# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   15

was to be expected according to human probability, and how, beyond all
hope, what people meant to turn to evil has so quickly turned to good: so
we truly do not know what else to say than this: something great,
something great has happened to us!

But now, who has done this great thing? Who has won the victory, the
peace, and the spoils? Was it we? Did we at least do our part toward it?
Were we perhaps too superior to our adversaries in learning? Ah, our
learning — however great it might have been — could not have tipped the
scale here. Or did we perhaps understand better than they how to explain
the seeming contradiction between universal grace and the particular
election of individuals, and make it acceptable to reason? That helped us
even less. We did not even attempt it. No, no! Speaking in human terms,
in this struggle we had — with one exception — everything against us.
Our opponents had an altogether excessive advantage. For before the
crowd that does not think, yet all the more likes to pass for enlightened
and liberal-minded, it was not we but they who could appear as fighters
against dark superstition, heroes of light, and martyrs of freedom — and
that has rarely failed to have its effect. With those who always want first
to understand and piece things together before they resolve to accept
even divine truths themselves (and that, after all, is what the old Adam
wants even in Christians), they could appeal — as we were not permitted
to — to the judgment of "sound" common sense. In their teaching there
was, after all, no mystery before which even the wisest must lay a finger
to his lips. Everything there rhymed perfectly with natural human
thoughts and feelings. Conclusions of reason of every kind had free play
and full standing there. For the sake of their teaching, no one needed to
become a fool before the world. Was that not a great advantage for them?
And did they fail to make use of it? — With those who, even in matters of
faith, build their conviction on human authority (even unconsciously),
they could point to a whole line of "fathers" who, although not of their
persuasion, often seemed to agree with them in wording. And how much
this benefited them, precisely among those who knew the least about
these fathers, is plain to see. — Indeed, even Holy Scripture itself they
could, here and there, cite with greater success than we could before
artless and untrained Christians. For the more — and rightly so — the
dear simple believers cherish precisely the universal promises of grace of
the Gospel, the more easily they too can be persuaded that the doctrine of
God's eternal election must be derived, or at least explained, from these
passages alone. In short, whatever mere reason and feeling of the natural
man (even in Christians) thinks, wishes, and wills — all of that spoke, in
this struggle, for them and against us. Would it have been any wonder if

[On the left margin, faint text from the facing page shows through; not transcribed — see the finds file.]