# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S331
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, etc. 331

...large a domain, is likewise equally intent on avoiding the harsh, law-driven manner of popish or fanatical confessors, who merely labor away at individual sins and imagine they have accomplished something great in their outward removal, since they have in view only their own honor, but not the sinner's thorough change of mind and conversion. Rather, it is his constant concern that this inward transformation take place from the ground up; and accordingly he makes use of the particular instance of sin now before him, as an occasion given from without, in order — with as much holy zeal for the honor of God as heartfelt compassion and fatherly love for the soul of his still unconverted parishioner — not merely to testify the Law to that person's conscience, but at the same time also to win his heart for Christ. This latter, evangelical endeavor, however, takes place in such a way that he portrays for him the love of God toward his immortal soul, according to all three articles of the faith, as powerfully and movingly as the Holy Spirit grants him grace and gift for it, and from this sets before him, as urgently as possible, the dignity and glory of his Christian calling, which he has so shamefully and ruinously denied through servitude to sin and the devil. Such reproof, administered both officially and in a brotherly manner, will then certainly not remain without effect: either it will, through God's grace, soften the guilty party, or, through the fault of his own evil heart and will, and according to God's righteous judgment, it will harden him.

D. The Comforting of the Sorrowful.

This is, to be sure, the sweetest and most delightful part of private pastoral care, and especially for a truly evangelically minded, that is, Lutheran, pastor; but — God be lamented! — on average it is the rarer cases in which he has occasion to comfort; and there are far more in which, alas, he must reprove, and above all wield the rod of woe. For even in older congregations, perhaps supplied for decades with God's pure and clear Word, there are commonly more of those who must be reproved on account of their ingratitude toward the Gospel, the encroaching worldly-mindedness, lukewarm and cold-hearted disposition, divided allegiance between God and the world, and lack of diligence in good works despite a formally correct knowledge — than there are those who, on account of godly sorrow, spiritual trial, and weakness of faith, need to be comforted; as such a sad truth lies before our eyes from the history of many a Lutheran congregation, even from the noble, glorious time of the Reformation itself. And therefore it is no wonder if the shepherds of such congregations themselves are not infrequently in need of comfort and beset with trial, and must attend to their office with much sighing and under no small burden and anguish of heart, and must cling closely to Isaiah 55:10–13, so as not to despair, seeing that, despite their persevering in prayer, intercession, teaching, reproof, enticement, warning, and so forth, things nowhere want to go properly forward, and the thorns choke the good seed more and more.

Yet God be praised! how, through his sustaining grace, on the whole