# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S64
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

64 Church and Contemporary History.

II. Foreign Countries.

Italy. The general Kirchenzeitung [Church Gazette] writes from Florence: Contempt for the Papacy and the clergy can scarcely be expressed more strongly, and scarcely had a stronger expression even in Germany and England at the time of the Reformation, than it now has in Italy itself. Nevertheless those on the far side of the Alps are gravely mistaken if they believe Italy stands on the eve of a Reformation, or of a break with its old historic Church. The hatred here against its representatives is, and remains, political in nature. Although a Waldensian church has arisen in Florence and in Bologna, said already to number three thousand members, it still lacks the true reforming spirit, and many of these separatists send for the Catholic priest when they are in articulo mortis (at their last gasp). An Italian statesman said in this regard: "Among us there is no religion; the educated classes believe in nothing and are indifferent; the lower strata of the people believe not in God, but in the saints, and the motive of their religious impulses is fear."

Visitation. Those Prussian Lutheran pastors, too, who have renounced the Supreme Church Council [Oberkirchencollegium] in Breslau, are taking steps toward an orderly ecclesiastical fellowship. To this belongs also a kind of mutual visitation. Ehlers reports on this in his Kirchliches Zeitblatt of November 15, as follows: "On October 4 and the following days the visitation of the local Lutheran congregation at Magdeburg, requested by Pastor Wolf, took place. Present were Pastors Diedrich, Räthjen, Meinel of Hamburg, and Vollert of Clodra in Saxe-Weimar. The remaining invited pastors were prevented from coming — the editor of the Zeitblatt by a death in his own congregation. Fuller report on this visitation may perhaps be given in the future. — Mutual visitations (in German, "Besuche," visits) of pastors and congregations are a fitting means of establishing among them a bond by which they serve one another, without exercising any lordship over one another. God will help the congregations separated from the O. K. C. find what is right, so that the full blessing of a fellowship willed by God may flow to the congregation, without man-made ordinances being laid upon them as though from divine command — which time and again has done great harm to the Church, and has become the sorrowful cause of lamentable ecclesiastical divisions."

J. Rupertt, Lutheran pastor in Bremerhaven, writes in a public acknowledgment of thanks for gifts of love received, under date of November 12 of last year: "Just now, in our own city too, the higher our little Lutheran church climbs toward heaven, the waves of bitter rage against ""God's Word and Luther's Doctrine"" rise the higher, as never before; and just in these heated days the Lord has overwhelmed us with gifts and with refreshing, encouraging words from every side, as never before! He is truly a mighty fortress! Blessed are all who trust in Him!"

Judgment of a Rationalist on Union Theology. The famous Württemberg scholar Baur, in his history of the church of the 19th century, published after his death last year, passed the following judgment on the theology named above: "One no longer has the right feeling for the old system, and yet also lacks the strength and the courage to rise to a new one; one no longer knows oneself to be inwardly one with the church, and yet does not dare to break with it outwardly; one holds fast to the Union with every interest, and yet cannot let go of the confessional element either. Can one wonder that all the dogmatic products of this class of theologians are something highly feeble, flat, and spiritless? From the dogmatic standpoint one can only grant the right to the opponents of these union theologians — to the Lutheran theologians, whose system, for all the repellent quality of its particularism, at least has the merit of character, of decisiveness, and of consistency."

Dr. Barth, the well-known writer of Christian books for the young, died on November 12 of last year, in the building of the Calw Publishing Society. He was born in 1799.

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