# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S245
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Union. 245

count in their favor: they did not know what they were doing. The ignorance concerning such matters was indeed appalling. But that does not make the deed itself any more praiseworthy. Do you really think that this structure will endure? It already reminds us of the Tower of Babel; and one can already see a good deal of the Lord’s confusing the languages of the builders. Do you really imagine that with such consensuses, in which we see only the living confessions of the two churches laid one upon the other like dead bodies, cut to fit the Procrustean bed, you can give your groundless churches a firm foundation beneath their feet? You accuse us of reaction, although we are not reactionaries, but merely wish to take up again the thread of church development where an age of general apostasy, which you deplore with us, allowed it to fall. But what are we to call your ignoring three hundred years of church and doctrinal history and proceeding as though, since the Reformation, people had done almost nothing but thresh empty straw, as though a controversy in which Paul Gerhard left home and office, and in which even recently disgrace, excommunication, and imprisonment have so often been endured, had been merely about the emperor’s beard? Or was our Luther ruled “by a wild passion that swept him into countless injustices and indignities,” and were his successors blind fanatics, so that you must hasten to retrace their misguided steps as soon as possible? Yet you should not attempt to heal the breach with a Henoticon that can do nothing more than conceal the dissensus with the consensus. Has church history not taught you even this much: that whenever an attempt has been made to bind disparate elements together without reconciliation by means of a mere formula, it has always produced still more bitter conflict? You will not succeed! For as long as the Union has existed, there has been bitter disunity in the Prussian territorial church—as though in mockery of its name—and it will remain and grow until this Union, which is not from God, is cast off. How that is to be done—showing this cannot be the task of these lines. It is always difficult to correct errors once they have been committed. But that is no reason to neglect doing so. To be sure, we see no other way than the one people believed, with such great alarm, to have been indicated by the Cabinet Order of March 6, 1852. If a serious effort were truly made to preserve the confessions and to restore to both churches, the Lutheran and the Reformed, the territory belonging to each before 1817, it might perhaps even be possible to retain a unified church government, although we too are deeply convinced that the well-being of a church also requires its own government. Those who still wished to remain united and truly could find nothing more in Scripture than the consensus of the two confessions should certainly have complete freedom to form a third confession, the united, or better, the consensual confession; perhaps one could even ask everyone whether he, each congregation together with its pas-