# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S142
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

142 The Uproar over the Newest Ober-Consistorial General Decrees in Bavaria.

she has the office of the physician, of the servant; she has the calling of the mother. So the Church, too, comes in her servants not to have herself served but to serve, in motherly earnestness and motherly love. And this law of love the Church bears in the common confession of her faith. Where this is not upheld, then in selfish arbitrariness either the servants of the Church become lords of the congregations, or the congregations and their members become lords of the servants of the Word. Arbitrariness then rules from above and arbitrariness from below, and the bond of fellowship, the common submission under the law of the unified will, is torn asunder. To check this, the government, the office, and the congregation must be resolved on mutual assistance from every member. And whoever has the calling to go before in such an endeavor must do so resolutely, for duty's and conscience's sake. If the bearers of the office and government of the Church do not first bow themselves under the law of the common confession, then let them cease accusing others of transgression. We want nothing but, above all, with our own persons to go before in obedience to the common churchly confession, because in such obedience alone lies our right and our authority. That this may take place in all calm, gentleness, and composure, the evangelical spirit of our churchly confession makes us able. And to the exhortation to immerse ourselves in it, our calling and duty drive us, as does the Apostle's warning against fleshly zeal and want of understanding.

By what means, however, within the Church the possession of the saving truth is to be secured, the life that comes from the divine truth is to be awakened, furthered, and preserved, and room and shape given to the witness of this life in corresponding common ordinances and customs — for this, the government in our Church is again not left to its own devices and new inventions. Rather, we have what we need as an inheritance from the fathers, and where it has decayed, been forgotten, or been disfigured, we have nothing to do but, with regard to the need of the present, to set ourselves again in possession of the goods that belong to us. But what the guiding points of view are in this respect, according to the confession of the Church, must here be stated in the most definite terms, so that no doubt whatever remain about it, and so that every individual bearer of the churchly office may both order himself accordingly and instruct and inform the congregations.

So now it is laid down in the address as the supreme principle of our Church, "that as the divinely ordained means of salvation, as the divine well-spring of the life that comes from God, nothing is to be named and held fast to but the Word of the saving truth," offered in the sermon, imparted and sealed in its whole fullness through the Sacraments. Therefore all means, ordinances, and customs must be aimed at this, that all the people remain in the right use of the pure Word and the pure Sacraments. "For if the well-spring is choked up, it does no good