# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S383
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ecclesiastical Contemporary Affairs. 383

...continuing in further exposition, and concluding with the point that our church is the one
most in agreement with the Word of God.

The Position of the Reformed and Lutheran Church in France and Russia.
On this subject the Saxon Church and School Gazette of September 29 expresses itself as
follows: In France the Bible belongs among the books whose circulation is placed under
police surveillance; the establishment of schools and churches is a matter of suspicious
observation and of obstruction by the prefects; the church property of the Lutheran church
at Strasbourg has, it is true, been provisionally rescued from unlawful violence, but not
secured — it depends rather on grace; and the Reformed church has been tamed, it has been
Napoleonically "civilized." It celebrated its three-hundredth anniversary a few months ago
(May 29) — a Reformed church without a confession of faith, without a synodal constitution,
and without church discipline. True, it no longer knows anything of the dragonnades, it has
freedom — but at the price of giving up the struggle against the Roman church, of forgetting
the age of its heroes and martyrs, of bowing beneath the rule of the imperial Catholic power,
and of renouncing ecclesiastical independence. The Reformed have long since demanded back
their synodal constitution, but the Emperor refuses it them — he knows what a weapon it
once was. They are to be free, but they are to stand under his hand and stir only according
to his will. And the Lutheran church in France? We know only too well how greatly it has
been weakened by the rationalist and unionist spirit. How badly things stand with the
Strasbourg faculty lies open before everyone's eyes. And the Lutheran church of Montbéliard
greets, in its letter of congratulation to the Reformed church, the prospect of a union.
"Hearts incline toward a complete union through mutual concessions. — We extend to you the
brotherly hand which Jean Andreä once refused, and wish thereby to relieve our conscience of
a burdensome weight." Such a spirit of union delivers the church over to inner division, and
so, finally, to the power of the state, whose arts will succeed, as it thinks it must, in rendering
it harmless. The lot that awaits it from the East is no better. We have seen it in the Baltic
provinces. There is a richly blessed church life in the Lutheran church of those provinces. But
bound hand and foot, it does not have even the word of the mouth wholly free, either on the
pulpit or in pastoral counsel. It must let it happen in silence, without being permitted to
testify against error, when its children forsake it to turn to the Greek church. And without
letting matters come to a point of violence which would compel it once to stake life and limb
and to raise the voice of testimony loudly and decidedly against the outrage, the noose is
being drawn ever tighter, which, unless God intervenes, threatens the church with a slowly
approaching end.

Sartorius's Meditations. From a manuscript literary remains, the Ev. K. Z.
shares some excerpts with its readers. We let a few of them follow here: "Schleiermacher and
Twesten maintain that religion rests on feeling, or on religious consciousness; that from this
proceeds faith, and from faith, in turn, knowledge and the science of religion as a scientific
presentation and description of the same. It must more correctly be maintained that the
ground of all religion is the Holy Spirit, whereby the truth of the above statement is not set
aside, but merely the pious feeling is at the same time also traced back to its objective ground
— which alone gives the concept of religion its true footing."

"Every apologetics of Christianity must begin with the demonstration of the need, unavoidably
necessary for every individual because of sin, for a supernatural redemption unto
salvation and sanctification, and only thereafter should the objective historical proofs follow
that Jesus is this Redeemer, and how he is so. The demonstration of this need for mankind in
general, or merely for the intellectual enlightenment of mankind, or merely for the founding of
a church and the like, misses the mark. — Apologetics must proceed more from the
powerlessness of the free will than from reason. Since the Lord himself came only to heal the
sick and to save the lost,