# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 01 11_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

count as outcasts, find a following that delights in their equally filthy and irrational effusions.

When, in our contributions directed against such scoffers in No. 5 of Der Lutheraner, we likewise made mention of great philosophers, we by no means intended thereby to degrade them so far as to want to place them alongside such wretched bawlers; rather, we wished to show: if keen-witted philosophers, by reason alone, could discover and offer nothing certain concerning the most important matters of mankind, then who would want to seek truth in the gibberish — that is, in the nonsense, in the mental rubbish-sweepings — of the more recent blasphemers?

Let us go further. The first weapon which such writers use against Christianity is, as we have shown, the pretense that it is unreasonable. A second is that they seek to demonstrate how ruinous Christianity has always been in its effects.

For when the enemies of true Christianity wish to deal it its death-blow, they begin by first assuring their readers how learned they are. Thereupon they proceed into the history of former times and tell dreadful tales of the Spanish Inquisition, of dark dungeons inhabited by mice and rats, of stakes and torture-chambers, of the wheel and the gallows, of thieves, robbers, and murderers, of poison, daggers, and similar dreadful instruments of murder, of secret atrocities committed by disgraceful priests, of witch trials, of conspiracies with the devil, etc., etc. Now, when these writers believe they have so affected their readers by their descriptions that every hair on their heads stands on end, then, they think, the favorable moment has come when they may put the question to their readers: Is Christianity, then, not the most terrible of all the terrors of mankind? They hope that every reader will now be won over to co-sign the death sentence. Among their own kind, such writers likewise do not fail of their purpose. People who have long since wished to be rid of the yoke of religion, so as no longer to have to fear a future judgment, read such argumentation with enthusiasm, applaud the high-minded enlightener and reliever of consciences with stormy acclaim, and cry out: Yes, yes, this is the man who ought to have come into the world long ago; then the earth would never have been a vale of tears; this man at last uncovers the secrets — hidden for centuries — of all priestly deception and its tormenting of mankind, and delivers us from God, whose oversight of the earth has now burdened us long enough. Even if this great man is still misjudged today, a grateful posterity will nonetheless crown his fair image with unfading laurels and, once his soul has long since dissolved into dust, will inscribe his name in letters of gold on lofty columns of honor and make it immortal.

— 39 —

Yet, dear Christians, let us for once ask: what, in short, is the real point of such a scoffer's long speeches? What does everything he says, in the end, actually amount to, when he tries to prove that Christianity is harmful and ruinous? Wherein, then, actually lies hidden the force of his argument? — You will be able to guess it without my saying so: that these new spreaders of enlightenment do not employ the old manner of drawing conclusions, but have themselves devised new rules for drawing them. For they reason thus: because there have been people who called themselves Christians and boasted of Christianity — indeed, who even wore a black coat — who were nevertheless scoundrels, therefore Christianity is a priestly fraud, an invention of lies for the torment of poor mankind.

Is that not a lovely piece of reasoning? — If a coarse man who has never practiced thinking comforts himself with the sins of those who call themselves Christians, by drawing from them the conclusion that Christianity is therefore false and the Scripture's threats against sinners void, no one will be greatly surprised; but what is one to say when people reason this way who imagine they have the great calling to enlighten the world and thereby to bless it with the creations of their intellect?

It goes without saying that we take up no pen to instruct such people; whoever draws such conclusions is either incapable of perceiving the force of a proper conclusion, or unwilling to do so, or both at once. To sensible and impartial readers, however, we now submit the following.

A doctrine or a church is not to be judged by how those who profess it behave, but by how they ought to behave according to its doctrine and according to the principles of their church — in accordance with the well-known proverb: "Abuse does not abolish proper use." Who would be so foolish as to call a free republic an institution harmful to the happiness of nations merely because it contains godless citizens — who may perhaps even be protected by high officials of the republic, but whose wicked deeds are nevertheless condemned by the laws of the state? No one of sound mind, surely. It is therefore truly childish to want to charge Christianity with the horrors of the papacy, which Holy Scripture had long before foretold as the seat of the Antichrist. Such argumentation the Christian would read only for amusement — since he sees from it how those who fancy themselves wise become fools — were one not compelled to grieve over the outrageous malice that alone can serve up such things to the poor, ignorant people to seduce them. Let history tell us ever so many horrors of those who called themselves Christians, servants of Christ, Christian authorities, etc.; this proves not in the least that Holy Scripture, and the Christian doctrine to be drawn from it alone, is ruinous, since it is precisely Holy Scripture that condemns and punishes all godless behavior as no other book in the world does. If one who outwardly professes Christianity, indeed even wears the priest's robe, is a hypocrite who secretly serves sin, then he is no believing Christian; then he belongs among the unbelievers; then he, like them, no longer believes in God's Word, neither in his grace nor in his wrath; no true Christian presents himself hypocritically as an unbeliever, but all who present themselves hypocritically as Christians have, precisely by doing so, stepped into the ranks of the unbelievers. Even granting that the persons named in Holy Scripture committed great sins, this casts no shadow on this holy Book, since it is precisely therein that God's curse upon such sins is recorded, along with the punishment with which God visited them. Our scoffers tell, lustfully and with a smirk, the stories of the fornication into which a David, etc., fell; the Bible, by contrast, relates such things in such a way that the reader, unless he has a wholly filthy and lustful mind, is moved to abhor such sins and to watch over himself.

What holds true of Christianity in general also holds true of the various churches within Christendom. Only the most boundless ignorance can lead one to the claim that the church always does whatever its outward members do. If that were so, there would of course never have been a church that had not defiled itself with every vice — for was there not even a Judas among the Twelve? Woe, then, to our Lutheran church! — For which church, then, would have defiled itself more with the rejection of the Word of God than it? For are not most preachers who still call themselves Lutheran, especially in our old fatherland, Rationalists (men of mere reason), who secretly mock the faith of the church they are supposed to serve and whose bread they eat, and who administer the preaching office only for their belly's sake? But how then? Shall our church be made to bear the burden of what these spiritual robbers and murderers, who have forced their way into it, undertake? — Far be it! — No, one can only say that the church has done what its outward members do when these have acted according to the precept of their church. Therefore the Lutheran church can never preach false doctrine, for the doctrine that it has laid down in its public symbols (confessions of faith), and on which it is therefore founded, is pure and unadulterated, according to the clear Word of God. Let, therefore, ever so many preachers called Lutheran teach falsely; they do not do so as servants of our church, but as its destroyers; and let ever so many Lutherans live godlessly, they do not live so as Lutherans, but as apostates (the fallen-away) of our church, which, according to God's commandment, teaches them to live blamelessly.

With full right, therefore, we wrote in the 7th number of our paper that it is the Roman church, but never the Lutheran church, that has stained itself with the blood of heretics,