# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S314
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

314 Contemporary Church History.

and taken my place, the land belongs to me also in a religious respect, to the exclusion of the right of every other) — thus it has been made serious." What does one call such reports? — In plain German: slander!

Death. On Sept. 1 died Pastor Dr. C. R. Demme of Philadelphia, Pa. He was a native of Saxony, had studied law there, and, after having served as a volunteer in the German Wars of Liberation, had come to America in the year 1816. Here he turned to theological studies, and was, after administering a pastorate near Hummelstown, Dauphin Co., Pa., pastor since Sept. 29, 1822, at St. Michael's and Zion's Church in Philadelphia.

„Papal Intervention.“ Under this heading the Apologete reports that the present Pope has recently issued a letter to the archbishops of New York and New Orleans, which contains a kind of intervention in our present national troubles. And indeed the letter reads in such a way that, without exaggeration, an attempt at indirect intervention may well be sought in it. The Pope writes, namely, to the designated dignitaries of the Roman Church in the United States: "Forget not, in our name, to remind and exhort the people and their supreme rulers that with a conciliatory spirit they accept peace and love one another with uninterrupted love. For we are confident that they will yield to our fatherly exhortations and will lend so much the more willing an ear to our words, as they themselves clearly and plainly perceive that no political or worldly considerations influence us, and that we are moved solely and alone by fatherly love to exhort them to love and to peace." One sees from this that the old spirit of the Papacy, which has always, with a lamb's countenance, offered its mediation to states in distress, so as thereby to gain influence over the politics of these states and to prepare the execution of its wolf's designs, has not yet departed from Rome. In the present case, however, less this is to be feared than rather the consequence that a peace advocated by the Pope would, precisely for the sake of this advocacy, become only the more unpopular; although the war-enthusiastic Apologete, driven about by abolitionist mania, says of the Pope's letter that it is "especially dangerous at this moment," "when our successes offer temptations (!) to a peace settlement involving compromises." The paper thus goes so far in its mad fanaticism that it regards the opportunity for a peace settlement, purchased by any compromise whatsoever, as a temptation! If only its goal, the abolition of slavery, is attained, then hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens may go on being slaughtered, just as many Negroes may perish in their misery, the moral and bodily ruin in the land may become ever more horrifying to every Christian heart — the Apologete then blesses the "glorious" times into which its existence has fallen, and has but one concern: that our rulers might be moved by the unspeakable misery of this war and make a Christian peace.

The "Lutheran and Missionary" on Church Government and the Authority of Synods. It is a fact that forces itself upon every unbiased observer of events in the ecclesiastical field here, that the so-called "burning questions" which arise in our old fatherland and disturb the churches find, after some time, often a considerable time, their echo in the specifically American churches — an echo which is, to be sure, mostly very faint, and not seldom one modulated by the political current of the moment. So it once went with the question of church and ministry; so it now goes with the question of church government, church orders, and obedience. While the dispute over this question, called forth especially by the claims of the Breslau Supreme Church Council, has long been under way in Germany, at last the above-named paper also, in its number of the 16th of July of this year, raises its voice, to join belatedly in the outcry over church government. Naturally — it is, after all, now here the time of strong government, and the American church, even the one calling itself "American Lutheran," the General Synod, marches with the times. Therefore