# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S155
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 155

H. A. Preus, Leeds P. O., Columbia Co., Wis., serves 11 congregations with 920 members;

H. A. Stub, Coon Prairie, Bad Ar Co., Wis., serves 12 congregations with 2,150 members.

The total number of all (confirmed) congregation members accordingly comes to 12,906. Norwegian Lutheran pastors standing outside the synodical body are:

A. E. Fridrichsen, Springvalley P. O., Fillmore Co., Minn.;

P. A. Rasmussen, Holdermann's Grove P. O., Kendall Co., Ill.;

H. L. Thalberg, Norway P. O., Racine Co., Wis.
G. Sch.

Church and Contemporary History.

I. America.

The Chiliasts' zeal for union. In the April number of the Chiliast newspaper "Signs of the Times" we read: "So long as Lutherans, Reformed, Baptists, etc. neither can nor will hold communion with one another, I say to your face: you are hypocrites, gnat-strainers and camel-swallowers. Or dare you falsely say: I love every disciple of the Savior, only I cannot hold communion with him, cannot share with him in common the pledge of brotherly and divine love—that I truly cannot do, for we are of different confessions! O you reprobate heretic! Do you not labor in the service of darkness to hold down the kingdom of God, to drive away the Holy Spirit and to swell the hosts of hell? The devil gives you your wages for it too. . . Had you love, it would consume your paper idols; you press on to make of great Babylon a people of God, you forget, over this godly work, your childish party opinions." When we read this, we thought of that father who, drunk, struck at his children with a great cudgel and, cursing and raging, cried: Love one another, or I—.

St. Louis, Mo. Almost all the English-Lutheran periodicals are full of remarks about our city as a post important to our church, where so many English-speaking Lutherans are supposed to be. Almost every issue contains appeals for money collections for the purpose of erecting an English-Lutheran church here. Remarkable! German immigrant Lutherans, once as few as twenty have settled in one place, are able—though often dirt poor—to set up a pastorate among themselves out of their own means, and a school besides, and here everything must be set in motion from East to West so that, by help from strangers, the necessary means may be procured for English-speaking Lutherans to meet their churchly needs. We do not understand it.

The General Synod. The "Missionary" had, among other things, also declared the union of a united [unierte] synod with the General Synod an impossibility on the ground that the latter wished to be received along with its united hymnbook. To this Mr. Hartmann of Chicago, in the "Olive Branch" of March 23, quite rightly replies that this objection is in fact ridiculous, since he is in a position to show that many congregations connected with the General Synod have to this day the very same united hymnbook in use.

The Reformed Church. We wrote in the March number that a genuine Reformed believer, good Arian that he is, denies that the humbled Christ is God and man in One Person. On account of this assertion the "Ref. Kz." says that it has become doubtful to it whether the qualities "honest and sincere," so far as the Reformed are concerned, have not gone missing from us. It refers us in this connection to Question 35, 33, 47.