# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S328
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

328 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, etc.

...also, where necessary, to reprove sharply, in case, through the devil's machinations, men should arise within a Lutheran — that is, orthodox — congregation who spoke perverse doctrines, so as to draw disciples to themselves and cause such a cancerous sore to spread quickly about. But even if it should not often come to this latter case, it will scarcely fail anywhere or at any time that a Lutheran pastor does not have those in error within his congregation, whom he mostly first discovers to be such through the pastoral conversation at the announcing for confession. How, then, is he to proceed here? In any case, he must first, as a level-headed spiritual physician, examine where the seat of this evil lies, whether it resides predominantly in the understanding or in the heart and will. This will become clear to him, though perhaps not the first time, yet gradually, as he draws forth from God's Word — as the great apothecary for every sickness — the remedy which, being the firm, certain truth, is also the infallible remedy appropriate to the particular error in question. Then it will become plain to him where the actual seat of the evil lies, and in what it is rooted. For if the patient shows sincere willingness to accept and take up this Word, which surely both is and can teach, so that, like the sun of truth, it may sooner or later break through and disperse the fog of error, then the one in error shows himself thereby to be a sincere person, in whom the error sits in the head, and who, by continuing willingness to be taught, will also succeed, through the conquering power of the truth, in being rid of his error.

But if the one in error either does not consent at all to be thoroughly instructed and convinced, and persists in such resistance, or if, after accepting instruction and after his understanding and conscience have in fact been won over — so that he no longer knows how to bring forward any of his former pretexts under a false appeal to God's Word — he nevertheless holds fast to the error stubbornly, and moreover seeks to spread it elsewhere and to lead others astray: then it becomes plain from this that in him the error has its seat and origin in the pride of the heart, and that he now cherishes and fosters it out of an evil will, against his better knowledge and conscience, and seeks to transplant it into others — so that he is a heretical person who has judged himself, and who, according to St. Paul's command, is to be avoided.

Yet between these two cases there is still a third, which at first is worse than the first, but which in the end takes a better course than the last. This is the case when the one in error has, at bottom, a sincere foundation of heart, but combined with it a rather strong temperamental obstinacy, and along with this either a more feeling-and-imaginative nature than a properly schooled understanding, or a rather thick and unwieldy formal understanding, so that, moreover, a certain haughty pseudo-cleverness and conceited pretense of wisdom are not lacking either. Such people are indeed no easy task for pastoral wisdom and patience; for since they, especially at the beginning, in the first conversations, often give the impression of malicious [illegible]