# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S152
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

152 Bavaria.

East Indies; we too rest, with our whole activity, no less than the Leipzig Mission, on the ground of the Lutheran confession. If the East Indian mission continues the work begun by the fathers a century and a half ago, so the American mission helps the Church, which once wandered to America in the persons of grieving Lutheran Salzburgers and, even with 1,000 and again 1,000 Lutheran immigrants, had nevertheless come near to extinction. If one must join the Leipzig mission because it leads the converts of the Hindus to the Lutheran Church, then one must join the American mission all the more, because it not only fills the empty measures of the Lutheran Church with spoonfuls, but moreover prevents its full measures from being poured out with bushel baskets. If one must join Leipzig because it is uplifting to see Saxons and Bavarians, Prussians and Hanoverians, Mecklenburgers and Hessians, Swedes and Danes, Russians and Poles, Frenchmen and Australians contributing to the work, then one must all the more support the home mission of America, for it has Saxons and Bavarians, Prussians and Hanoverians, Mecklenburgers and Hessians, Württembergers, Badeners and Rhenish Palatines, Alsatians and Frenchmen, yes, even Norwegians and Swedes, and who knows what else of peoples and tongues and languages, contributing from their own purse, providing them the preaching of the Gospel, calling them back from sects and false Christians, from unbelief and heathenism, uniting them into congregations, and leading them back to the Lutheran Church. It is not self-praise when we speak such words, for it is not we who have done all this work; but it is nevertheless a truth that may well become known to God's praise and honor, that if any mission has in recent times been blessed by the Lord, it is the American one that has been blessed. Scarcely has any other had so mighty a reflex effect on the homeland as this one has. The most significant questions of the present day, which have been debated among us to great blessing, and whose seed-time and harvest are by no means yet at an end — the questions of the visible and invisible Church, of the congregation and the congregational office, and everything connected with that — are genuinely American questions of life, and have for the most part been prompted by the American mission, transplanted to Germany, and fought through more victoriously on this side than on that. The great Synod of Missouri and its numerous mission congregations, the Synods of Buffalo and Iowa, distinct and bounded off from one another though they are, are and remain factors of a Lutheran future and of a Lutheran Church which, however hopeful the East Indian mission may be, nevertheless promises the German homeland a wholly different effect than the East Indian mission does. One may well say that the Missourian congregations do not go along with us, and that it has gone with the Society for Home Missions and its emissaries and messengers just as it went with the English state and its political colonies in America. But to that there is also an ample rejoinder. The English