# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S371
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Evangelical Supreme Church Council and the Evangelical Church Gazette. 371

might deceive themselves, rather than that they should be grounded more deeply in the unshakable certainty of their salvation, resting on an eternal foundation outside themselves.

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(Contributed.)
The Evangelical Supreme Church Council and the Evangelical
Church Gazette.
(Conclusion.)

Offense is taken above all at the fact that the article is designated a protestation. In view of the authorities placed under the fourth commandment, one may indeed petition, but not protest.**) But how is it possible that protestation should be outlawed among us without our at the same time condemning our own origin? To this our origin the author of the "Protestation" himself expressly ties, in that he begins it with the words: "The time and hour have come that Protestantism should again become a truth among us." That original protestation, too, was directed against the legitimate authorities and rested on the view, deeply grounded in the Word of God, that in a conflict between the first and the fourth commandment the latter must yield — as is already evident from the fact that the first commandment occupies a position ruling over all the others. Johann Aurifaber says, in the narrative of those events concerning Luther, W. W. 21, 116: "In the year 1529 at Speyer, around Easter of that same year, the imperial diet convened. — — And at that same diet, against the cunning and earnest efforts and demands of King Ferdinand and the other popish electors and princes, spiritual and secular, a splendid protestation was submitted by the evangelical electors and princes, and also by the imperial cities. Hence afterward those same evangelical estates came to be called throughout the world the protesting estates." The protesting estates request, in the oral address at the imperial audience, W. W. 16, 567: "May Your Imperial Majesty not take an ungracious view on account of the protestation that has been made, but rather ascribe it to the unavoidable, urgent, and high necessity, considering that indeed the eternal, and thus the salvation of souls, must and should be set before the temporal and the teaching of men. — Since they are also willing, should they be convinced by a more certain report from another source, grounded in divine, truthful Scripture, to let themselves and the others be shown the proper measure." — The writing of the Brandenburg chancellor Georg Vogler, "wherein it is set forth how wrongly the evangelical envoys were treated by the imperial arrest," Luther's W.

**) If a Turkish emperor wishes to be asked not to command against God's Word, that is in good order; but when an evangelical Supreme Church Council demands this, it condemns itself. L. u. W.