# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S1
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang III.                    January 1857.                    No. 1.

Preface to Jahrgang 1857.

When a year ago we let go out the first number of the second volume of this journal, we felt ourselves moved to express joyful hopes concerning our dear Church in the United States of North America, and, on the ground of these hopes, unpretentiously to propose the holding of a general Lutheran conference of all those Lutherans here who acknowledge and confess the unaltered Augsburg Confession of 1530, without reservation, as the pure and faithful expression of the doctrine of Holy Scripture and of their own faith. Our hope that the time had at last come for such a personal drawing-together of all the members, devoted here to our Church, of the various synods calling themselves Lutheran, and for a mutual oral exchange bound up with it concerning the ground uniting the Lutherans — a hope we unpretentiously proposed to advance — rested chiefly on the fact that, on the occasion of a churchly, officially proposed alteration of our fundamental confession shortly before (under the title of a so-called Definite Platform), it had become evident that the Church of North America called Lutheran had, in its most various divisions, a host of witnesses to whom God had given light, faith, and courage enough to withstand the revolutionary and dissolving lusts of the, to be sure, not few who had fallen away in its midst. Our hope has not been disappointed. The conference has been held — not only despite all the machinations of its enemies against it, but also despite the misgivings which even faithful members and servants of our Church raised, in particular, against the basis on which the conference was to be formed and to convene. And we do not doubt that all who beforehand were in agreement with the purpose and manner of the conference now hold the conviction that the intended purpose was reached not merely to some degree, but beyond all asking and understanding. Our Church here was, among other things, in a twofold danger: either to be splintered into mutually contending troop-divisions, or to fall prey, with its own particular direction, to the conquering appetites of some synodal combination swelling in number and influence and engulfing everything. Through the conference there has now been

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