction wishing from the outset to be the sole and exclusively authorized one and to force all the others onto its own last. It