# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S312
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 312 —

mostly such people as God's grace and mercy had, in part through great
struggles, torn out of grievous error, and whose hearts he had brought to
rest and peace in the one and eternal truth, as our dear Lutheran Church,
in accordance with Scripture, has set it down, witnessed, and preaches in
its confessional writings. It was simply the desire — natural, longing, and
burning in believers — to build themselves up, and the congregations
entrusted to them, and as many as the Lord, according to his good pleasure,
might awaken to the voice of their testimony and lead to them, at least in
spirit, out of the prevailing confusion, in true, heartfelt communion of
faith and life with like-minded brothers, upon the same faith and
confession. For with them too it was said: "I believe, therefore I speak."
They neither wished nor were able to keep silent about the ruinous
confusion into which the church, partly through its own complicity, had
fallen prey to foxes and dogs, to the shame of the name of Christ and to
the great harm of souls who, in great numbers, were being led astray
either openly by the sects or, under the name "Lutheran," by blind guides
of the blind. Just as they themselves had, through God's great mercy, been
led back out of the wild and desolate foreign land into the comfortable,
bright, and peaceful father's house, so now they too wished, for their
part, to help others find their way back, and to call them to it, and help
blaze the trail, through written and spoken testimony, in teaching and
defending [Lehre und Wehre]. This they recognized as the task set before
them by God.

That was what let them, and all of us, seek and find one another; that,
and that alone, has held us together until now in the true communion of the
Spirit — a wonder of the Lord in such a time of falling away, of division,
of self-seeking, and of the reckless, unbound willfulness arising from it.
In this communion of the Spirit, on the ground of the one common faith, in
this obedience of love toward the one common Lord, we have until now,
though in great weakness, striven together with earnestness and sincerity
to fulfill the task which the Lord has commanded us, as every true
Christian, to carry out.

Or has the Synod as such recognized any task or office other than this?
By no means. It declared this openly at its founding, and our struggles
without and within, our teaching and defending, our tearing down and
building up, our coming together as well as our staying together, our
attracting as well as our repelling, our laboring as well as our suffering
— all are indeed proof that we have until now recognized this as the task
of our life. May the Lord help us henceforth, as before, that we do not
grow soft in the afflictions that come upon us on this account, and that
the heat that meets us on this account does not alarm us or turn us aside,
but that we hold out manfully in patience and labor, until by grace we
receive the prize of the contest, the crown of victory, from the Lord's own
hand.

Hard trials we have already withstood by his grace. For many years now
we have, on account of the Lutheran doctrine of church and ministry, and
because — out of necessity of conscience — we have taken up the cause of
those banned for the sake of this doctrine with more than popish
insolence, been heaped with the meanest and coarsest slanders. We stand
accused before the whole church of this land and of the old fatherland as
the most reckless offenders against the body of Christ, and are, strange
enough, by respected conferences