# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1859_S89
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Grief of the Church in Hesse-Darmstadt.	89

it is nevertheless comforting to see the rotten weapons which he brings forth to do battle with the sword of the divine Word.

The introduction of a Bretschneiderian hymnbook into the schools is, however great an abomination it is, once again a measure that can only harm the whole undertaking. For the age of tedious rhymes cut from boards is plainly past. And further, when one sees what unknown quantities are being summoned to represent rationalism in Coburg — noting that disreputable people are found among them — one must confess that this unbelieving tendency has reached its end, as once happened with open heathenism in Julian's day. Just as decent people were then ashamed to be called heathen, so now people are ashamed of rationalism. And is it any worse in Coburg than among us? Indeed, the Grand Duchy of Hesse needs a hymnbook that, cut from the boards of the tree of lies, is wooden enough no longer to be introduced. It is there. For the present it stays there too. And we too have people like those in Coburg. And their shame is no less evident than that of the Coburgers.

By Jäger there has now again appeared a pamphlet in Frankfurt, "Christ or Belial," which thoroughly exposes the rotten state of affairs and sets forth, in a form at once stimulating and earnest for the general reader, the results of the more learned work by Reich concerning our Church. One notices, moreover, in the book that it was not written in order to scold, but that its preaching of repentance is itself an improvement. He proceeds from the well-known Ewald affair and demonstrates the horrors of the devastation on whose account such a false prophet is not removed from office.

When I wrote to you that our church authority had, after all, not kept silent regarding Ewald, this was true. In the meantime it has since come out that the church authority did not even have the courage to come forward openly before the mob in Darmstadt. This reprimand was meant to be a secret one. Ewald himself kept silent. But since it nevertheless appeared in the church paper, an investigation was begun as to through whom it had become known that Ewald had received the reprimand. In this way the honor of the church authority fares very poorly in this affair. For, through this secrecy, the reprimand becomes nothing other than as if one man said into another's ear: You have done a foolish thing. This affair is too much a matter of comradeship.

Alongside these events stand others of less notoriety and yet of equal gravity. In N. a pastor preached that the Evangelical Protestant Church had abandoned the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, because it conflicted with 1) the Father-love of God, 2) brotherly love, 3) God's plan of salvation. On the following Sunday his colleague preached, in reply, that the Evangelical Lutheran Church must guard the treasure of the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, precisely because in it are grounded 1) the Father-love of God toward his children, 2) brotherly love,