# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 01 08_S147
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Of the five children born to him in this marriage, two died in infancy; two sons and a daughter survived him and will, as we hope in God, help to preserve among us the memory of their blessed father. For the first seven or eight years of his ministry, our dear Löber labored, as many other, younger believing preachers did then and probably still do now, in a less than clear light of evangelical knowledge. The far-resounding watchman's call of the venerable Harms in his Ninety-Five Theses for the jubilee year 1817, his early acquaintance with Dr. Luther's writings, the stirring occasioned by the new jubilee year of 1830, for which he published in print a memorial treatise on the Augsburg Confession — which, according to a notice in the Berlin Church Gazette, was "a voice full of life even out of the Altenburg region, where otherwise spiritual death reigns" — all these awakening voices had indeed already brought him onto the path toward the treasure of pure evangelical doctrine; but the influences of Pietism, of Herrnhutism, and of the false spirit of union, all of which had been absorbed by him unknowingly in that first fresh awakening to the spiritual life, had not yet been sufficiently recognized by him in their contradiction to the pure Gospel, nor rooted out again. This second purification — the turning away also from the more refined unbelief — the faithful God brought about in our Löber through the living and forceful testimony of younger friends who had attached themselves to Pastor Stephan of Dresden, and through acquaintance with Stephan himself. He could not long resist the power of the truth; he examined, prayed, searched, and when the clearer light had now also dawned upon him, he at once put away whatever appeared to him not in keeping with it, in doctrine and in life. It is true that he had also erred with regard to the person of Stephan, in that he, along with all of Stephan's adherents, held him to be the sole brightest and final light of this age of the world, and therefore also accepted at the same time Stephan's false teachings concerning the authority of the preaching office — even in worldly matters — and concerning the Church, which as a visible church was restricted solely to Stephan's own circle; yet even so, a real advance in the knowledge of the truth had been wrought in him. In consequence of this attachment to Stephan he emigrated, bound by an erring conscience, giving up his office without dismissal, in the autumn of the year 1838, and, through God's almighty protection, arrived sound and safe, through the hot zone and across the wide Atlantic ocean, at New Orleans, to the astonishment and dismay of the friends and relatives he left behind, and arrived, likewise well preserved, at St. Louis in January 1839. In May of that same year, as a result of his preaching on the Sunday Rogate, his eyes were first opened concerning Stephan through voluntary confessions. Now there began a new purification, which lasted for several years. The manifold bodily affliction that he had to endure in that time of the first settlement — severe illnesses, the death of his sister and of several other friends and fellow church members who had emigrated with him, together with the inward siftings and struggles in the new congregations in Perry County, which brought about the complete purging out of the Stephanist leaven — completed this purification, and it soon showed itself in noble fruits. When he had come to recognize well the sin of his desertion of office, he laid down his pastoral office at Altenburg before the Lord into the hands of the congregation, through whom, however, the Lord at once entrusted it to him again. He wrote to his former sovereign asking forgiveness, and received it at once in the most benevolent terms. From the three wrong paths of Stephanism — the false doctrine of the preaching office and of the Church, as well as the false understanding of evangelical freedom that had become common practice under Stephan's rule — he renounced himself in a special writing, which he also sent, signed by the other brothers in office as well, to Christian friends in Germany. Thus he had been made a chosen one in the furnace of affliction, Isa. 48:10, had come through fire and water, but was also again led out and refreshed by the hand of the Lord. Ps. 66.

Now the Lord again began to build and to plant through him. Diligently and faithfully he taught, together with his voluntary helper, Mr. Brohm, now pastor at New York, and after his departure with Rector Gönner, as well as with Pastor Keyl of Frohna, schoolteacher Winter, and Mr. Ritschke, the few students of the seminary for preachers at Altenburg, which had also been founded through his cooperation, and took upon himself in it the instruction in exegesis, dogmatics, homiletics, pastoral theology, logic, psychology, the German language, aesthetics and rhetoric, geography and world history — even drawing. The Lutheran congregation at St. Louis, acknowledging this many-sided labor of his, performed without any fixed salary, expressed the same through gifts of thanks and by conferring on him the title of Professor. After the pastors Walther, Bürger, and Keyl were called away from Perry County, he also took over the pastoral care of the congregations at Dresden, Selitz, Frohna, and Wittenberg. He experienced the joy of seeing two of his pupils, the pastors Biltz and Müller, enter upon the preaching office; his elder son he heard, the year before his death, not only preach, but also saw him already appointed by the congregation of Frohna to be his own helper; his younger son, too, he saw growing up, under his own instruction and that of his helpers, to his joy. For three years in succession he helped, by undertaking further and costly journeys and by taking part in the deliberations, to initiate, found, and establish the synodical union of the Lutheran Church in the West of the United States, and thus served now also in wider circles with his gifts. In August of the year 1847 the first general ministers' conference was held in his hospitable house, which will remain in unforgettable memory to all who took part in it. At the synodical assembly at St. Louis in the year 1848 he preached an excellent sermon on the cure of souls, which has already been communicated in the "Lutheraner."

When the blessed one had now completed his fiftieth year of life, he began to feel the gradual decline of his bodily strength, and wished to be relieved of the heavy labor at the seminary, in order to be better able to attend to his pastoral office among the congregations. He was also deeply shaken and moved by the outbreaks of the general revolution in Europe in the year 1848, as well as by the news of the death of his elder brother that was thereby occasioned. On the other hand, the faithful God granted him a great joy in that same year, when he publicly blessed the marriage of his one beloved daughter to the cantor of the Lutheran congregation at St. Louis, Mr. Theodor Bünger, in his own spacious and beautiful church at Altenburg, dedicated three years before. In May of the year 1849 he undertook, together with the writer of this, the ordination of his fellow minister the blessed Buttermann at Chester, who had gone before him so soon thereafter. Ah, it was the last journey we made together!

Soon after his return, cholera also broke out at Frohna and Altenburg. There he did not flee like a hireling, but rather spent his strength, in the hot season of the year, visiting the sick and the dying, and spoke, again and again, at the graveside, words of comfort and admonition.

After the Lord of the Church had thus accomplished through him all the service for which He had gifted and called him; after He had, in Germany, through him fed some of His lambs in several distinguished families and had let a powerful testimony of the truth be given; after He, in the Duchy of Altenburg, in the land where the bones of his fathers rest, in this former hereditary land of Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast, John Frederick the Magnanimous, and Ernest the Pious, had also, through his confession in preaching and in life, let the light of the Gospel shine once more for fourteen years; after, in the whole reviving Lutheran Church of Germany, many souls had been counseled, instructed, warned, and comforted through him, both by word and by writing; after He had borne him on eagles' wings across the wild, wide sea, and had let our Löber plant and build His Church also in the wilderness of this distant West — now the Lord wished to give him rest from his labor.

In the midst of his hot day's work, the last illness overtook him on the 1st of August, a chest fever, which soon passed into a fatal nervous fever. His last sermon, like the farewell address of the holy apostle Paul, Acts 20, was on the Gospel concerning the false prophets. His last catechetical examination he held on the evening blessing, just as if he had thereby prepared himself for his own blessed falling asleep.