# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S312
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

312 Church and Contemporary History.

...President Washington, the New York Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church assembled on May 28, 1789, and prepared, on the day following, an address to Washington, in which he and "the liberty handed down through the providence of God and the glorious Revolution" were highly extolled." Loyalty and revolution are thus at times treated by these upright Methodists as identical. In any case — this one sees clearly and plainly from their conduct — loyalty means to them a citizen's firm adherence to those in power, provided the latter pursue the aims of his party. The solution of the riddle why the Methodists, otherwise so revolutionary, are now, along with all the atheistic subverters of our land, so loyal, lies therefore without doubt in the emancipation of the slaves that those in power in our land now intend. Since the Methodists, together with all the unbelievers of the whole world, are arch-abolitionists, they are of course loyal now as well. Should the administration wage the war for a contrary purpose, the loyalty of our "mourner's-bench humanists" would certainly look shaky enough, just as it showed itself to be in the matter of Kossuth, Garibaldi, Poland, and so forth. These gentlemen have, to be sure, up to now always wrapped themselves in the sheep's clothing of loyalty toward their own government. But why could they do so? Was it perhaps because they truly had a Christian conscience regarding God's word on the sanctity of the governing authority? By no means; no more than the equally "super-loyal" atheistic radicals! The reason lies in this, that their loyalty toward the government of the land has not yet been put to the test. When the former governor of Missouri, later deposed, who acted contrary to the sympathies of such loyalists, had not yet been deposed, and so was still in a lawful office, we here had to witness marvels from the loyal Methodists and other loyalists of this place. What would such people do if, like a Peter and a Paul of old, they had to live under a Nero? — We see it from the Apologist: they would, as soon as they gained sufficient power, be "already done" with him; indeed they are already working toward the "triumph of the freedom of all peoples," with which the freedom of the Poles too would triumph. O you hypocrites, you "loyal" revolutionaries of this latter time!

From a sermon by Bishop Simpson, delivered on the last Thanksgiving Day before the Methodist congregations of Chicago, the "Apologist" of Aug. 24 gives an excerpt. It says there, among other things: "At the outbreak of the war it was said that we could raise no loan of money for the conduct of the war. What has turned out to be the case? We were not even obliged to draw upon foreign credit. Our people willingly offered their capital to the government, and the time is not far off when our credit and our paper money will stand at par with gold." No wonder, when the "Apologist" says of this sermon that it "testifies not only to the piety and loyalty of this highly esteemed pillar of the church, but also to his deep insight into the politics of the United States." In this last respect at least the Methodist prelate seems to understand himself better than he does the preaching of the Gospel, which alone belongs in the pulpit.

Infant Baptism. The "Evangelist" of Aug. 29 reports: "Among the Congregationalist congregations in the State of Connecticut there are 76 in which, in the year 1862, no child was baptized. In one of the congregations no child had been baptized in 10 years, and in none of all the congregations were more than 20 children baptized in the past year." One sees from this how dreadfully Anabaptism is increasing even outside the Baptist sect; a necessary consequence of the false doctrine of baptism held by all the sects. We are reminded here of that word of Luther's: "And it is the truth that the Anabaptist spirit and the enthusiast spirit are one spirit; for although outwardly they present themselves as if they were not of one spirit — as Zwingli and his followers presented themselves as if they were enemies of the Anabaptists on certain points — yet in baptism and the sacrament they were wholly and entirely one spirit in both. For they both alike taught the great art, namely, that in baptism it is mere water, and in the sacrament mere bread and wine. And in sum, no error or heresy stands alone: where the devil sets in one foot, he goes in after it with his whole body. Whoever grants that baptism is mere water must also grant that the sacrament is mere