# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S346
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

346 Literary Notices.

church — that the Roman Pope is the Antichrist — until at last he could
no longer reject it at all, because in fact (this B. concedes frequently and
without concealment) the Antichristendom really did have its chief seat
in Rome. Such admissions from a decided opponent, and the reflections
that naturally attach themselves to them, have at least strengthened in
me the resolve to give up the general Protestant doctrine of the
Antichrist only once a better one is offered me. Until then, however,
many a little drop of water will still run into the world's ocean. For at
the very least our present highly-learned "scholarliness" has continually
gathered nothing but material toward the construction of a caricature of
the Antichrist.

Concerning the judgment of the work of the Reformation, Ströbel
writes: Luther, wielding the gospel of the free grace of God in Christ as
his passport and safe conduct, and the justifying faith in the forgiveness
of sins, without merit of his own or another's, human, ecclesiastical, or
of the saints, as his sure walking staff, preaches everywhere and always
"de captivitate Babylonica," "the papacy founded by the devil," "on the
freedom of a Christian man," and so on, and thereby carries through a
reformation in the name of God and of Christ — that is, by the grace of
God and of Christ — which, under the mightiest storms from without
and within, has already for three hundred years held its ground against
the gates of hell, and has written on its banner the defiant motto, not yet
to this day put to shame: God's Word and Luther's teaching shall not
pass away, now and never! Vorreiter, on the other hand, presupposing
the divine right and authority of the popes, councils, and traditions, also
wants, to be sure, to see a reformation — but of what? Not of the
church of Christ from an intruded tyranny and a stealthily crept-in
human ordinance, but of the threefold crown of Christ's vicar from the
dust clinging to it; of the monks' cowls and priestly tonsures from
inveterate filth; of masses for souls, purgatory, indulgences, images of
the saints, relics, and the remaining sacred objects from cobwebs, mold,
moth-eaten decay, and — sharp practice. And this reformation he wants
to see brought about not through the gospel, but through the popes and
councils. He wants a reformation in the name of the church, a
reformation by the grace of the Roman see, a reformation such as, in the
opinion of the Romanists, was brought about by the Council of Trent.
Toward such a reformation, he says, Luther too had at first striven, until
he let himself be turned aside from his divine calling as reformer by an
anti-Christian, seditious party. To overthrow the rule of the papacy, the
authority of synods, monasticism, the veneration of the saints, of images,
and of relics in a great part of the Western church — to this, he says,
Luther was not called by God; but only to this: to cleanse all these and
similar institutions from the anti-Christian and abusive elements that
had gradually become bound up with them, and to bring the deadened