# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S207
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1911. 207

There are personalities whose life and life's work bear, to an
eminent degree, the stamp: From God, in God, for God, and to
God! This can be said of the blessed Dr. Walther in all truth. He
was a theologian by the grace of God, a prophet in the spirit of
Luther, one of the greatest and strongest characters and personalities
of the Lutheran Church — indeed of the Church at large — a pillar of
the Lutheran Church, aglow with the great thought of rescuing,
through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, immortal but lost human beings,
of leading them into the true visible Church of God on earth, into
the genuine, free Lutheran Church, of grounding them in all truth
against every error, and of making them truly happy and, at last,
eternally blessed.

When, 28 years ago, I handed the famous Dr. Delitzsch in Leipzig
a letter of recommendation from Dr. Walther, tears streamed from
his eyes as he read the letter, and he burst out with the words: "O
you, my dear, unforgettable friend of my youth, Carl Ferdinand
Wilhelm Walther, who have become such a pillar of the Lutheran
Church in America!"

We agree with what Georg von Bosse writes about Dr. Walther in
his prize-winning work, *Das deutsche Element in den Vereinigten
Staaten* [The German Element in the United States]: "He was a
comprehensive mind and a leader such as no ecclesiastical body in
America has had a second of. In every doctrinal controversy he set
the direction; as co-editor of the Synod's church periodicals he was
a fruitful teacher of pastors and congregations; through an extensive
correspondence, the rich counselor of many who turned to him in
difficult matters of conscience; as pastor of the St. Louis
congregation, an eloquent, instructive, and moving preacher —
everywhere a theologian by the grace of God."

Let us ask further: where must we seek the source of the
greatness of this man, so richly equipped by God? The answer is
this: he stood on the rock foundation of the infallible Word of God
and said to the Church and to the world: "Thus says the Lord in
His Word. That is enough for me. For His Word is the sole source
of religious knowledge, the sole rule and standard of faith, doctrine,
and life. Let reason, feeling, scholarship, the majority, opinion, and
the world be defied!"

He said further: "By grace alone, for Christ's sake, without any
cooperation of your own, you, poor lost human being, must, in the
order established by God Himself, be converted without compulsion,
justified through faith, and made eternally blessed — not through
any human evolution or reform effort. But precisely because you
are made righteous and blessed by grace alone, your whole life as a
Christian must be a divine service, a service of love, a stream of
thanksgiving to God for the wonderful rescue from sin, death, and
hell."