# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S121
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

121 The Whole of the Lutheran Symbols, the Foundation, etc.

"-berg then asked him publicly in the church before the congregation whether
he would do this through God's grace and help, whereupon he not only
answered yes, but also gave his hand upon it." (See: Volume XVIII, from
the year 1754, Part 106, page 598. The report is taken from a work of the
Augsburg senior Samuel Urlsperger, "God's American Husbandry," which
work contains the diaries and correspondence of the American Lutheran
preachers concerned.)

In another place of the same work it reads as follows:

"The dedication of the Philadelphia church, already mentioned by us, has
been described in detail by Pastor Mühlenberg, and we note of it only this
much further: that, as the cornerstones of this church were laid with the
intention that the evangelical-Lutheran doctrine, according to the
foundation of the prophets and apostles, according to the unaltered
Augsburg Confession and all the other symbolical books of our
church, should be taught therein — so too the church council at
Philadelphia had, at the dedication, publicly and by word of mouth to
promise that, with God's help, they would endeavor to maintain the same,
for the aforesaid purpose, unto child and children's children."
(Volume XVI, from the year 1758, page 936. 937.)

Important also for the proof of our assertion is this: that the Lutheran
Salzburgers who emigrated to Georgia in the year 1734 accepted the support
for this from the King of England and from the English Society de
promovenda cognitione Christi (for the advancement of the knowledge of
Christ) only under the condition granted them: "That they should be
protected in the free exercise of their religion according to the content
of the Augsburg Confession and the other symbolical books of the
evangelical church to which they professed themselves." (See Sam.
Urlsperger's detailed report on the Salzburg emigrants, p. 4; compare
Heinsius's impartial church history, part 3, p. 129.)

Because the most influential of the first Lutheran preachers came forth
from the school of A. H. Francke, some conclude a priori that these men,
given their presumably purely practical bent, could hardly have been so
strict as to demand of every Lutheran the confession of all the Symbols,
and that therefore the original doctrinal basis of the American Lutheran
church was surely a broader one than that of the church of Germany. As we
have heard above, however, this presumption is entirely false. When
Mühlenberg went to America, even in Germany the orthodox had great
misgivings as to whether this man recommended by Francke was the right one
to win, amid the unparalleled discord in doctrine that already
characterized America at that time, a firm foundation on which to build
the pure Lutheran church. In the second continuation of the church history
of Heinsins it therefore says, among other things: