# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

143 From this year's Preface to the Saxon Church and School Paper.

...the glory of our church to have written Solus Christus, Christi gloria upon its banner, and thereby to lie victorious in the field against Rome's denial of the sole honor of Jesus Christ. Now truly, if she must first learn this over again from the Roman church, must let the Jesuits tell it to her once more, and must yield to them the task of holding high the banner of Christ, then she is no longer worthy to exist. Yet we hope that, by God's grace and help, things will get better.

The "Evangelical Breviary" by Dieffenbach and Müller is meant to serve as a bond of fellowship among those united in the same mind and endeavor, in Hesse to begin with. We confess that it does not seem to us entirely unobjectionable. An order of prayer is a salutary and necessary thing. But here too much of a good thing is done, and the free movement of life in Christ is bound all too tightly into fixed, ever-identical forms. The evangelical pastor is to keep six fixed hours of prayer daily: Matins, Lauds, Pro Pace, Meditation, Vespers, Compline. Matins is to consist of: Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Collect, Lesson, Preces, Versicle, Creed, Sanctus, Our Father, Benediction — and the other Hours similarly. In this way the manner of congregational prayer, which is of necessity liturgically fixed, is carried over into private devotion, and its freedom is wrongly bound, its simplicity destroyed, its inwardness turned into outward show. And when one thinks of such a form of prayer, "Thus should the evangelical pastor daily bring his offering to the Lord," one easily makes such forms and formulas a matter of conscience, and sets up a commandment and doctrine of men. And to hold this man-made ordinance to be wholly "the eternal ordinances of God," even where that is not what is meant, looks, in the Romanizing manner, like a failure to distinguish an order of salvation necessary to salvation from a merely salutary churchly order. It has indeed been said that a Roman priest might have time for this, an evangelical pastor scarcely. But if by that one meant that the former were the more desirable, then we may say that a true pastor ought not to have time for it at all. It is too much, and it is too little. Far richer still should a pastor bring the sacrifices of prayer, and carry his congregation's need and concern upon a praying heart, rather than first waiting for this hour or that. And how can a true servant of Jesus Christ, whose labor in prayer must be so manifold, always cast whatever moves him in his heart into the same words? "There must be order" — but not for its own sake, and not out of delight in its beauty or its age.

Alongside this romantic inclination goes an emphasis on the church's statutory order. Churchly order is necessary in two respects. Christian life, as it is worked by the Word and the Holy Spirit, must be given form, so that it does not lose or lose itself; and the life of the churchly people, which is meant to become Christian, must proceed in discipline and good conduct, so as to be kept safe for the Word, which wills to make hearts new. But in every way order serves only the Word; only for