# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1864_S191
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Contemporary History. 191

hereditary enemy meddles in it, then all Germany will become a bloody theater of war, so that the churches stand entirely empty, and the angels weep and the devils laugh. Believe me, I am a better patriot than all of you, and if you went more often into your prayer closet, you would do more for Germany than with all your reasoning and boasting and agitating. If the judgments of God are still to be turned away from Germany, it will happen through prayer. Therefore I ask all who read this to pray every day; the prayer bell reminds us of it three times a day: Grant us peace graciously, Lord God, in our time. For there is indeed no other who could fight for us, except You, our God alone. Amen." Fiat applicatio!

Sweden. In Swedish ecclesiastical legislation, the following important changes have recently been made. The Sacrament Law of the year 1855, which sentenced anyone administering the sacraments without being ordained to a fine or even imprisonment on bread and water, has been repealed. Likewise the law of 1686, by which every confirmed person, especially if he was a state official, was compelled to receive Holy Communion at least once a year. Finally, by a special law, a general synod has been created for the Swedish state church, in which the twelve bishops of the realm sit ex officio, while beside them the clergy and laity will also be represented by elected deputies. The decision concerning liturgy, catechism, hymnal, etc., which until now belonged to the political representation of the country in the Riksdag, shall henceforth be left to this ecclesiastical Convocation, as it is called.

Renan's book has already brought him in over two hundred fifty thousand thalers — a good business as well. Renan is said to be of Jewish descent.

The Christian State. On the occasion of a discussion of the ecclesiastical-political reformation striven for in Italy in the age of the Reformation by otherwise upright men, P. (Philippi?), in Kliefoth's journal for January and February, utters the golden saying, worth taking to heart for our own circumstances here as well: "God's Word is indeed also to permeate all worldly things and ordinances; but that it should do so ought not to be our aim; rather, first let God's Word, in its whole truth, come purely into the hearts, and then it will also give new birth to the states."

Australia. Pastor Fritzsche of Lobethal died on November 26 of last year.

The discord among Christians over political questions appears at present to have reached a height in Germany similar to that here in America. It is especially the Berlin Kreuzzeitung and its numerous party which, by opposing, in the Schleswig-Holstein question, the fairly generally held assumption that the Augustenburg line possesses the right of succession to the duchies, is meeting with the sharpest attacks. Dr. Ebrard says of it, in a pamphlet of his own: "It is a party that looks like a lamb and speaks like a dragon, that carries the name of Christ in its mouth and the cross on its brow, but in truth aims, in hypocritical self-interest, to undermine the foundation of Christian moral order in the state and in the states." He finally calls upon "all preachers in Prussia who love the Lord Jesus" to: "For the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the salvation of the souls entrusted to you, give the people proof that Bible-believing Christianity is neither a tool of the police nor a cloak for wickedness, and that Christianity and the Kreuzzeitung are opposite things — God grant it! Amen!" Not very differently have the theological faculty and clergy of Kiel expressed themselves against the Kreuzzeitung, a declaration to which the theological faculty and clergy of Jena, and other municipal ministeria, subsequently gave their assent. In this question, the Ev. Kirchenzeitung stands essentially by the side of the Kreuzzeitung, for which the former is severely chastised in the March issue of the Erlangen journal. After Hengstenberg had set, against the "admittedly very weighty legitimacy of the hereditary Prince of Augustenburg," another legitimacy — "the fact of the centuries-long connection of Schleswig and Holstein with Denmark" — and, without wishing to decide the matter, had recommended only cautious restraint, "since the present evil enemy of Germany, the Revolution, is doing everything in its power to get control of the matter there," the Erlangen journal replies to him: It "could, indeed, be said of a