# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church's Decline Does Not Overturn the Doctrine of the Office, Etc.                    19

...our "personal" failings that provoked it. The world acts just as we do, by the rule: enemy of the cause, friend of the person, — it is not our individual shortcomings, no, it is the spiritual gifts bestowed on our Church that it hates and persecutes in us. We must become certain of this, and accustomed to it, so that we too can recognize and expose, in their true light, the "personal" pretexts behind which it hides its real intentions. Not seldom, such personal insinuations mirror the very state of mind of those who make them, and fall back with all their shame upon their own heads. One wonders whether it stands any differently with those hurled against Guericke? One thing we know: that they at least do not dazzle by any brilliant show.

"Whoever sees in 'Lutheranism' a confession, church, sect, or the like that arose at the close of the Middle Ages, at the dawn of the modern era, let him by all means board the rudderless, helmless, compassless craft of today's Hypsistarians, Euphemites, and Caelicolans, and let himself, as a religious castaway, be driven and tossed about by every wind of state and church, by every storm of the world and the nations, until at last he makes landfall at the Pope's or at Muhammad's. We others, however, wish, like our church historian, to continue our voyage on the little ship under the Augsburg flag, whose shipmaster is Christ, whose helmsman is the Holy Spirit, whose compass is the divine Word; we wish to watch from a safe deck, without astonishment or terror, as around us ecclesiastical and political sea-monsters surface in blue-tinged variety and sink again into the deep, only to make room for other, still more fantastic monsters; we wish to sail with open ears yet unbewitched past the islands of the sirens, and, according to God's will, run either into the floodtide of a new outpouring of the Spirit, or, what is better still, into the harbor of eternal rest."

(Submitted by Pastor Röbbelen.)

The Church's Decline Does Not Overturn the Doctrine of the Office, Any More Than the Church Changes Its Nature Because Men Lay It Waste.

As one thinks of the Church, so one also thinks of the office. Our opponents picture the Church to themselves as nothing other than how it presently appears; therefore they are unwilling to grant that it can hold the office in and with the royal priesthood. But to an unbelieving, earthly-minded, rebellious crowd no one grants the keys; rather, they belong to those who have received Christ and have, as God's dear children, also become heirs of all heavenly goods. When, among such people, a preacher administers, in their name, the office that they possess, then in everything he does