# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 70]

—simply teach from the Small Catechism; that is just the fashion here. That is no great art. One need only want to do it, and one can. Let us, for God's sake, not think that way. It is indeed God's praiseworthy grace that we have what we have, and for that very reason we could just as well have lost it again within a year. What was read earlier from Luther's writings has been terribly fulfilled in Germany, and it applies to us as well. Before long it could be said of us too: gone is gone. Let us consider how inexpressible is the grace that has been given to us, as the apostle praises it in 2 Corinthians 4:6: "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts." Here the apostle speaks first of the glorious wonder of creation — namely, that God created the natural light — and then extols as an equal wonder that he has given a bright shining into our hearts. — We should also take a good hard look at the dreadful materialism of our day and its dangers. Everything runs after profit and lives for pleasure. Our Christians live amid such conditions and see that Christianity offers them nothing of that sort. Instead of becoming all the more watchful because of this, they fall asleep and grow weary of God's spiritual benefits. One can hardly believe how powerfully this poison works its way into people. They still listen to the sermon, they still read God's Word, and yet the thought creeps in unnoticed: ah, but we must also provide for earthly things. So one gradually forgets the value of the heavenly goods and strives after those of the earth. But how can I be thankful, if my heart is set upon another treasure?

Secondly, we must guard against self-satisfied boasting. This danger may well be greater than one would think on superficial consideration, on account of the corruption of pride inherited by us all. It easily brings us to the point where we say with our mouths, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory," while at the bottom of our hearts there is nevertheless a self-satisfied boasting. Great watchfulness and a deep knowledge of our natural corruption are therefore needed if one is not to fall into this. What ruinous consequences self-satisfied boasting can have is made clear by the story of the tower of Babel. Because they wanted to make a name for themselves, God in his wrath destroyed the work they had begun, and the tower stands to this hour as a witness that God resists the proud. We must guard against such self-satisfied boasting all the more, because God has truly given us great things. Our *Gymnasium* [preparatory school], our teachers' and preachers' seminary, that we all believe, confess, and labor in one spirit and mind, that he gives us many students, that our institutions flourish — all of this is the sheer, unmixed grace of our God. We are not one hair better than others who do not have all this; so we must be all the more careful with our boasting, especially toward other synods too, for, truly, the last can become the first—