# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S228
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

228 Church and Contemporary History.

they cannot do the first and will not do the second. They content themselves with hurling the burnt-out bombs, with great heroism, back into our camp. — G. Sch.

False Faith, False Morals. — A proof of this is furnished by the Lutheran Observer, whose unbiblical and un-Lutheran errors in doctrine have often been discussed in our periodicals, when it communicates to its readers, in connection with the well-known murder of Key by Sickles in Washington, the following little specimen of its morality: "A man ought to be praised when he obeys one of the holiest instincts of nature, and not condemned when he avenges a wrong which, if left unredressed, would destroy the foundations of society. Both the letter and the spirit of the Bible declare adultery to be a capital crime, and the teachings of this book are in harmony with the noblest instincts of our nature, and these are a fiery wall around our hearth and around our house." As the Observer proceeds in matters of faith, so it does also in ethics. Since the notions of his fleshly reason and unreason stand higher for him than the divine truth of holy Scripture and the Small Catechism, he does not shrink from sophistry, nor even from the abuse of the Bible itself, in order to gloss over his mad opinions and give them a semblance of proof. Key lived in adultery with Sickles' wife; adultery is, according to Scripture and the "noblest instincts of our nature," a capital crime; consequently Sickles acted "commendably" in shooting Key. That is the Observer's logic. That holy Scripture gives the sword — the right to punish a man with death — only to the public authority, and that it declares any and every act of private vengeance to be sin: that, to be sure, is of no concern to the Observer. He has achieved his purpose, and has, in his own opinion, proven what he wanted to prove. In doing so, however, as the Missionary also remarks, he has in this matter shown himself to be a fellow-spirit of this country's gangs of loafers and murderers. He has approved a murder, and has not merely sought to excuse or justify it, but has declared it a praiseworthy deed. Are we not right to say that it is a lie when he, together with his fellow spirits in the General Synod, calls himself Lutheran, that he bears this name of Luther and of the church to its mockery and shame?               G. Sch.

Norwegian Professorship at Concordia College in St. Louis. — According to the "Maanedstidende," Pastor Larsen has accepted the call extended to him by the church council of the Norwegian Synod to serve as Norwegian professor at Concordia College. The church council has also resolved that, from the university fund of the Norwegian church, which now amounts to 9,276 dollars, a stipend shall be granted to a qualified candidate in Norway, so that he may be put in a position to prepare himself for a second Norwegian professorship at Concordia College or at a Norwegian college yet to be established.               G. Sch.

General Scandinavian-Lutheran Conference. — The "Maanedstidende" contains a call from the president of the Norwegian Synod, A. C. Preus, for a general Scandinavian-Lutheran conference, to be held from the 8th to the 11th or 12th of July at Chicago. The purpose of this assembly is to establish a better relationship and to remove misunderstandings among the various Scandinavian Lutheran church bodies. All Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish pastors of the Lutheran confession are invited to this conference.               G. Sch.

In reply to the remarks of Theophilus in No. 193 of the Lutherischer Herold, let the following serve as an answer: 1. That he is entirely mistaken in his conjectures about the identity of "B."; 2. that in our remarks about the untoward condition of two Lutheran synods existing side by side within one and the same territory, and about the merger of the two synods that ought to be achieved, we were guided not in the remotest degree by any annexationist cravings, but simply by wholly objective grounds. Whoever has even an idea of a churchly order pleasing to God must confess that a living side-by-side and intermingling, indeed a continual crisscrossing, of two ecclesiastical bodies is not a normal state but an untoward one, which can never further unity of spirit, but must often endanger it in the most serious way, as is evident and as experience teaches. Should not Theophilus himself wish that this untoward state might give way to a merging of the two synods? That between the Ohio and the Missouri Synod, for all their formal profession of the symbolical books, not inconsiderable differences prevail, is a fact which, for our own sake, we ought not to conceal from ourselves, and which cannot be cleared away by the polite exchange of compliments that Theophilus calls a mutual recognition of orthodoxy. If we have held the general conference to be the most suitable means of bringing about a true brotherly understanding, we are gladly willing to be taught better, should Theophilus name to us a still more suitable one.               Brohm.

II. Abroad.
The Jesuits have, as the "Wahrheitsfreund" reports, been expelled from Montevideo (South America).