# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1859_S92
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

92	Bibliographical Appendix.

evangelical personality and feel themselves so powerfully seized and drawn by it, while our sex still to this day places its highest wisdom and honor in paying homage to half-believing individuals, adventurers, and windbags, and in tirelessly poring over and chewing over again their quack remedies and Robinsonades. Truly, our reputation is nothing to boast of! When will we finally cast overboard all the edifying rubbish and claptrap that modern piety has hauled up by the cartload, and in which, after all, neither strength nor comfort is to be found — when will we still our spiritual hunger and thirst once more with the bread and water of life, instead of with the gingerbread and liqueur of death? We would certainly have very pressing cause to reach with both hands for a gift such as the one just now announced; for it shows us, in the faithful mirror of the past, a living picture of ourselves and of our times and conditions. In those days the evangelical Christendom was persecuted and torn to pieces by the enlightened Philippist Union, and today it is persecuted by that union's daughter, the still more enlightened Atheist Union. The arts of cunning and malice, of hatred and mockery — indeed all the driving springs which the ancient arch-liar presently sets in motion — are still exactly the same as those with which, three hundred years ago, he sought to plunge into fresh ruin, or preferably to destroy outright, the Church that had barely just been freed from the tyranny of the papacy. Should we not have every reason and full need to learn from the witnesses of Christ of that time the victorious manner in which they withstood the fiery arrows of the Evil One, resisted his cunning devices, tore apart his secret snares, and, unseduced by allurements and deceptions, unshaken by the world's threats and acts of violence, fought their way through, with faith in their hearts and the Word of God in their mouths, to the gates of the triumphant congregation? Or should we instead take it to heart that those faithful confessors of the Gospel are branded as heretics, decried, and slandered by the present-day promoters of the mystery of iniquity and their now-living disciples? — that in particular Tilemann Heshusius is a thorn in the eye of all old and new enlighteners, and the bogeyman with whom they frighten children? Despite their wild outcry, the man so reviled is nevertheless no fleshless, bloodless monster, but a man with an honest, plain, sober Christian heart, as one soon perceives on hearing him speak; for example, right at the start of his first Advent sermon: "We often think and wish: ah, if only God's Word could be preached in such a way that the mighty lords, wise counselors, learned men, and great peoples would receive it with delight and joy; that everything, too, might stand in quiet, in good peace and rest, with no quarrel or strife, no heresy or offense arising; that one might indeed be spared the vile disgrace, the daily slander, the terrible persecution. We too would gladly enjoy, along with the Gospel, the favor of the great lords, advancement, temporal honor and prosperity; yet there is no Christian who has not often faced such trials