# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S348
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

348 Literary Notices.

synods — "dog bones and horse bones" of a church that has become
worldly. It has already, from another quarter, been charged with full
justice against the pseudo-Protestant Romanists that only timidity and
inconsistency keep them from demanding "penance" not merely for the
evangelical improvement of the church, but also for the preaching of the
gospel through the Son of Man and his apostles. For all the guilt that
they heap upon the heads of Luther and his fellow workers falls back,
only in doubled measure, upon the first heralds of the evangelical
message of salvation. Yes, yes — Christ, Paul, Luther, and "we
Protestants" need "penance"; our "separated brethren," on the other
hand, need not have it preached to them — after all, they have remained
faithful to the Roman see, they have not torn apart the churchly
organism; they are the ninety-nine righteous who need no "penance."
Whether, indeed, this most modern penance-preaching to "us
Protestants" will result in numerous papist awakenings is another
question. I hope there are still a good many others to whom it goes
exactly as it does to me. I have been so hard-boiled in the sin-kettle of
the Reformation that the Stahl-Wangemann-Vorreiter brand of penance
seems to me altogether ridiculous, and reconciliation with Rome, as a
means of blotting out sin, seems to me utterly dispensable. These, of
course, are matters of taste. Others will consider it a good bargain if,
merely at the price of surrendering the gospel, heaven's door is thrown
open to them by the successor of Peter; to me, the whole Roman glory
would be too dear at the price of a single silver groschen. So I hope
there will still be many for whom the justifying faith in papal grace
cannot be forced through even by the most crushing calls to penance.

As to the charge that Protestantism and revolution are coinciding
concepts, the writer expresses himself as follows: Against this, as
regards the assertion that Protestantism is the revolution, I have to
remark, and to establish by a few historical facts, all of which have
occurred within the span of the present generation, that one may just as
well turn the spear around and say that Romanism is the revolution, and
Protestantism a protecting dam against it. For: a) the hearths and chief
seats of revolution are, in our day, the "Catholic" countries France,
Poland, Austria, Italy; b) the "Protestant" realms England and Sweden
know nothing of "revolution," nor even of revolutionary fever; c) in the
parity kingdom of the united Netherlands, the revolution went out from
the "Catholic" Belgians and was fought down by the "Protestant"
Dutch; d) the classic soil of Roman Catholicism, the Papal States, is by
no means, as one would, after all the papist boasting, expect with full
confidence, a model country of subjects' obedience, but rather, despite
its hermetic sealing-off against all anti-Christian Protestant poison, a
revolutionary model state; — and in what does the Holy Father himself
see the only remedy against his rebellious subjects? In flirting with the
"French Revolution"! — These are historical facts which cannot be
hushed up, nor changed nor carped at, facts which God has rather
allowed to come to pass in order to expose the mendacious talk