# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S128
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

128 Church-Contemporary-History.

A stipend of 150 Gulden he had received at that time he later had to repay. Only in
the year 1859 did he pay off the remainder. In the years 1814 and 15 he received the
lower and higher priestly ordinations, and became first the baronial tutor (Hofmeister) at
Steineck and at the same time pastor of that same place. After three years he was
transferred as pastor to Mühlhausen. Contact with a young man who had been stirred by
Prof. Sailer at Landshut first helped to turn his previous moral sermons into gripping
sermons of repentance, with which he also worked awakeningly on the inhabitants of the
surrounding area, even the evangelical ones. The little book by Boos, "Christ for us and
in us," brought him more and more onto evangelical paths, so that at last he drew the
eyes of his Catholic fellow clergy upon himself. A series of attacks by them, and of
complaints to the spiritual and secular authorities, was the next consequence. After all
sorts of measures, of the kind the Catholic church is accustomed to take with apostate
priests, the parish was finally taken from him in October 1822. The congregation,
however, fell to him, troop after troop, following their former pastor, and as early as
January 23, 1823 requested admission into the evangelical church. On March 7 their
Henhöfer followed them in this step. From July 1 of that same year until his end he was
an evangelical pastor in several places. — He died after a brief illness, 73 years old.

Hesse. The following is reported by the Freimund of December 25 of last year:
"In May of this year a number of Hessian clergy brought a charge before the Darmstadt
Upper Consistory against Professor Noack at Gießen for unbelief and freethinking (cf. No.
25). He had namely, in an essay, considered the resurrection of the Crucified One in the
light of present-day scholarship, and flatly denied it. The Ministry of the Interior, to
which the charge was submitted by the Upper Consistory, has now disposed of it in the
following manner. It has had the simple communication conveyed to the accused, through
the rector of the state university, that the essay belongs to the domain of biblical-critical
inquiry, which must be left free to scholarship if it is to fulfill its task, and consequently
is not in itself to be judged an attack on the Christian faith [!] — but that the frivolous
and mocking language, which frequently comes to the fore in it, being incompatible with
the earnestness and dignity of biblical scholarship, is disapproved of. So, according to the
N. Fr. Z., runs the ministerial ruling. — But what will the shepherds and watchmen of
the Hessian church have to say to that?"

On the subject of prayer for the departed the consistory of the evangelical
church province of Silesia published, last year, an official declaration. It states there:
"We may and should remember the departed in our prayers." (p. 12.) Indeed, it goes on
to say: "That such prayers, even though they are not commanded, are permissible, is to
be recognized as beyond doubt, on the ground of Holy Scripture. The above account of
the difference in the state of the departed, from the moment of death until the
consummation of all things at the judgment through the world's rebirth, (Matt. 19:28,)
testifies to the permissibility of our prayers for the pardoned, who are to be thought of as
in a state of development — and that not merely of growth, but also of purification, Matt.
12:32." There we have, then, a public confession of the doctrine of purgatory from a
Union church government, than which nothing could be more definite! Even Hengstenberg
writes on this: "We have here without doubt a refined form of purgatory before us, and
just as in the earlier church the doctrine of purgatory called forth the obligation of
intercession for the dead, so it would happen again now, if this doctrine finds entry
through the notion of development and purification." Alas! that consistory stands,
however, in such views by no means alone. The kindred new doctrine of Hades, closely
related to it, counts, as is well known, legions of confessors among the newer "believing"
theologians.