# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 11 —

nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm,
and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou
sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and
knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and
naked." (Rev. 3:15–17.) And however many faithful watchmen might still
arise and fight ever so bravely for the preservation of the pure Gospel, wherever
that satiety and that worldly mind had taken hold, there the pure Gospel
too withdrew at last — here sooner, there later. God indeed preserved it in
many places through the first three centuries, since in his great mercy he
visited the church of that age with severe persecutions and watered the
furrows of its field with its own blood; but once the persecutions had ended
and, through the Emperor Constantine, the way to wealth and honor was
opened to the members of the church, and satiety and worldly-mindedness
now forced their way into the church, then no struggle, however earnest, of
individual faithful witnesses still granted to the church by God could any
longer save the jewel of saving, unadulterated truth: in his wrath God at
last himself removed the lampstand of the pure Gospel from its place;
indeed, once the church had thus been swept and adorned for Satan, the
man of sin and the son of perdition, the adversary who exalts himself above
all that is called God or is worshiped — in a word, the Antichrist — set
himself up in the temple of God as a god, and gave himself out to be God,
and for almost an entire millennium laid waste, more dreadfully than human
tongues are able to express, the sanctuary of God on earth.

Yet three and a half centuries ago the LORD heard the groaning of the
wretched under the oppression of the Antichrist, raised up the monk Martin
Luther, revealed to him, in long and fervent struggles of soul, the pure
Gospel and, with it, the mystery of the Antichrist's wickedness, equipped
him with every gift of a reformer of the church, and filled him alike with a
burning hatred of the Antichrist then ruling in the church and with an
ardent love for those it had led astray. And behold! when Luther proclaimed
the pure, blessed Gospel to Christendom once more, it again proved its old
power even then. Not only thousands but millions — indeed, whole nations
— received it with joy, and everywhere it was received a wonderful
transformation again took place; God again purified for himself a people of
his own, zealous for good works, and countless souls once more adorned the
Gospel in every respect. Together with the old apostolic faith, apostolic love
and apostolic life shone forth once again. The spirit of the first witnesses
awoke anew. The blood of holy martyrs, shed by the hand of the Antichrist,
flowed once more in streams, and again, both within and beyond the land of
the Reformation, the