# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 05 17_S73
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall never pass away."

Published by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 1.

St. Louis, Mo., May 17, 1845.

No. 19.

Terms: The Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at a subscription price of one dollar and twenty-five cents for out-of-town subscribers, who must prepay half of this and bear the postage themselves. — In St. Louis, each single number is sold for 6¼ cents.

(Submitted by Pastor Keyl.)

Life Story of Dr. Luther.
(Continued from No. 11.)

On Luther's departure from Worms, the Elector of Saxony had resolved to bring him to safety from his enemies, and Luther finally consented to this wise counsel, although he would rather have shed his blood as a testimony to the truth. Thus, on his return journey, Luther was forcibly seized from his companions near Eisenach and brought to Wartburg Castle, where he remained for ten months under the name Junker Georg, dressed as a knight. At first only his most trusted friends knew of this, while his enemies gleefully spread the rumor that he had died. He himself wrote to a friend: "I am a strange prisoner, sitting here not only willingly but also unwillingly. Willingly, because the Lord so wills it; unwillingly, because I would gladly stand among the people for the Word of God." This brief stay in his Patmos (for so he called the Wartburg, after Revelation 1:9) was rich in important experiences for Luther; for here he suffered not only repeated and extremely painful bouts of illness, but also grievous afflictions of spirit; he complained of his spiritual insensibility, of a lack of zeal in prayer, of sluggishness, drowsiness, and much other misery, so much so that he nearly came to think God had turned wholly away from him. In addition came external terrors, by which Satan sought to make him despair, but which Luther overcame through contempt. Notable here is his own confession that such and similar crosses are far harder to bear in solitude than among friends who can uplift and comfort us with God's Word.

One might now suppose that this man, so manifoldly afflicted, would rarely have been inclined toward strenuous occupations; yet how astonished one must be upon surveying, even at a single glance, his unparalleled activity! Not only did he apply himself most zealously to the Hebrew and Greek languages, and not only did he preach diligently to his household — some say even twice a day — and not only did he write a great many spirited letters to his friends, but at no other time in his life did he, in so few months, produce so many and such excellent writings for the Church of God as precisely during his stay at the Wartburg. In particular, he translated the entire New Testament from Greek into German, which appeared in print the following year and spread through all of Germany with astonishing speed, so that, as the papal writer Cochlaeus reports to his great vexation, even craftsmen and women read it so eagerly and repeatedly that they gradually learned it by heart, and within a few months were able to dispute with priests and others out of Holy Scripture and refute them from it. Furthermore, Luther produced the first part of his Church Postil, which comprises the sermons on the customary Gospels and Epistles from the first Sunday in Advent to the Feast of Epiphany, and thereby met a pressing need, since there was a complete lack of good books of sermons from which the people could, when necessary, also be read to in church. Finally, he composed a treatise on "spiritual and monastic vows," which he dedicated to his dear father; in it he proves thoroughly from God's Word that all vows which are made without, indeed against, God's commandment, and which are impossible to keep, cannot ensnare or hold captive a Christian's conscience. He also shows that no baptized Christian who has made a vow to the Trinity at baptism and sworn himself to the universal apostolic Church may, without harm to and dissolution of his faith and vow, swear or vow anything else to another in matters of religion and conscience; but if anyone, out of ignorance or through the seduction of others, had made such an impossible or unchristian vow (such as, for example, that of voluntary poverty, of obedience to papal superiors, or of remaining in the unmarried state), the eternal Son of God frees him from it and joyfully receives in grace him who turns back to Him and holds fast to the first vow made in baptism. Since Luther himself, following these biblical principles, no longer considered himself bound by his earlier unchristian oaths and vows, only he can reproach him with the charge of perjury who has himself in some way perjuriously broken his own holy baptismal vow against the triune God. While many now reviled Luther on account of this writing on monastic vows, many others praised God with joyful mouths that He had thereby delivered them at once from a long-felt torment of conscience.

One can easily imagine that amid all this labor, little time remained to Luther for recreation; yet he did not entirely forgo it either, so as to return refreshed to new labors. In the pleasure of great lords and idle people, as he calls hunting, he found only displeasure, and therefore rarely took part in it; instead, he occasionally visited good friends in the surrounding area, to whom, dressed as a knight with a long beard and a sword at his side, he was often quite unrecognizable; indeed, he even once traveled secretly to Wittenberg before he had yet fully returned there.

The latter occurred on the following occasion. Whereas all of Satan's attempts to suppress the emerging Gospel had, up to that point, only brought about its further spread, Satan now tried another approach and stirred up disorder and offense within Luther's own congregation. For during Luther's absence, but with his consent, the Augustinian monks had abolished the papal Mass and reinstituted the true Christian Mass, or the Holy Supper of the Lord. Then Dr. Carlstadt, to whom the pace of reform seemed too slow, began to introduce an offensive kind of liberty: together with his followers, precisely during the Christmas season, he threw the images and crucifixes out of the churches, allowed people to take the Holy Supper for themselves from the altar, and carried on various similar mischief. Since all means of restraining him proved futile, Luther's congregation, with urgent pleas, called him back, and at the beginning of March 1522, despite all danger to his life as one banned by the Pope and outlawed by the Emperor, he hastened at once to Wittenberg and, in eight sermons which he preached day after day for a week, restored the disturbed peace of the church. Even Carlstadt, whom Luther treated with all

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