# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 18 —

...we had thus taught concerning God's grace. The accursed Pope had
utterly oppressed poor consciences with his human ordinances, and had
taken away every proper means, help, and comfort by which poor,
despairing hearts might have been saved from despair: what else should
we have done at that time than to raise up again the oppressed and
burdened hearts and hold before them the true comfort? But we also know
well that one must speak differently with those who are already full,
tender, and fat. We were then all cast out and greatly afflicted. The
water in the bottle was gone — that is, no comfort was at hand. We lay
like the dying, just as Ishmael under the bush. Therefore we needed
such teachers as held God's grace before us and taught us how we might
be refreshed. The Antinomians, however, want the doctrine of repentance
to begin plainly with grace; but I have not followed that procedure.
For I knew well that Ishmael was first driven out and made to despair
before he heard comfort from the angel. I have accordingly followed
that example, and have comforted no one except those who had already
felt sorrow and grief over their sin and had despaired of themselves,
whom the Law had terrified and whom Leviathan had assaulted and utterly
dismayed." (I, 2144 f.) — A similar relation we also find between the
earlier and later period regarding Luther's judgment on the right
character of church discipline. As anxiously concerned as Luther was at
first, above all, that an overly zealous form of church discipline, one
unsparing of the weak, not be brought back into the renewed Church by
overly hot-headed preachers and congregations, he nevertheless conceded
in the year 1537 to the Swiss, when they sought unity in the confession
of the truth, with regard to their strict church discipline: "Perhaps
in this point it is better grasped among you than among us." (XVII,
2598.)

Well then, I repeat it: let us follow our father Luther and his
faithful helpers! It is true that even they could not once prevent our
Church, after Luther's death, from falling into deep decline, both in
doctrine and in life; but it was the fruit of their faithfulness that
at last the good elements of our Church, suppressed for a time, came
again to prevail thirty years after Luther's death, that our Church
again gathered itself under the banner of the precious Formula of
Concord, and preserved the treasure of pure doctrine for a whole
century thereafter. Let us therefore also not despair. The experience
that a church has always remained faithful for only one generation does
not rest on some unalterable, exceptionless law of the kingdom of God.
A ministry alive with faith and full of zealous fire, allied with the
children of God present within their congregations, can well hold back
God's wrath.

May, then, our synodical convention this year also be blessed by God's
mercy to this end, that all of us, teachers and hearers alike, indeed