# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S225
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Word on Civil Marriage from Nassau. 225

...their form of worship; for we know that this worship is nothing, because it is nothing but sin against Jesus' word, and because it springs from unbelief — an abomination to God, and so without further blessing than the one which the Lord in general still grants even to His fallen creature in this present time. — If the church, according to her divine conscience, cannot forbid marriage to unbelievers, then she also cannot condemn civil marriage as such. The church also knows that a mere exchange of vows between the betrothed, without the right word of God and the right faith, is nothing; accordingly she would have to call the marriages of all unbelievers — were she of the opinion of our present-day zealots against civil marriage — wild marriages and concubinage, and their children bastards. But to my knowledge she has never done this, and today, in earnest, no one does either. —

Without sin in the world, to be sure, no one would ever have hit upon the idea of civil marriage; but now the church must approve of it for sin's sake, much as, for example, she also approves the taking of oaths, the entering of military service, and the like. It has become a necessary evil — for sin's sake, and its presence, where it already exists, as in France, Rheinhessen, Frankfurt am Main, etc., as well as the clamor for it where it does not yet exist, is a sign of the times and a solemn warning that the world lies in wickedness and that we are not to give ourselves over to its spirit. —

Indeed, given the present state of the world, the church must even wish that civil marriage be introduced, if she rightly recognizes her calling in the world at all. The opponents of civil marriage are for the most part the friends of the state churches and the established popular churches, and they oppose it because in it they see the collapse of their palace, the loss of their authority — which, however, they do not desire for the sake of God's word alone; because they suspect that the masses, who in any case are nothing but harm to the church, will thereby in the long run withdraw from their following, and the like. — We, however, hold that the great multitude does not belong in the church at all — or is the little flock to mean nothing anymore? God forbid, dear Father in heaven, that the great multitude must be taken under church discipline, that it cannot be admitted to the Sacrament. And whoever is under discipline is, so long as he has not done penance, at odds with the church; the church holds up to him God's curse and wrath, and therefore she cannot join him in marriage, because a blessing is bound up with that act — or else she would have to strike herself, and the whole proclamation of the word that our sins separate us from God, in the face, and shamefully dissemble and play the hypocrite, as though she no longer knew anything of the condition of the persons desiring marriage — which yet she declares loudly and plainly elsewhere. But because someone is an unbeliever or a heathen, marriage ought not on that account to be made impossible for him anywhere; therefore the church must wish — if only to avoid a still greater increase of fornication and adultery — that such a person be helped to marriage in some other way, so that she remains unentangled with him.

But what, then, is to become of the church? And how the celebration of the wedding will be despised! I hear it said. There is no need to worry at all. Whoever is not truly