# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1853_S236
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 236 —

time and will form the principal subject of our present deliberations.
While we must indeed rejoice over God's blessing, which has made this
division necessary, the division itself still cannot be deliberated and
brought to a conclusion without pain. The feeling steals over us that, with
the division of the Synod, the close bond that has until now held our
hearts together in such love and unity — and which in this foreign land
had to be doubly precious and dear to us — would also be loosened. But
even if we suppress all personal feelings, the fear of the dangers to which
we might be exposed by the division keeps pressing upon us anew. How
easily could the blessing that the Lord has let flow to us so far in our
union be spilled? How easily could love grow cold, the individual parts
become estranged from one another, the inner spiritual life be weakened?
The glow of coals is stronger and more effective, and keeps better and
longer, when they lie together in a larger heap than when they are
divided into several smaller heaps. Must we not also fear that our
strength will be splintered, our activity and effectiveness both inward and
outward crippled, and the desire, drive, and power for great, common
endeavors weakened? — We all know the narrow selfishness that dwells in
us by nature, the sluggishness of the flesh, which under the pretended
concern for the good of its own narrower circle so readily seeks and so
easily finds excuses for withdrawing its participation in the common
endeavors of the whole, undertaken for the good of the whole; we know
the natural pride, and the desire to exalt oneself, to assert oneself, the
craving to gain influence for oneself while withdrawing from the influence
of others — desires that find it easier to have their way in smaller circles
than in larger ones, where more and greater gifts flow together and the
gifted man more readily meets his master among the more richly gifted.

How near lies the fear of the danger that, when the whole is divided
into district synods, precisely through the sinfulness of the human heart a
false direction might spring up unnoticed in this or that branch synod,
spread unnoticed, and come to the fore, whereby unity in the Spirit could
be endangered and disturbed? Or that, through the deceit of the devil and
of our own flesh, a strange, false spirit might steal into one part and
spread discord, division, and ruin over the whole before we could master
and overcome it?

That these dangers could befall us, and could befall us more easily
through a division than if the Synod, as heretofore, remained together —
who can deny it? Indeed, the very fact that we have for so long resisted
the division recognized as necessary — the concerns and fears expressed in
the deliberations held on it so far, and the objections raised against it —
all this shows sufficiently that we are not blind to these dangers, and that
it is only the awareness that neither a craving for innovation and a desire
to experiment, still less a cooling of mutual love in our hearts or a decline
in the zeal to pursue further the holy purposes that the Synod has kept
before its eyes until now, but rather that only the weightiest of motives —
the impossibility, given the Synod's massive growth, of properly fulfilling
the duties incumbent upon it — only this awareness, then, that pressing
necessity alone drives us to this step, gives our minds the calm and
assurance needed for it. But this necessity does not avert the dangers; it
does not lessen the importance of this step; it does not diminish the
responsibility resting upon us —