# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S62
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

62 Church News of the Day.

“The Founding and Organization of the Church,” by J. E., where among other things it says: “Deacons, chosen by the congregation for life and examined and ordained by the elders; elders, appointed by the apostles or their successors (e.g. Titus and Timothy) and set over the congregation with the consent of the people; and over the elders a bishop or overseer with responsibility for the whole — and this was the manner in which the inspired holy apostles, according to the unanimous testimony of the apostles' immediate disciples, organized the church. Had polemical interests not intervened, no one would ever have doubted the institution of the office of bishop — already so clearly marked out in Holy Scripture — as the continuation or replacement of the apostolic office. Christ is the cornerstone of the temple-building. Joined to him is the foundation which, next to him, bears and holds together the whole: apostles and prophets. Next to these Christ has given the church, for its further building: evangelists (bishops); second, pastors and teachers (elders); and deacons.” In keeping with this view, the writer had already remarked earlier: “The ambassadorial office instituted by Christ in Christ's stead, which preaches reconciliation, has” (the writer of the article himself underlined this) “to continue uninterruptedly in regular succession.” So here we have the complete episcopalian system. Mr. Anstadt appears, on this showing, to be already poised to follow Dr. Reynolds into the well-organized Episcopal Church described above.

Zeal of an Apostate. Riedel, who recently went over from the Dutch Reformed Church to the papacy, confirms the often-made observation that no one displays anti-Christian lies more shamelessly than those who have apostatized to popery. The said Riedel now pours out his venom against what he calls Protestantism, almost continuously, in Mr. Oertel's Catholic Kirchenzeitung, in the Baltimore Catholic Volkszeitung, and in the Catholic Wahrheitsfreund, in unspeakably loose and vapid drivel. To cite just one example, and indeed one of the more decent ones, he writes in the Wahrheitsfreund of December 30: “Instruction through the reading of the Bible or of the holy Scriptures must accordingly indeed be most useful and necessary for the teachers of the church and the shepherds of God's congregation, but with regard to the flock, or to the individual members of the congregation of the Lord, it must be regarded as a most subsidiary and superfluous means of conversion, or even of instruction. For the believing people it is enough, and should be enough, that they hear those to whom the Savior said: He that heareth you heareth me. Luke 10:16.” (As if one did not precisely then hear the apostles, when one reads their writings!) “For faith cometh by hearing, hearing cometh by preaching, and preaching cometh by being sent; but nothing cometh by reading; from reading comes, at most, contradiction.” And so the deluded man drivels on.

The Columbus Kirchenzeitung, at the beginning of the new year, reads its subscribers the following sharp moral, which will hopefully have its effect: “But you collectors of new subscribers, who by the sweat of your brow have brought it about that we have risen from about fourteen hundred subscribers at the start to nearly one thousand, surely now need rest. Sleep on, then, until the end of the year, and leave a little spot open at your weary side, so that the Kirchenzeitung, after its year's labor, may lie down beside you too and fall gently asleep with you. For if things go on much longer this way, it will need nothing more than a coffin and a grave. Who could begrudge you the rest, after your toilsome labor, into which you have entered and drawn one after another! Sleep on quietly, then, and let nothing disturb your rest! But, in earnest, dear brethren, if each of you does not take heart and soon do something, our paper, after a five-year career, will need a gravestone; and the devil will smile at that and write upon the gravestone, to the eternal shame of the Ohio Synod: Here lie the remains of the starved handmaid of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Ohio; because she had to make bricks without straw, and had to labor year in, year out, without food, she died a wretched death on the 15th of December, A.D. 1865, at the advanced age of 5 years, less 16 days. — Things