# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1850_S117
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 117 —

in a wholly different respect, an even more important and decisive one,
toward the severest trial the Church can ever experience — a trial next to
which those brought on by bloody persecutions are to be reckoned slight —
in short, it is this: the temptation to false doctrine.

Before I name more closely the objects of this temptation, allow me first
to say a few things by way of introduction.

It cannot be denied that after a long deathlike sleep, into which our
German Lutheran Church seemed to have wholly sunk, it has for about
three decades now stirred mightily again and shown forth new, godly life.
Not only have ever more dear men come forward since that time who,
recognizing the depth of the falling-away of most of our Church's servants
into rationalism, raised their voice against it like a trumpet and loudly
called for a return to faith in the divine revelation contained in Holy
Scripture; but soon the eyes of many were also opened with horror to the
fact that the church union [Kirchenunion] which arose in this period was
nothing but a new deception, by which Satan sought to destroy the new
work of God and rob German Christendom of the blessing of the new,
divine visitation of grace granted to it; and so at last the number has also
grown ever greater of those who have come to see, and have publicly
testified in word and writing, that the one true union founded by God
already exists in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and that every other,
man-made union is but a caricature of it, by which Satan merely mocks a
Christendom scarcely yet awakened.

But what has happened? — Has this insight, given by God, been
faithfully dealt with? — Would to God that, having arrived at this
question, I could step aside and let a Luther, a Chemnitz, a J. Gerhard, or
at least some other weighty voice of our own time, answer this question
here publicly in my place! How gladly would I then be silent and a
listener! — But since God has so ordained that I, the least among you,
must once more speak here publicly by virtue of my office, I beg you, for
God's sake, to now set my wretched person wholly aside and look only at
the matter I am compelled to speak of.

I ask, then, once more: What has happened? Has that insight given by
God been faithfully dealt with? Has one really returned to our precious
Evangelical Lutheran Church, this union established by God Himself; has
one really returned to the faith and confession of our fathers? Have the
men whom God sent as teachers to Christendom at the time of the
Reformation, and through whom God revealed and gave back to it His
pure and unadulterated Word — men whom an ungrateful following
generation had thrust from their teaching chairs — have these men truly
been reinstated in their office, and are the spirits of the prophets in our
day now once more subject to these prophets of a better time? Has one
truly struck one's breast in penitence, and has each one, like a prodigal
son, truly returned repentant to the faithful mother he had forsaken? —
However harsh, and however little becoming to me above all, the answer
may seem, I cannot do otherwise; if I am to give truth its due, I must
answer here: No! With a very few witnesses to the truth excepted, this has
not happened.

To be sure, after having long boasted of the Lutheran