# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S4
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

4                         On the Efficacy of the Sacraments.

for in matters of the kingdom of God all acting must happen in faith, or God does not own it and does not seal it with his blessing. It is by no means a human self-contrivance that brought the participants together at the conference, nor is it anything outwardly imposing, anything specious and grand before the world — say, an outwardly grand but inwardly discordant Lutheran union — that they sought thereby; even were it to succeed, this could have no other outcome than that work in the land of Shinar; for God has an abomination of such building, so very much become the fashion now, that is hollow and sets up a monument to itself. No, the purpose of the conference is, in the first place, none other than to bring together from time to time all the Lutherans here standing on one ground of faith, living and working scattered abroad, so that above all, by means of an exchange concerning the doctrine of our Church, they may mutually strengthen one another in faith and mutually further one another in the knowledge of the truth; that they may clear out of the way that by which Satan would divide them and splinter their combined strength, and that, as they ever anew revive the awareness of their belonging together, so they may grow ever more fervent in brotherly love toward one another. These are indeed very simple things, but ones commanded by God; by them one does not build upward, so that the world too may see and admire the building, but downward, into the depth; by them one indeed lets go one's own "willing or running" and leaves it to God whether he will erect anything on the deep divine ground that has been laid: but what does it matter? Will it be God alone who then lets it fail in that which is now his own affair — in the thriving, in the fruit? Never! We indeed may become unfaithful, but he cannot. Our word often fails to accomplish that for which we speak it, but the word of the Lord must succeed in that for which he sends it. Isaiah 55.

So then we look with the most joyful hopes into the future; for he who has given the willing will also grant the accomplishing; he who has begun the good work will also carry it through. May it please him also to continue making use of our "Lehre und Wehre" further, as of a weak tool, to this end.

(Submitted by Prof. Crämer.)
On the Efficacy of the Sacraments.

That in recent times, even within the Lutheran Church, a way of viewing the efficacy of the sacraments has widely made itself known, which extends this efficacy to all who do not resist, and that one thus sees in the sacraments a means which joins, in some fashion, even dead members — who therefore do not have Christ's Spirit, who are not his — still somehow organically and as members with the spiritual body of Christ, is, as the