# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 03 22_S60
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...spoke to the heart, who awakened sinners, who showed them the overflowing riches of the grace of God in Christ; we heard no one who insisted on the new birth as indispensably necessary to come to heaven. We heard only preaching about virtue and morality; we were pointed only to ourselves, only to our own doing and working. This constant talk of virtue became loathsome to us; we grew altogether deaf and unfeeling toward it. Then it happened that we once came into a Methodist (or some other) church, and behold, here we heard what we needed; here we felt our hearts struck, and were convinced of our own corruption; here the Gospel of Jesus, the Savior of sinners, became a pleasant, sweet message to us; here we found rest and peace in Christ; here we received a new life. Should we not, then, join such a church, where we had such important experiences in our soul?

Your reasoning, dear brethren, seems just; your complaints about the Lutheran Church are in part true; but listen to us.

Although there are indeed, among the preachers in the Lutheran Church, many thieves and murderers who have not entered by the door, there are nevertheless still many upright teachers in it who preach Christ purely and truly. Had you heard such men, you would certainly, with due faithfulness, have experienced a genuine conversion; and that you did not hear them — who knows whether the fault was not your own! Now it pleased God to bless his Word to your heart from the mouth of a sectarian preacher; for that God has his work also in other churches and sects, far be it from us to deny, since his power, grace, and wisdom are infinite. Nevertheless, one ought still to flee the false prophets, even where God often works good through them. It is not the thanks you owe God for your conversion, that you now forsake the fellowship of the true Church and cling to the sects; that you deny the plainly divine truth, and instead accept, and even zealously defend, plain errors. How many such church turncoats we see contending against their former fellow believers! Because the sects, for the most part, spiritualize the Lord's Supper in good Calvinist fashion — that is, dissolve and annihilate it — this is soon imitated among those partisans; they rejoice, in their own conceit, over the new discovery, and now wish also to play the knight against the Lutheran Church, thinking themselves very clever when they confidently help to revile the Lutherans' rigid clinging to the letter. But it is a poor honor they earn thereby, in that they belittle and defame the very dearest treasures of the Church — the gracious Sacraments of our Lord Jesus Christ — and in that they mock, even in the grave, the honest zeal of faith of their fathers, who, through unspeakable struggles, won for us, their descendants, the jewel of the truth. They thereby show how far the false sectarian spirit has already led them away from the simplicity of the divine Word.

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But if you, dear brethren, have not yet fallen so deeply, you are nonetheless in great danger; the longer you hold fellowship with sectarianism, the more deeply error will take root in you; the more you will lose your love for the truth; and once the love of the truth is lost, faith too is lost.

Therefore turn back quickly from this dangerous path; draw your soul out of the snares before it becomes impossible for you to come out. And if, through God's grace, you come to the wholesome resolve to leave the sectarian fellowship, do not fail to bear a testimony of the truth, for you owe them this. In this way you show them true love; and if they do not listen to you, you will nonetheless have saved your own souls.

Rejoice that, through your blessed return to the truth, you can be reconciled once more to the Lutheran Church, your mother, whom you had offended twice over — once by your former impenitence, and again by your unfaithfulness. Rejoice that you can now adorn the Lutheran Church as living members, having before dishonored it as dead members. Rejoice that, through your example, you may set many a wandering soul right again and thus help save many a dearly redeemed soul; yes, rejoice finally that you may live in the blessed hope that he whom you have confessed here before men, despite all reproach, will one day confess you before his heavenly Father. Amen.

The Converted Jesuit.

Jacob Reihing is a remarkable example of how often precisely those who contend most fiercely for their error — when they do so ignorantly, like a Saul (1 Timothy 1:13) — are at last turned around by God's grace and transformed into the most blessed instruments for the spreading of the truth. Reihing was born on January 6, 1579, at Augsburg, of Roman Catholic parents; he studied at the University of Ingolstadt, then entered the Jesuit order, and became, at the same university, a doctor and professor of theology, and finally court preacher to the Palatine Count of Neuburg. Up to that time Reihing was an exceedingly zealous champion of the papacy; he not only wrote several works in its defense and in supposed refutation of the Evangelical Lutheran doctrine, but in the year 1614 actually persuaded the formerly Lutheran Count Palatine Wolfgang Wilhelm to go over to the Roman Church. Reihing was likewise the chief instigator of that Count Palatine's driving out, from the Palatinate of Neuburg, not only his former Lutheran court preacher Heilbrunner, but also many of his subjects who remained Lutheran. The reasons that were supposed to have moved Wolfgang Wilhelm to profess the papal religion, Reihing set forth to the world in a work of his own, entitled "The Walls of the Holy City," that is, of the Roman Church. In short, Reihing showed himself a true Jesuit — that is, a very bodyguard of the Pope. God, however, had resolved to make this man an encouraging example of the riches of his mercy and the power of his enlightening grace. And so it came about that Reihing, in the year 1621 (convinced through the diligent reading of Holy Scripture, to which he had been compelled), against all expectation, sought admission into the bosom of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Great was the sensation this conversion caused throughout all Germany; even J. Gerhard wrote, in that same year, to a friend in Copenhagen: "That the notorious Jesuit Reihing has come over to our side has doubtless become known to you; it is indeed to be regarded as a wonder, that out of such a Saul a Paul has been made."

Reihing then turned to Württemberg, and on November 23 of the said year preached a sermon of recantation at Tübingen in the presence of three Württemberg princes, and eight days later a sermon against the Roman sacrifice of the Mass in the court chapel at Stuttgart. In the year 1628 he at last fell asleep, gently and blessedly, in the true faith in his one Mediator, our dear Lord Jesus Christ, as a Lutheran professor of theology and superintendent at Tübingen.

We still possess several excellent writings that Reihing published after his conversion, in which he refuted his earlier writings — composed in papal blindness — as sincerely and humbly as he did thoroughly; one of the finest among them bears the title: "The Torn Papal Bonds." In this book Reihing himself relates, in the following manner, how he came to this knowledge: "My hearers (in the Palatinate of Neuburg), who for the greater part were either Evangelicals or had only recently been enticed to the papacy, demanded proof from Scripture; and my opponents, against whom I wrote and spoke, likewise drove me into Scripture and challenged me to contend with them from Scripture alone. What was I to do? I was compelled to seek scriptural proofs for everything, lest it should appear, to the still unsettled minds of my hearers, who clung so firmly to Scripture, that I myself had no confidence in my own cause, or was even forced to give it up as lost. I therefore labored to establish the papacy from the books of divine Scripture, and thereby to overthrow the Augsburg Confession. To this end was directed the purpose of all my sermons, conversations, and writings. It also seemed, to many, and to myself, that I was contending with success; I already went about like a celebrated victor, and was even here and there taken for one. But the reckoning of the Lord in heaven was otherwise; according to his counsel my struggle was to reach a wholly different outcome. For, as if by a divine ray of light, the blindness and darkness of my proud spirit was at last driven away; a little more than a year ago I began, with a gaze grown ever brighter from day to day, illumined from heaven, to perceive that Holy Scripture, on all the most important points of controversy, was most plainly against the papists and for the Evangelicals. And so at last not only was the lying mask of truth that had been hung before the papal errors stripped away, but also the paint of error that had been laid over the evangelical truth was wiped away in my soul. The error that I had formerly defended as truth fell away, and the purest truth that I had fought as error awoke at last within me, and conquered, and triumphed."

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