# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S201
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1911. 201

wilderness. Right from the first appearance of *Der Lutheraner*, men
like Wyneken shouted for joy at him and pressed enthusiastically
around his banner. And the throngs grew ever larger; the circles
around Walther kept widening: pastors, teachers, congregations,
congregation members. Walther became the leader of a mighty
army: hundreds became thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of
thousands — all eager and ready to fight for God's Word and
Luther's teaching. To the blessing that God laid upon Walther's
work bear witness our imposing institutions of every kind, our
numerous spacious churches, our great publishing house, our
widely-distributed literature, our extensive missions, our Synod with
its 21 districts and nearly 900,000 souls, this year's great jubilee
convention here in St. Louis, the assembly here of our sister English
Synod, and also this great festival congregation.

To God alone the glory! For it is also by His great grace that this
blessing means more than mere outward success. The banner that
God put into Walther's hands bore the inscription: "God's Word and
Luther's teaching shall never pass away." Luther's writings had
helped Walther to clarity about the Bible. And Scripture, in turn,
made him divinely certain that the Lutheran symbols contain
nothing other than pure biblical truth itself. At the same time, it
had also become clear to Walther that the well-being of the Church
lies not ahead of us but behind us, and that in our time the
Church's trumpet call could sound nothing else but: "Back to
Luther, back to Scripture!" And by issuing this watchword, which
his army took up, Walther, so far as it lay with him, cleansed the
Lutheran Church of America from, and preserved it against, every
kind of leaven of false doctrine and practice, and led it back to
unadulterated Lutheranism and thereby to Holy Scripture itself.

When God raised up Walther, hierarchical notions were stirring
everywhere — not only in the German territorial churches, which
have from of old been dominated by the state, but also in the free
churches of Germany and in the synods of America. Indeed, the
leader of the "Saxons" at that time, ahead of others, sought to erect
an episcopal chair within his own camp! Against all these papist
tendencies, Walther, in serious struggles, restored honor to the
priesthood of all Christians and gave back to the congregations their
God-given rights unmutilated.

Even before Walther appeared on the scene, Methodism, with its
new measures — revivals, emotional conversion, the anxious bench
struggle, penitential convulsions, and the mourner's bench — had
made its noisy entry into the Lutheran Church of America. Chiliastic
[millennialist] dreams, too, soon began to disturb the Church.
Walther, who had himself only been freed from Pietism through the
doctrine of justification, and had attained to Lutheran sobriety and
certainty of salvation, victoriously opposed these enthusiast