# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1862_S316
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

316 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

Regarding the Iowa Synod, a correspondent of the Lutheran Observer, signing himself Americus, writes as follows under date of September 5, among other things: "These brethren have no fellowship with any other part of the Lutheran church in this land. Even the Missouri Synod is too anti-symbolic and too liberal for them. It may amuse some of our American-Lutheran brethren to learn that the Löhe-ites are also millenarians and claim to find this doctrine in the Augsburg Confession. In this they differ from the Missourians." Thus our Americus, like the Americans generally when they report on German synods, mixes the true and the false together.

Synergism. Thus we read in the Lutheran Observer of September 5, in an article headed "Free Choice": "When a man becomes a Christian, he acts as a free man; and whatever power may have been exercised over him, his freedom has not been violated, nor has he done anything that was not a matter of his own preference or choice. The instructed sinner recognizes the power of God in his transformation. He is conscious that he has become what he is through an influence from above. There was a certain mysterious power that arrested his attention, that awakened his conscience, that moved him to give his heart to God. But he is conscious of no violation of his freedom" (which then, before his conversion?) "having taken place. He was converted in the full exercise of his faculties" (which then, before his conversion?) "and with the full consciousness of acting as a free man. There is no act that a man ever performs more freely than this, that he becomes a Christian."

II. Abroad.

How Germany Judges America. We read the following in Münkel's Neues Zeitblatt of June 20: "The Mecklenburg Gotteskasten describes the need of America in these words: '"North America, this land of civilized barbarism, which, left to itself, must necessarily fall into complete degeneracy, can perhaps still be saved for Christian culture through the founding and consolidation of church order. But such rescue seems possible to us only by way of the church; for every other sphere of life there is, as it seems to us, eaten away by incurable decay."'" Others say that matters are not really so bad, and that the Americans find themselves properly only in a boastful adolescence. But be that as it may, there is need there in any case. The small number of preachers barely suffices to maintain even the congregations already in existence, in building them up and improving them. Here, then, would be a rewarding field for the church, one that moreover does not by any means cost as much as the mission field among the heathen. If the mission stations among the heathen must be maintained continually at great expense, every preacher in America at once has his congregation without much seeking and gathering, and finds his livelihood together with the congregation." "Had America not been so greatly neglected as it has been for a series of years, how many hundreds — not merely of souls, but of congregations — would by now have been gathered there to the church!" "In all this there is much truth, though it must be added that the blame for this neglect is by no means to be sought only on this side of the ocean." In the next following number of the same paper we find some excerpts from the work of Licentiate Mellin of Berlin: "The German Evangelical Church in North America, Presented from Personal Observation," together with some accompanying remarks by Dr. Münkel. We share the following from both: "The work (Mellin's) deals chiefly with the '"Kirchenverein des Westens"' [Church Union of the West], and would engage our attention less, given the insignificance of this union, if it did not incidentally let the eye sweep over the great mass of the Germans.

The original German population that adheres to the Lutheran church amounts, accordingly, to about 1,100,000, while 360,000 belong to the Reformed church, so that one could reckon almost 1½ million for both churches together. The Lutheran church out-