# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S210
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

210 The Riddle of the Breslauers.

of the world. This circumstance has detained us longer in the consideration of those facts than the actual subject of the chapter before us required. The importance of the matter, as well as the need, from the sad wasteland of materialistic pseudo-science, to betake ourselves from time to time for needful refreshment to the fresh green pasture of genuine science, as it is offered to us in the citations above, may excuse this.

(To be continued.)

* * *

(Submitted by Prof. Brauer.)

The Riddle of the Breslauers.

The adherents of the Supreme Church Collegium at Breslau are, as is well known, laboring mightily to prove the divine right of their church government. Because the preaching office is of divine right, all offices that proceed from the preaching office are now supposed also to be of divine right — and so also the church government. But Ehlers and every upright Lutheran deny the latter, and that is now the riddle of the Breslauers: they simply cannot manage to whittle it down; it seems to them a "downright incomprehensible inference." Herr Superintendent H. Latzel hopes to get the better of Ehlers on this point, and Herr Kirchenrath Nagel likewise thinks: "it is to be hoped that the above essay (Latzel's) will succeed in bringing out more clearly the point actually at issue in this dispute." In the Kirchenblatt of April 15, Latzel presses Ehlers as follows: "the editor of the church newspaper (Ehlers) is urgently requested to resolve the riddle: how it should follow, from the testimony adduced by Chemnitz that the originally single church office was only later, for the sake of more convenient administration, divided into several offices, that these several offices must be of human right, while the undivided church office is of divine right!" This inference seems to me downright incomprehensible. If a billet of beechwood is, unarguably, through and through made of beechwood — for otherwise it would not be so called — then it is quite irrefutable that when that same billet is split into logs and chopped small, whether the pieces be many or few, whether they be made large or small, or whether the splitting of it takes place in the evening or the morning, in summer or in winter, all the individual pieces are nevertheless still beechwood, since through the splitting it is impossible for birch or alder logs to come of it. Now if the one undivided church office is of divine right, and consequently must be of divine right through and through, if it is to be of divine right as a whole at all, then it follows just as irrefutably from this that when this office is broken up into several offices — whether this happens sooner or later, at the beginning or the end of the church's develop-