# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S129
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.
Volume V.    May 1859.    No. 5.

Excerpted Communications from This Year's Preface to the Evangelical Church Gazette, by Dr. Hengstenberg of Berlin.

Since, toward the end of last year, through the change of government that took place, a great alteration has come about in the circumstances of the Prussian Union state church — one that gravely threatens, in particular, the effectiveness of those who, perceiving at least the ungodliness of an absorptive union, are laboring to preserve the doctrine of the Lutheran Church within the state church — it must be of high interest to everyone who from the heart takes comfort in the promise, "All things are yours!", to learn what position the men in question now occupy, and how they express themselves publicly in the vicinity of the throne, from which it now flashes down upon them. The most significant of these, and the one most hated by all dogmatic indifferentists, at whose downfall many now feast their eyes and over whom many now ride roughshod who are not worthy to hand him a glass of water, and who, were they in the same position, would conduct themselves quite differently — is without doubt Hengstenberg; a man through whose mighty testimony God has, for more than thirty years, unquestionably done more than through any other man, toward the overthrow of rationalism and the reawakening of the old theology, in Germany and far beyond its borders. To be sure, the dear man remains, according to our most heartfelt conviction, still caught in a grave error regarding the right position which one of sound doctrine ought to take up in his circumstances; nor is he himself free of various views irreconcilable with the Lutheran confession: nevertheless he remains for us a precious instrument of God, for which we have high cause to thank Him, the Lord of the Church, and to ask and entreat for its full equipping, strengthening, and establishment. What is reviled in him is not so much the erroneous matter in which he is still caught, as that which is also precious and holy to us. So then we let excerpted communications from this year's preface to the Evangelical Church Gazette follow here.

The preface places at its head Jer. 17:5–8 and Ps. 146:3–9. And now it reads*):

*) It hardly needs remarking, for our esteemed readers, that despite our joy over these testimonies of Hengstenberg's here taken up, we by no means offer all of them as an expression of our own conviction.
L. u. W.