# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1864_S348
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

348 Literary Intelligence.

publicly strike in the face on the pulpit. Here full church power is vested in the sovereign synod, so that the state retains only the right of supreme oversight; and this sovereign synod consists two-thirds of laymen, of whom almost no churchly qualifications at all are required, and one-third of clergy. Where the government actually lies, and to what state the Lutheran Church has come, everyone can see for himself, and that follows from this. The Lutheran confessions are set entirely aside. One could dismiss this thoroughly bad constitution, which does not even amount to anything in its own kind, quite summarily; but Consistorial Councillor Krabbe has taken the trouble to expose thoroughly and fundamentally its absurdity and its contradiction to the Lutheran Church, to demonstrate its great dangers, and to show how it would have to be shaped according to Lutheran principles. If the constitution is worth nothing, it has at least given occasion for such an expert opinion.

Shortly to appear from Gustav Schlawitz in Berlin:

D. Conr. Dieterici institutiones catecheticae depromptae e b. Lutheri catechesi sive catechismi Lutheri expositio, first published by D. Conr. Dietericus in 1613, from the 1640 edition prepared by Dietericus's son, newly edited by D. Aug. Guil. Dieckhoff. Our esteemed readers will be glad to learn that Prof. Dieckhoff in Rostock is thus making the elder Dietrich's larger Catechism accessible again to the theological public of our day. Without doubt this classic catechetical work, which we have already characterized more fully earlier in the "Lutheraner," belongs among the old Lutheran theological treasures that most needed to be sought out again from their obscurity and given back to the Church. God grant now that many take it up and share in its blessing. The work is announced as follows: "The exposition of the Catechism which Conrad Dietrich, formerly professor of practical philosophy at Giessen, later superintendent and director of the Gymnasium at Ulm, first published in 1613 under the title Institutiones catecheticae, well deserves to be circulated anew. It occupies a very significant place in the catechetical literature of the Lutheran Church. Appearing at the same time as the first volumes of Gerhard's Loci, this work sums up the result of the catechetical labor of the century of the Reformation and has, as the very numerous editions through the seventeenth century and into the middle of the eighteenth prove, exercised the most significant influence on the so rich catechism literature of that period, to which the most important expounded catechisms also belong. No other work could be better suited to unlock the sense and coherence of the explanatory material that gathered around Luther's Catechism, in the genuine spirit of the Lutheran Church, and at the same time to offer the key to the genetic understanding of the expounded catechisms of the seventeenth century on into the eighteenth."