# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S64
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

64 Church News of the Day.

...bring us all together in this way — that we should all remember our sins and repent from the heart and forgive one another, just as we feel ourselves in need of God's forgiveness, and should join hands on the ground of our common faith in Christ. I think that, even if various views should still remain and still assert themselves, and even if we still remained without sacramental fellowship, such a heartfelt forgiving would nevertheless be pleasing to God through Christ, and the bitterness through which we have sinned would have to yield. And then I hope the Lord would grant further blessing through Jesus Christ. Amen.’”

Collegialism. Why Hengstenberg zealously opposes collegialism and its practical consequences he himself indicates in his Ev. Kz. of November 21 of last year, when he writes: “Against the undertaking, initiated in the sense of a representation rising from below through electoral stages, to remodel the church constitution, the prevailing condition of congregations, widely current, has been persistently urged in these pages as the chief practical objection. The latter gives rise to the fear that the rule of majorities, asserting itself under the shelter and appearance of a legal principle, will deprive the confession of the place due to it alone, and, by undermining its authority, will hand the church over to disruption and dissolution. The misgivings that arise directly from such foresight no one, under present circumstances, can prove to be groundless. They are therefore supported by the earnestness of the word: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” We too, placed in the same circumstances as German theologians, would raise every “chief practical objection” against a collegialist remodeling of the constitution; but we fear that the practical considerations that necessarily come into question here have exercised an all-too-undue influence on Prof. Hengstenberg's theory of church constitution.

“Renan's Life of Jesus.” In a report on this French plagiarism of Strauss's Life of Jesus, delivered by Prof. Cassel at the meeting of the Church Central Union in the Province of Saxony, the reporter says: “as the work of a theologian it ranks, despite its glitter, beneath the production of a candidate for examination, but as a social pamphlet against the church it is a masterpiece, a masterpiece of the old serpent speaking the language of young France. The book's chief catchword is ‘Revolution.’”

The “Gartenlaube.” Concerning this journal, which has appeared in Leipzig for many years, we read the following, among other things, in the Ev. Kz. of November 28 of last year: “In 1858 the G. L. was printed in 70,000 copies; by 1862, in 120,000 copies; indeed, according to the Breslauer Morgenzeitung, the number of its subscribers is said to amount to 135,000. It is the plain truth when it boasts of being ‘the most-read paper on earth,’ a world paper. And yet, precisely because of this success in sheer numbers, anyone who has not forgotten Schiller's distich ‘majestas populi’ must already conclude, from the immense circulation, that there is a lack of all originality, an at best mediocre content, and by no means a ‘discriminating reading public.’ The fact itself that the G. L. is so widely circulated contains, moreover, not a trace of anything incomprehensible or mysterious. The paper could not appear at all if our people were not already largely corrupted, and because, in the decomposition of our de-Christianized people, one sees, in one's blindness, nothing but progress, one therefore so gladly heaps up for oneself teachers after whom one's ears itch.” A clear proof — we will only say — of the thoughtlessness and the infection of present-day Christians by the spirit of this age is this: that the godless paper, the G. L., has here and there found admittance into Christian families as well.

Pistorius, hitherto a member of the Breslau Oberkirchencollegium, has followed a call to the pastorate at Basedow, near Malchin, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In a public “farewell word” he protests against the insinuation that his present departure is a flight.