# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S2
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

2                         Preface to Jahrgang 1857.

made the blessed beginning of a mighty dam against this twofold danger, and the way broken for this: that despite all the varying constitutions and modes of activity of the individual parts of our Church here, according to the measure of their course of development, their local circumstances, and the insight and gifts of their leading and cooperating personalities, there should gradually form, one in faith, doctrine, and confession, an Evangelical Lutheran Church of North America which, because strong inwardly through the true bond of faith and brotherly love, should also stand strong outwardly against the adversaries swarming about it. We also hope that now, among many of those who out of sincere loyalty to the treasure of the entire public confessions of our Church had scruples of conscience about taking part in a conference whose basis was to be, in the first instance, only the Invariata*), the misgivings entertained have vanished. At the conference it became manifestly evident that all the members, since they — as the invitation to the conference required — sincerely accepted with mouth and heart the Augsburg Confession "without reservation," without a reservatio mentalis, regarded the other confessions as what they are: as authentic explanations and elaborations of the Augustana, and therefore wished them applied as such. Now if it is indeed certain that the other confessions contain the same doctrine and no other than that laid down in the Augsburg Confession — as no one will deny who knows both kinds of confessions and has compared them exactly — why should one not, grounding oneself on this certainty, extend the hand of brotherhood to those who declare that they accept the Augsburg Confession without reservation? Perhaps because Zwinglians and Calvinists once placed themselves under its aegis, in order to share in the political religious peace as well? Or because so many appeal to it deceitfully in general? — We hold that whoever is so dishonest and unscrupulous as to bind and swear himself to the Augsburg Confession, although he rejects the pure biblical faith laid down in it, or at least rejects it in part, has a conscience so broad and blunted and branded enough that, when his advantage requires it, he will also subscribe the whole Concordia, the entire compendium of the Lutheran symbols, although he does not believe the doctrine contained therein, nor intends to conduct his office according to it. Indeed the Definite-Platform movement showed plainly enough how men in whom there is still some conscientiousness finally find it unbearable to lay an unqualified confession, with constant inner contradiction, even to the Augsburg Confession alone. — Or does the practice of our fathers hinder us from acknowledging as brothers those in whose midst not all parts of the Book of Concord hold symbolical authority

*) Or, as a faithful member of our Church from the audience at the conference named it, naively but truly: "The Invariable Augsburg Confession!"