# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 05 30_S159
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something on Dr. J. Albr. Bengel's Principles of Education.

"With young people I never make much of the usual boyish pranks and youthful thoughtlessness; I do explain to them in general that it is sin, but I do not punish every single instance of it, because with people who pay no heed to inner discipline it can hardly be otherwise. It is a different matter when harmful and dangerous outbursts occur; then one must certainly look into it and, if necessary, show a bit of sternness—only one must let it be seen that one means well and that nothing is held against them afterward."

"When children are guarded too anxiously, they tend afterward, once they get a bit of freedom, to run all the wilder, and with such carefully sheltered children one has trouble telling nature and grace apart."

"It soon becomes evident what young people are going to become. Where there is cheerful freedom and openness, there is no cause for concern; but where falsehood, lying, and unchastity are found along with wildness, there is little good to be hoped for."

"Educators must certainly guard against anger, and must not try to force their respect or break the stubbornness of those under them by force; otherwise, when children are provoked to anger, they easily boil over, grow hard-hearted, and become even more corrupted. The sole and only aim must be to set them right. Often, where a small fault has been punished, one can shame and win over a soul by unexpectedly and deliberately overlooking a greater one. In education one should avoid all artificiality. One should give children good opportunity by which the Word of God becomes known to them; even if not everything remains with them, still something here and there will remain. But one should begin with narrative history and not with maxims; examples give one delight, commands do not. It is not advisable to overload children with many interpretations and demands, or else they become closed off and ill-disposed toward everything. A well-digger only clears the obstacles out of the way, and then the water runs by itself. If one merely cuts off children's opportunity for gross excesses, it is otherwise better to leave them, in their mostly innocent busy activity, more to their own inclination than to that imposed by others—for example, in jumping and other activities to which youthful liveliness drives them; since some overseers often scold everything as thoughtlessness, one should not be quite so exacting."

"One should hold children to prayer at least morning and evening, either praying aloud before them so that they may take it as a model, or letting them pray themselves. Moreover, one should also diligently pray for them oneself in private."

"One protects girls from impertinent curiosity and flirtatiousness, directs them toward quietness, and instills in them a disgust for idle chatter and for carrying gossip into the house. I have not desired to make my daughters refined in body or in spirit. They have been raised thus in simplicity after the manner of the patriarchs, and have precisely thereby been kept from gallantry, novels, and other impertinent curiosity. Whatever is still lacking, a husband can himself supply, and accustom them as he wishes to have them; this would not be so easily possible had I given them a more fixed mold."

"The association of unmarried persons of both sexes with one another is always dangerous, even under the best appearance. A certain austeritas (strict reserve) in this matter is good and useful."

The results of an upbringing built on these principles were such that Bengel could say:

"Just as I have made it my concern to give my children a good upbringing, so too have I experienced from my children and grandchildren no heartache but only pure joy, and the fatherly and grandfatherly blessing will rest upon them."

(From Burk's Pastoral Theology.)

Take Comfort!
(Löhe.)

Can you no longer find justice on earth? I tell you, and I will maintain my case against you, that as surely as there is justice in heaven, so surely is there justice on earth. Does he not live who has gone to the Father, Jesus Christ? Is he not in eternal glory on the Father's throne? He indeed is our righteousness! Our righteousness is indeed lifted out of the realm of sin; it is kept for us untouchable, unloseable. But you have a share in it if, without seeing, you nevertheless believe that he is yours. Whoever believes in him believes that he, having in our name been humbled, in our name condemned, and in our name justified through the resurrection and glorified through his ascension, is not counted unjust before God, but has come—has already come—with the thief, and has been received with the thief unto Mount Zion, unto the heavenly city, unto the spirits of the righteous made perfect. You do not see the righteous, but you will see them. They are hidden with Christ in God, but they live; they are marked, as surely as the word of the Holy Spirit speaks of him who went away and is not seen.

Do you still complain? You say it is a raging of Satan on earth, an unbearable power of wickedness. But what would you have said on the day of the crucifixion? You would not have been able to say with the Lord: "The prince of this world comes, and has nothing in me." You are shortsighted; you perhaps have insight into the evil that still exists, but from staring so much into the night you are blinded to the light; you do not see that "the prince of this world is judged." But Christ speaks, the Spirit preaches it. Whatever Satan stirs up, however much it storms, what is thereby made manifest is not his power but his death throes, not his triumph but his defeat. In every defeat the members of Jesus are victorious. The history of the church is indeed a history of victory for our Lord and his church, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

Good courage, good times I preach to you! We walk amid birth pangs, but also at the beginning of eternal life. The last times are also the first at the break of dawn. We are being led ever more into all truth; the light shines ever brighter in Goshen the darker it becomes in Egypt. All the words of the Lord grow ever clearer; we walk ever further into their fulfillment! Ah, give us, Lord, eyes to see, a heart to understand, that as long as Christ is the Lord, it grows more glorious from day to day!

The Rejected Father.

Dear child, care for your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he lives. And bear with him kindly should he become childish, and do not despise him because you are more capable than he. (Sir. 3:14–15.)

In Hilgenbach, formerly a market town of Nassau, now Prussian, there lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century a married couple who still had an aged father and a small boy of about five years. The father grew ever weaker; he trembled and could not bring the spoon to his mouth without spilling. The son and daughter-in-law were disgusted by him and moved him from the table to a spot behind the stove. But since he had no table there and had to hold his little earthen bowl on his trembling knees, it often fell from him and broke. So they gave him a little wooden bowl to eat from instead. The old man's little grandson noticed this; he slipped away from the table, began gathering little boards and laying them side by side. When his father asked him, "Boy, what are you making there?" he answered, "I am making a little trough for you to eat from when I am grown up." These words struck the parents like a thunderclap; they rose up, asked the old father's forgiveness with tears, and gladly kept him at their table for as long as he lived.

The Powerful Mirror.

The Son of God let it cost him so dearly to blot out our sins that it is necessary for us often to picture the Crucified One to ourselves, and to let ourselves be deterred from sin by his image of suffering. The Florentine monk Galatinus attempted this with success on another person. There lived in his neighborhood a wanton woman whom he would gladly have brought to the Lord Christ. For this purpose he devised the following means. He had a picture of the crucified Jesus painted on a panel, framed like a mirror, and hung it at a window through which the woman could see from her house; and he would often stand before it, as though he were looking at himself in the mirror. She noticed this,