# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S278
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

278 A Church Event.

remains to be judged. What has been said so far should, however, sufficiently demonstrate how often in this Christian Catechism the Christian doctrine is weakened, altered, and distorted. So this attempt, too, to write a new catechism, may perhaps have brought a Lutheran Christian the benefit of making the two glorious catechisms given to us through the faithful service of our father Luther not dispensable to him, but only the more precious.

A Church Event *)

of no small importance has for some time now stirred up feeling in Paris. At the Reformed church there, a preacher known for his oratorical talent, Athanase Coquerel the younger, served as vicar (suffragant). This man, however, is an enemy of our most holy Christian faith, for he denies the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and of the eternal deity of Christ, as the published report of the Reformed church council sufficiently demonstrates. That such a man could no longer be a pastor at a Christian church, he ought himself to have long since recognized. For how can a preacher answer it to his conscience, to hold an office in a church whose faith and confession he tramples underfoot? However, if the conscience of such preachers does not awaken, a congregation, once it comes again to a consciousness of its duty to hold fast to the doctrine of the Word of God, may no longer tolerate in its midst such preachers as set themselves against God's Word. For how can two kinds of doctrine rightly coexist within one and the same church fellowship, one of which builds up while the other tears down? Such a state of affairs would, the longer it lasted, only confuse a church—and with it the souls of the faithful—more and more, and plunge them into ruin. The consistory of the Reformed Church in Paris (conseil presbytérial) has therefore not renewed Mr. Coquerel's term of service, which had expired, and has thus dismissed him.

A great outcry followed in the so-called liberal press. Several political newspapers took Mr. Coquerel's part, notably the newspaper Le Temps, whose principal editors are, as is well known, two former theologians. One would have thought that these gentlemen had long since gotten past the

*) We take this report from "Schifflein Christi" [Little Ship of Christ], a monthly paper published for the benefit of the German infant school on the Montagne in Paris, which we hereby most warmly recommend (price 1 florin 12 kreuzer, orderable at any bookshop). The editorial staff has indeed received, with respectful thanks, a detailed report from the presbytery of the Reformed congregation in Paris, but believes it does better with this report than with one drawn directly from that account, since the editors of Schifflein Christi stand closer to the circumstances in question and are better able to appraise them. — Note of the editor of Der Freimund.