# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S347
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literary Notices. 347

deadened organism of the church back to life; to fill the institutions,
which have become mere mechanism, again with a fresh spirit; to teach
that the deep corruption in head and members be known and felt as a
churchly "collective guilt"; and to call the whole church to repentance
with a voice of thunder — in a word, to be and to become, to do and to
refrain from doing, what a Gerson, a Tauler, a Thomas à Kempis were
and did before him, and what a Spener, a Francke, a Zinzendorf were
and did after him, and to which he, Luther, himself, through his early
appearance, had awakened such gladdening hopes. Unfortunately,
unfortunately, he says, it did not remain at this blessed beginning; the
reformer turned into a revolutionary, who made a great part of the
Christian church apostate from its sole rightful head, the Roman Pope,
and thereby caused a split in the kingdom of Christ which must drive
"us Protestants" to daily repentance and penance in sackcloth and
ashes, but also to the most zealous efforts toward reunion with the
brethren who have remained faithful. For only through a humble return
under the rule of the holy father can the grave guilt of the Reformation
be atoned for. — These are Vorreiter's basic thoughts about Luther and
his work. To find them even somewhat tolerable, one must already have
broken completely with the gospel in one's heart, and have kissed the
Vatican slipper with enthusiasm. For it is plain that Luther's evangelical
public stand, his struggle against the papacy and other human
ordinances in the church — precisely that in which his reforming calling
consists — is the stumbling block for Vorreiter. He thinks that if Luther
had simply been able and willing to keep silent — which, to be sure,
would have been most advantageous for the peace of the church — then
he should have done as Tauler, Spener, and others did, who let the
gospel lie quiet and preferred to preach to people the law, contrition, and
"penance," a preaching by which they were spared the danger of
becoming reformers, and the peace of the church was not disturbed. —
It is indeed a very peculiar thing about the crypto-papist outcry for
"penance" that has now become the order of the day. In all seriousness,
people always impute such penance only to "us" Protestants, of all
people. Well, yes, we too, like all the children of men, need that daily
contrition and penance by which the old Adam is to be drowned and to
die; and Luther did not fail, from the very beginning, to preach this
right, wholesome penance; his ninety-five theses on the Wittenberg
church door, and his Enchiridion in the hands of the schoolchildren, are
irrefutable witnesses of this. But it is exactly this penance that our
crypto-papists count as nothing at all; they demand of "us Protestants"
not contrition, sorrow, and terror over our falling away from God and
his holy law, not believing refuge at Christ's throne of grace and gospel;
we are to do penance for our falling away from the holy