# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 05 24_S171
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— whom God used for the chastening and quickening of the Church of England — these artificial pumps and presses; for they preached on their mission journeys with demonstration of the Spirit and of power, and the grace of the Holy Spirit worked through their preaching many an awakening from the sleep of sin, which their feeble successors now seek to force violently by the aid of self-made driving- and steam-engines. To these levers of awakening belong chiefly:

a. The protracted meetings and camp meetings. What was formerly, in part, a matter of necessity in the time of those two men has now, for the most part without necessity, become a fixed form; for there now seems to be no lack of Methodist preachers and churches.

Furthermore, what was natural in that earlier state of necessity has now become an unnatural and grotesque distortion. For can one imagine anything madder or more absurd in the spiritual realm than this day-long, indeed week-long, storming of the feelings of a flowing and ebbing crowd by several of these violent preachers — a crowd that is, as it were, continually plied with spirituous drinks, from cider to doubly spiced mulled wine, but not with bread and healthy, sustaining, nourishing food? What, even in the best case, can the fruit of this be? The violent excitement of individual feelings of repentance and faith, which, for lack of later careful cultivation and right guidance, either end in weariness and emptiness, or take a crooked direction, so that the person craves only the renewal of that first bittersweet enjoyment, and not a thorough conversion and change of mind. But even granting that some of these persons, through that special grace of the Holy Spirit of which I spoke earlier, should later come to a sound state of repentance and faith, should this exciting and driving manner be approved on that account? By no means; for it is a gross and palpable contempt of the Apostle's admonition in 1 Corinthians 14:40: "Let all things be done decently" — that is, becomingly — "and in order!" and "God is not a God of confusion, but of peace" (1 Corinthians 14:33). It further mocks all churchly and worshipful custom, since, as has been said, the outward occasion for the earlier field preaching of Wesley and Whitefield, and the earlier state of necessity, no longer exists; it rests on a secret confidence in the power and effect of this pressing and driving upon the feelings of the hearers; and it produces, on the whole, various evils. For it provokes the mockery of what is holy, and is not an innocent occasion but a guilty cause of scoffers sinning still more; it gives just offense to God-fearing and churchly minded people; it feeds and encourages the idle, curious appetite of the crowd for hearing and spectacle, which streams together here as to fairs and to hawkers, and chatters, laughs, eats, and drinks during the sermons, prayers, and hymns, and so on; and by its repeated storming, it also gives no time or rest to the person wholesomely struck by the Word of God to work through the impressions received and arrive at a sound knowledge of sin and of salvation; rather, it drives only, on the whole, toward that morbid excitement of isolated feelings of repentance and faith, which, as in a spiritual intoxication and stupor, become confused and entangled with one another; upon which follows, as has been said, either weariness and emptiness, indeed disgust and satiety, or, for the most part, merely the craving to have this bittersweet emotional intoxication again — much as opium-eaters and brandy-drinkers do in the flesh.

b. The so-called anxious seat (mourners' bench), or the summoning of penitent souls to a particular place after an address has been given. In the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield it happened at times, especially in regions where Law and Gospel had not yet been proclaimed at all, or not rightly, that individual souls were so powerfully struck in their hearts that they cried out aloud and sprang up, sobbed and wailed in anguish, or shouted and rejoiced for joy. And who would dare to measure the riches of God's grace with so narrow a gauge as to deny outright that those stirrings of repentance or faith in the heart were worked by the Holy Spirit through the preaching, revealing themselves in such unusually strong outbursts? One need only think of people until then spiritually neglected and degraded, of lively and strong feelings, who perhaps in their whole lives had never yet heard Law and Gospel preached with demonstration of the Spirit and of power — what wonder if such people, after being powerfully struck in the heart by the Word of God, involuntarily made these feelings known also in audible sounds and perhaps unusual gestures? It seems to me that in judging such phenomena one must guard against two opposite errors. The one, indicated above, is to regard them as self-made pretense and hypocrisy, or merely as fanatical self-delusion, and sooner as works of the devil than of God; the other is to regard such occurrences as the sole work of the Holy Spirit and as the true and proper awakening and conversion which by rights ought to happen in everyone. Into the former error usually fall those preachers and members of our church who lack deeper inner experience of repentance and faith, and therefore also spiritual knowledge of Scripture, of the manifold ways of God, and of the manifold constitution of human nature. Into the latter error, however, the Methodists themselves have fallen, and from it, no doubt, the anxious seat and the procedure connected with it chiefly arose. For what was, in Wesley's and Whitefield's time, in individual cases the free working of the Spirit of God through their preaching, their feeble descendants now seek to turn into a general form and to elevate into the proper way and manner. They now measure, in particular, the nature and worth of conversion by the greater or lesser intensity of the inner feelings of repentance and grace and of outward gesture, and hence the pressing and driving of their preachers, that the (so-called) penitent souls should come to that particular place — just as if the converting grace of the Holy Spirit were bound to a fixed place, time, and manner, or as if a person could obtain repentance by his own will and step forward as penitent. In doing so they further employ, quite in the manner of hucksters and quacks, their enticing and frightening stories, to bring the timid or the stubborn souls forward — the former by praising the seemingly miraculous cures of the anxious seat, the latter by intimidating them with the deadly danger of rejecting this infallible remedy. These little stories, mostly quite trite and threadbare in themselves, can nevertheless do a twofold harm. Through the enticing stories, this or that spiritually vain and conceited soul may be moved to come forward and adopt the gestures of the penitent without truly being so, and thereafter to be regarded as such by the congregation; conversely, through the frightening stories, many a timid but sincere and repentance-willing soul, who simply could not overcome her reluctance to step forward, may later fall into great fear and distress, and, through the devil's deceit, come to believe that the time of grace is past for her because she did not go to the anxious seat — were it not that God's grace and wisdom are greater than the Methodists' fanatical folly and their new legalistic drivenness with the anxious seat: were it not that God looks upon the heart, regardless of whether the outward gesture accompanying it is strong, weak, or entirely absent — it would not be the fault of these childish and foolish frightening stories alone if such an anxious soul later despaired entirely of God's grace because she did not go to the anxious seat along with the others. This much at least is certain: the Methodists and Methodist-minded preachers hold being penitent and coming to the anxious seat to be one and the same thing; but the two, as just noted, can in many cases be worlds apart, for there can come forward many who do not sincerely grieve over their sins, and there can fail to come forward many who are in true, godly sorrow. As to the former case, you yourself know what happened with Mrs. O., who in February was led to the anxious seat amid considerable convulsions and shrieking, but who after about a quarter of an hour was already skipping for joy and gratefully pressing the hands of her spiritual helpers in the faith; yet within a few weeks she fell into open marital strife with her husband, so that for a time they lived entirely separated from one another.

Therefore it is an untenable ground when the Methodists claim that it serves as a testimony to