# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S334
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

334 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, etc.

...the sorrow just mentioned is present, here too the practice is again precisely the opposite of that of popish and fanatical pastors; for since these men, as such, themselves lack evangelical understanding, sound faith, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, they can neither rightly recognize that state of heart which is sorrow, together with the trial of faith comprised in it, nor procure against such an evil the right evangelical remedies and the true medicine for the soul. As belonging to the law-driven and work-driving guild — and no less fellow members of the same are the so-called evangelical, that is, pietistic-unionistic preachers, as such — they, as papists, can here proceed in no other way than to load upon a conscience already wounded, which has already tasted sufficiently the wrath of God, the weight of its sins, and the curse of the Law, old and new supposedly satisfaction-rendering and penitential works of the Law — praying, fasting, almsgiving, and the like — and accordingly, so far as lies in them, to beat the soul of their brother to death, like the true children of Cain.

But if the so-called pastors are Pietists, Unionists, Methodists, and the like, then they too, as such, have just as little the right evangelical comfort at hand for timid, terrified consciences; rather, if they themselves are lax and lukewarm, they apply only the futile and fleeting palliatives of wretched human comfort, which of course cannot hold or heal; or, if they are themselves of a driving, legalistic nature and disposition (ready-made saints and work-righteous men, before they have thoroughly become poor sinners in Adam), then they have here no other way than to drive those in need of comfort legalistically to prayer and to admonish them to persist in it until they feel a sense of grace in their hearts; and in doing so they represent Christ and his merit to them as though they would only then be reconciled and redeemed once they believed in Christ — a believing which they in fact chiefly locate in that very feeling. For they themselves have no clear evangelical knowledge of Christ and his office and work, and they confuse, to their own great harm and that of their people, the acquiring of salvation with the appropriating of it. For it does not stand clearly before their souls, according to John 1:29, 1 John 2:2, and Romans 5:18, that prior to, above, and apart from all faith of individuals, all men have, through the vicarious satisfaction of Christ, already in fact been reconciled and redeemed, and that Christ has acquired and merited salvation for all — though nevertheless only those can become partakers of it who, through true and living faith, lay hold of Christ and his merit out of the Gospel and appropriate it to themselves, thereby obtaining forgiveness of sins, peace with God, and eternal life.

And from this unclarity of their evangelical understanding it comes about that they are unable to comfort evangelically those hearts that have been struck down and broken by the Law, but rather, so far as lies in them, through their legalistic, law-driving nature drive them fully to despair. Quite differently, indeed oppositely, however, does an upright evan—