# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 03 08_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

great faithfulness and self-denial; yet not a few bishops also began to strive after vain honor, to serve the court, and enviously to hate and divide among themselves for the sake of rank. Even so, there was still found a good portion of the great field of the church that bore better fruit, and there are still so very many examples to be seen, in the Christendom of that time, of the practice of every Christian virtue that we Christians of today must be ashamed; but the further many strayed and were lost from the true way of repentance and the sole justification that comes from faith, the more they fell into self-chosen works of monkish holiness, by which they thought to have a righteousness of their own before God. Church discipline was, to be sure, still practiced, so that in particular — as we shall soon see — quite unlike Christendom today, careful watch was kept against inroading false doctrine; yet nevertheless much weed of public offenses and divisions grew up mightily, which the enemy, amid such a decaying condition of the church, was able to sow ever more unstoppably in the midst of the good wheat.

Thus Christendom had grown ripe for a heavy sifting, which God imposed upon it by allowing powerful errors to break in among it, whereby much chaff was separated from the wheat and a great number of easily-led, impure souls were made manifest — though, to be sure, a multitude of the weak in faith were also offended and hindered, and the very name of Christ was not a little disgraced and slandered even among the heathen. This was exactly what Satan wanted; and just as in the first three centuries (to speak with Luther) he had not, as a "black" devil, been able to strangle and harm enough by the sword, so now, from the fourth century on, he came in a far more dangerous form, as a "white" devil, who sought to sift the Christians through seductive false doctrine, and — as before upon their bodies — now still more terribly to murder their souls and to destroy them down into hell.

But just as, whenever factious spirits arise, the upright who remain are always meant to become manifest, so also we shall now perceive, in the sad history of the Arian heresy, that even then there was no lack of upright members and warriors of Christ, who well knew how to wield the spiritual weapons of their knighthood, and who stood in the breach in the battle on the day of the Lord. Ezekiel 13:5.

(To be continued.)

For Earnest Consideration

For the readers of Der Lutheraner and of the so-called Wahrheitsfreund [Friend of Truth].

That the position which we have taken from the very beginning against Mr. Oertel, as the local public defender of Papism among the Germans, was none other

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than this: to show, from the Roman Church's own confessions and admissions and those of its representatives, that Papism is contrary to God's Word — that is, unbiblical. This, we hope, has escaped no reader, whether impartial or partial. We hereby now declare publicly that we will not be enticed to abandon this position by any zigzagging maneuvers of our opponent.

Instead, namely, of Mr. O. attempting to establish the attacked papist doctrine from Holy Scripture — or rather, since that was not possible, retracting it as priestly lying and deceit; and instead of his further refuting, from God's Word, the evangelical-Lutheran doctrine which he has publicly denied — or rather, since that was not possible, accepting it again with a penitent heart — instead of doing any of that, Mr. O. speaks now of the strife and divisions which the assertion of pure doctrine has provoked among the Protestants, and tries, oddly enough, to prove thereby that no one could possess the truth, since one party has never agreed with another; now he puts on display a few splinters which he thinks he has found in Luther's life; now he brings up a decision of Luther's in a highly intricate, tricky, and confused case of conscience — a decision which, since one does not know all the attending circumstances, can easily be interpreted to Luther's disadvantage; now the gentleman cites private opinions of Luther's which the Lutheran Church has never adopted; now he quotes (evidently against his own conscience) sayings of Luther that contain irony — that is, in which Luther is speaking only in mockery, as though he were speaking in full earnest; now he distorts facts to the detriment of the confessors of pure evangelical doctrine; now he seeks to stir up mutual bitterness among the Protestants; now he even imputes to the editor of Der Lutheraner opinions that never entered his mind, and the like. In short, Mr. O. does not fight honestly and uprightly, but goes around the main issue as though it were something not quite safe to touch.

Now if we wanted always to answer immediately everything Mr. O. brings forward, always to straighten out what has been distorted, always to set what has been misrepresented back into its proper light, always properly to distinguish what has been falsely lumped together; if we wanted to set against the splinters and gnats of Luther — if such they were — the beams and camels of the censor himself, and the countless crimes and filthiness of many popes and their accomplices, by way of comparison; if, further, we wanted at least always to point out that the arrows shot at our church have not hit their mark; in short, if we wanted always to clear the whole forest of errors that we find planted, as "catholic truth," in the columns of every issue of his Wahrheitsfreund — where would we end? and what would our readers gain by it?

The best result would be that they would be moved to pity for poor Mr. O., and would perceive, as a warning to themselves, how deeply a person can fall into superstition, blindness, and dishonesty once he has left the path of truth and withdrawn himself from the gracious guidance of the Holy Spirit.

But our little paper has an altogether different purpose. Our sole concern is to lead our readers to Holy Scripture, and to awaken in them faithfulness to every word of it in this age of unbelief, superstition, and fanaticism, and thereby to strip the currently circulating, easily deceptive errors of their false appearance. If, therefore, Mr. O. continues to shift the matters actually in dispute between us, chiefly to attack Luther personally, now to take the Protestants to task wholesale and thereby to accuse the Lutherans of things in which they have no part, now to open a quarrel over the tithing of mint, dill, and cummin (Matthew 23:23) while passing over the doctrines on which the salvation and blessedness of souls depend, then we intend not to waste our time on unimportant disputations, nor, through our own fault, to divert our readers from the main point. The doctrine of the Lutheran Church is contained in its symbolical books [Confessions]; by these we wish to be judged, and to this treasure we intend to hold fast!

Mr. O., of course, has need to let not the least appearance rest upon his popes that they might ever have erred while sitting in their chair, for then, indeed, Mr. Oertel's church would collapse over his head, his lamp in the darkness of this world would be extinguished, his shepherd would be dead, and his Christ gone. We Lutherans, on the other hand, are not caught in any such desperate situation; if Luther once erred, then he erred, and on that point is, so to speak, himself not Lutheran; nevertheless our foundation stands firm, the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as the cornerstone. If, therefore, we cannot on some occasion defend Luther against his splinter-judging enemies, we have lost or forfeited nothing; God still keeps the right in his Word, and remains pure when he is judged by those who wantonly set themselves up as judges over his holy Word. Psalm 51:6.

Before we close, we must mention two more things:

Whenever Mr. O. finds something in the writing of some more recent Protestant either against the Lutheran or in favor of the Roman church, he always thinks he has found an admission that will serve him splendidly, on which he may now plant a firm foot in his arguments against us. We grant Mr. O. this pleasure, but must nevertheless tell him herewith that in this way he is only building castles in the air