# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S319
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 319

...not to be shipped to Cayenne on account of this reading. The Alsatians wanted "to count it almost as a sin that Wucherer should thus take a stand against their authorities."

The congregation of the Irvingites in Berlin, as the National-Zeitung writes, has grown so much in membership that it is thinking of building itself a church.

The Baptists in Germany (initially in Hamburg) solemnly observed their twenty-fifth jubilee from April 22 to 25. It was, namely, on April 22, 1834, that Oncken had himself baptized along with seven others, thereby laying the foundation of the Baptist sect in Germany.

Romanizing. Under the title "On Catholicizing," a work has recently appeared in Saxony. Its author is C. M. Zimmermann, pastor in Döbeln. On the occasion of a notice of this work in the Saxon Church and School Gazette of July 28, the following, among other things, is written about romanizing: "One can romanize in two directions, the ecclesiastical and the rationalistic, through a false emphasis on churchly objectivity and authority, and through a Pelagian emphasis on one's own virtue. There is a romanizing tendency here and there in that first direction as well, especially in Lutheran circles within the Union. One sets justification back, as it were, behind the sacraments; or demands the episcopate as a 'divine institution belonging to the true church'; or demands, on pain of excommunication, obedience to the office in everything not against God's Word, even in outward things; or comes close to wanting to make every churchly act, such as confirmation, unconditionally effective; or takes more pleasure in the beauty and antiquity of churchly order than in sober truth; or, in ethics, separates ordinary vocational work from the special activity by which one is thought to serve God, through which the former is supposed merely to win one 'time and freedom,' and the like. But all this consists only of individual tendencies, which one must indeed resist for the sake of evangelical truth, but which hardly form so coherent a direction that the main force of the struggle would have to be aimed chiefly against them. The opposite of this is formed by a direction which consciously calls itself anti-Catholic and rather prides itself on this, and yet thoroughly romanizes — that is the rationalistic direction. Ever since Sartorius, in the eighteen-twenties, declared and demonstrated the kinship of rationalism and Romanism — then a folly in the eyes of the leading voices — this claim has met with ever more general recognition. The kinship lies above all in the Pelagian trait common to both sides, which emphasizes man's own work at the expense of grounding salvation exclusively in the objective grace of God. It is chiefly this romanizing which is traced, in the work under review, through the individual doctrines and activities of church life, in a manner well suited to having the subject formulated, say, into theses, in order then to submit these for discussion to conferences such as the coming Dresden Pastoral Conference — an intention that is also expressed in the dedication of this work."

Dr. von Harleß, during the recent movements of war in Germany, has published a little tract entitled: "How Ministers Should Conduct Themselves in Time of War: A Voice of Luther to His Contemporaries" (published by Teubner in Leipzig). The three main questions discussed in it are: 1. what God is preaching to us in the signs of the times; 2. how the duty of the individual calling in general relates to this question; and 3. how, in the particular and individual duties of our calling, we are to wait in such a way that we do not overstep the bounds, but keep due measure, rightly divide God's Word, and remain within the rule set for each according to his own gift and task. Among other things, the little book says: "To call for war as such is not our business; but once the call to war has sounded, then it is our business to testify that, without a moral-religious uplifting, the national uplifting is worm-eaten, and that the right uplifting consists not in self-exaltation but in self-humbling.... It would be ill with the thought of an indwelling national glory of our own, the possession of which is subject to no little doubt, both morally and politically. But it is permitted, before God and men, to think this: that in order to cast down the mighty from their seats, God exalts the lowly. And we cannot consider this without ourselves thinking more humbly. Woe to us, should we forget to humble ourselves before God."

"But it is the very dispensations under which things are now coming to a