# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S282
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

282 Miscellany.

for our ecclesiastical fellowship it would be highly expedient if the president had more time at his disposal for discharging this office, whose importance increases the more the boundaries of our association expand and the number of teachers grows. Since a new election is now to take place, I hope it will not be regarded as immodesty on my part — since I know that some will give me their votes — if I urgently ask the synod not to let its choice fall upon me again this time, since I possess neither the competence necessary for this office, nor can the large congregations entrusted to me spare so much of my time and labor as the responsible care of this office requires.

And now, dear brothers, let us proceed in Jesus' name to the beginning of the proceedings. May the Lord guide them through his Spirit, that they may serve the advancement of his kingdom and the glorification of his name! Amen!

(To be continued.)

Miscellany.

A Lutheran in the United Prussian State Church. The picture of such a Lutheran is presented, among others, by Stahl in a most remarkable way. He defends his own position within the united church, while warning others against such a position. We see this from an excerpt which Ströbel gives, in Guericke's journal, from Stahl's work: "The Lutheran Church and the Union." At one point Stahl writes: "Luther and Brenz and Westphal, etc., might rightly fear that the Reformed Church would not hold its ground, that the spiritualism from which its doctrine of the sacrament comes would carry it still further, to all the extravagances of Carlstadt and the Anabaptists and other enthusiasts. Time has taught us that, even amid the branching-off of sects, it truly was able, in its principal communions, to maintain its ground. How should we withhold from it the recognition and esteem and acknowledgment of inner fellowship? In doing so we correspond to the spirit of the Lutheran Church not less, but more, than the old Lutheran Church did. Since then, oppositions to our faith have arisen in the world of which not only Luther and Chemnitz and Andreae, but even Spener and Zinzendorf, had no notion: rationalism, pantheism, materialism. The enormity of this opposition must reduce the distinction among all Christian confessions, and especially among Lutherans and Calvinists, to small dimensions, and the threatening destruction of the whole Christian faith must summon all confessions to a fellowship of defense. How should the strife