# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28 Ecclesiastical Contemporary Notes.

things that all other peoples might well be terrified at the sight of them, and our heavenly Father himself must have been greatly astonished at it. But God wills also to be honored by a nation which he has exalted and so richly blessed. "It is not the swift that win the race, nor the strong that win the battle." Wayward children that we are, we must turn back to the God who made us. — Fourthly: God wills through this war to purify our political system. For years we have scarcely had any legislation that would have been worthy of a great and Christian nation. Worthless, godless men have brought confusion into our political system, and the whole thing has been a grand farce, a contemptible scramble after offices and spoils, an outrage against God and an intelligent people. Parties, as they have existed in this land, have brought us nearly to ruin, and we are now reaping what we have sown in this respect. The war will at last heal the evil. Good and honest men will again be chosen for office as in the days of our fathers, and the nation will be saved. — Still more: God wills through this war to bring law and authority again to force among us. This had almost entirely disappeared in church and state, in the family, the schoolroom, the courtroom, the councils of the states and of the nation; everywhere the force of law was nearly gone. All respect for age, position, and office was gone. Now there are only two ways to govern people: by constitution and laws, or by force; by principles and the power of conscience, or by the bayonet. Since laws of every kind had all but lost their force among us, our liberty had degenerated into license, and we scarcely had any kind of government left, nothing remained to us but the power of the sword. But this war has already opened the nation's eyes, and will set us right again. When God's purposes in this war are accomplished, or a happy outcome is near at hand, it will end, and not before." — C.

The "Lutheran and Missionary" on Liturgy. However much we must censure it as mistaken and unseemly when, in a church periodical, in order to plead the cause of the surplice, one appeals among other things to the "approval of a great number of the best-bred churchgoing ladies," as happens in the number of December 4 of the paper named, it nevertheless pleases us to find expressed there also such sound and correct views on liturgy as the following: "A liturgy which is built up on the basis of our church confessions, and which in its various integral parts embodies and sets forth the sharp features of our faith, is a bulwark against aberrations in doctrine. The more often the congregation hears the genuine expression of Lutheran principles and doctrines, the more deeply these will penetrate into their hearts, the more intimately will they blend into one with their own feelings. This will strengthen the church against the force of ecclesiastical storms, which toss it to and fro like ships torn loose from chain and anchor." — C.

"A Religious Dog." The reader will certainly, upon reading this heading, think of a fable, and wonder how it found its way into "Lehre und Wehre." Now, even if it is not an instructive fable, the matter is nevertheless an instructive story, and a striking proof of how extremes touch one another. The whole host of Puritan, fanatical, and neo-Lutheran Sabbath-keepers, who understand about as much of the Third Commandment as a blind, bigoted Jew, would certainly not be able to marvel enough, were they to read in the K. G. [Kirchengeschichte] that in the gray Middle Ages the blind superstition of the Romanists was capable, in the diocese of Lyon, of invoking "a dog, which fought and died for the child of its master, as a martyr and child-saint." (See Guericke, Kirchengeschichte II, 243). And yet, has it not sprung from exactly the same works-righteous spirit, when the "Observer," in its number of December 12, offers its readers under the above title the story of a Sabbath-keeping dog as an edifying natural-historical curiosity? For thus he writes, namely, following the "Boston Journal": In the old and beautiful town of Chatham, N. H., there is a very remarkable dog, whose character and behavior may well excite the admiration of all good people. On week-