# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ninth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1899. 15

After the Synod's organization was completed, the Reverend General
President, Dr. H. C. Schwan, read the following synodical address along
with the president's report.

Synodical Address.

Venerable fathers and brothers, beloved in Christ!

We now live in an age of associations. The whole world is full of them.
Especially our country. These associations serve the most varied
purposes. There are social, commercial, political, and of course also
religious associations. And what is especially remarkable about the
last of these is that, after a period of tearing apart and splintering, a
period of reconciliation, gathering, and union now seems to have set in.
With the very same zeal with which church bodies once used to
separate and fight each other over the slightest causes, people now
strive to gather together everything that can in any way be brought
under one roof. Programs are drawn up, conferences are held, lands and
seas are crossed, church conventions are assembled; indeed, even a
general parliament of religions has already convened, at which even
heathens from distant lands found seat and voice. People hope for
nothing less than that, out of the mixing and fermenting of all the
world's religious elements, the one great religion of the universe will at
last emerge, so that eternal peace may come upon the earth and all the
peoples of the world may be united into one great, happy family.

But even in circles that do not hold these extravagant hopes for
peace, where people even mean to remain on the ground of Christianity,
indeed of Holy Scripture, this drive toward peace and union has not
left them untouched. Thus, as we read, several numerous and respected
church bodies on both sides [of the Atlantic] have recently, together,
composed a catechism, on the basis of which they now hope to unite all
their congregations. In it, namely, all those scriptural doctrines have
been dropped, or at least passed over in silence, that might have
stirred up disagreement, and only the few that had a prospect of being
accepted by the great majority have been retained. And for such a
union they now confidently cite all the passages of Holy Scripture that
exhort us to peace and unity.

Now, my esteemed brothers, where then do we here stand with regard
to all such efforts toward peace?

No participation on our part is expected there at all. And in that
respect people know us rightly. But now our refusal is attributed to our
well-known rigid exclusivity. And this, indeed, is surely meant as a
reproach against our Unver— [sentence continues on the next page; the
word is cut off mid-compound, likely "Unverſtand" (narrow-mindedness)
or similar — not completed here]