# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 57]

—spiritual beggars. But we still have it, through God's grace. May God only pour out his Holy Spirit in these days, that it might become like springtime among us, that our hearts might glow again as they did 25 years ago, when we resolved: we will unite in a church after the old pattern, we will believe and confess the Lutheran, pure, unadulterated doctrine, in order in this way to overcome the devil and the world, to die in blessedness, and to bring many with us to heaven. If that does not happen, then our jubilee has been a funeral. Terrible, terrible! Indeed, everything we are is finished from the moment we concede that someone among us could depart from our confession. We are simply convinced: the doctrine of our confession is the doctrine of the prophets and apostles, which God has given the world so that it might be saved. Of this doctrine we can give up nothing, for in every word of it there is life and salvation. If we give up even a single word of it, we give up life and salvation. God graciously preserve us from wanting to know, to seek, or to teach anything new, and from striving after a reputation for scholarship while losing sight of the salvation of souls.

Regarding the words "far from a papistic tendency," it was remarked: in order rightly to recognize how God has preserved us from this tendency, it might be good to relate something from the time before the Synod's founding. At least the Saxons had previously been caught up in a good deal of *Papistry* [popery]. They held the external church to be the church outside of which there was no salvation. They brought this opinion with them to America. They held the preaching office — even if it was not so expressly stated — to be a mediating office [*Mitleramt*, as printed] between God and man, without which one could not come to God. They held that the preaching office alone had the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whoever wished to be saved had to hold to the right external church, had to obey the preaching office unconditionally. But God rescued them. The man who had stood at their head was toppled, and those who had previously been deaf to every warning were violently shaken out of their terrible dream and saw all at once: everything we have held until now for the dearest truths is false. Then the whole ground of their faith gave way beneath their feet. But what did they do? They turned to the symbolical books. There they found an entirely different doctrine of the church, of the preaching office, of obedience to it, of ordination, of the spiritual priesthood, of the way to salvation, of the means of grace, and so on. Grabau shortly afterward wrote them a letter and enclosed his so-called pastoral letter [*Hirtenbrief*]. In it they found again the very same false doctrines from which they had just been rescued. They naturally rejected them. A fierce struggle over these doctrines then broke out. But this struggle had something sweet in it. It preserved our Synod from falling into a priestcraft [*Pfaffenthum*], just as every struggle the Synod has had to endure brought the splendid benefit that it —kept the pure doctrine ever—