# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up?

superior force of the civil authority in Germany is in many ways hindered,
indeed in the Austrian lands no Lutheran pastor may even open his
mouth to censure the papist doctrines, which are nonetheless in no way better than
those of the fanatics.

And even though over there all sorts of fanatical sects, as for example the Me-
thodists and Baptists, did not at once attain legal recognition, or at least tol-
eration and free exercise of religion, yet the church authorities,
together with their head, the princely-episcopal territorial lord, still allowed as before
openly rationalist preachers to set forth their godless, soul-murdering doctrine — which is
undeniably subversive and far more pernicious than that of the Methodists and Bap-
tists — year after year, to the poor people, strengthening them
in unbelief against Christ, and casting the souls dearly bought by Christ's blood into
the devil's jaws for eternal damnation; indeed, although
things have here and there begun to improve somewhat in the Lutheran lands,
it still happened that rationalistically minded candidates, who made no
secret of it, were installed in the pastoral office.)

Here, by contrast, wherever genuine Lutheran teachers physically collide with fanatical
sects or with the Roman church, and a
struggle arises, the civil authority allows free scope to all —
in sum, here in our church the Word of God stands unhindered
on the field, in part to guard our own church members against seductive false teachers,
indeed to stop their mouths, in part to win over some sincere souls
from among their followers to the truth.

And indeed, however brief the history of our synod, for example,
still is, it has already repeatedly become clear as an evident fact that the
heated onslaughts of fanatics and mob-spirits against our pastors and
congregations soon slackened, their own cause growing slack and stale, dull and cold,
and that earnest and sincere souls, whom they had led astray, and who
naturally, amid their little man-made doctrines and the pernicious falsifications of the evan-
gelical teaching on the justification of the sinner before God through legalistic
additions, could find no rest for their alarmed consciences, found the Prince
of Peace in our congregations.

It thus becomes clear, upon a comparison between here and there
with regard to the government of our church, as an undeniable truth,
that we Lutherans on this side of the ocean find ourselves at great advantage;
for our situation is, in this respect, similar to that of the church in the Apostolic age,
in that the Lutheran congregations not only possess, in name, their evangel-
ical rights acquired for them by Christ, but actually make use of them
in deed and in truth, and, unrestricted by legal encroach-

*) Thus, for example, recently in the territory of the free city of Hamburg, an evidently rational-
ist candidate named Grogengiesser, who had made his unbelief clear and evident in printed
writings, was installed in the pastoral office.