# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S136
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

136 Excerpted Communications from This Year's Preface, etc.

A "New Evangelical Church Gazette" was announced in the past year for the new one. We cannot regard as proper the choice of our own title with only a small, easily overlooked addition, even judging by a very ordinary standard. If by this title it is perhaps meant to suggest that the new paper is entering upon the mission that the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung formerly occupied but has now abandoned, such a suggestion would rest on no foundation. . . . . . The new paper, standing under foreign influences, sets itself above this Church; indeed it takes up, at a dizzying height, a standpoint above all churches. In this connection it must seem strange that the contributors named by the prospectus are nevertheless all members and servants of a particular church, for the most part solemnly bound to its confession; further, that the editor, Herr Lic. Messner, and his collaborators, in the very presence of Luther, Melanchthon, Arndt, J. Gerhard, Scriver, and Bengel — in the presence of the whole cloud of witnesses who found in the faith of the Lutheran Church the pure expression of scriptural truth — suppose themselves to be in possession of the one infallible standard the Gospel offers, and thereby able to correct the work of these fathers now at rest in God. When the program describes the territorial-church Union "as a powerful means of promoting the inner unity of all true members of the Evangelical Church," such a phrase will no doubt often be received by faithful members of the Evangelical Church with a pained smile, and by Catholics with a scornful one. It shows that there is indeed manifold material available for "unmasking" in our time. Whoever stands at all on the ground of Holy Scripture and of the Church ought at least to begin by being cautious in praising the Union. The time now draws near when the word will be fulfilled upon those who hunger after Union: "So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their own desire; they were not estranged from their lust. But while their meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God came upon them, and slew the fattest of them, and smote down the young men of Israel." One cannot think of this matter without at the same time being reminded of Goethe's saying, "what one desires in youth, one has in abundance in old age," and of the fate of Crassus, into whose throat, at the last, was poured the very gold he had thirsted after so greatly. Oh, for the poor deceived ones who labor for laughing heirs, who pave the way for those who (as, for example, almost every number of the Protestantische Kirchen-Zeitung shows) are already preparing to rob them, too, of what is precious and holy to them!

The unfavorable fate that has thus far attended every undertaking of the Alliance in Germany — to which its Luther is more deeply attached at heart than might well appear — will, unless we are mistaken, overtake this newest attempt as well to naturalize an English sectarian spirit among us.

How swift an end has come, indeed, to the work begun last year by one of the first heralds of the Alliance in Germany, Bunsen, on the