# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S203
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The General Synod of the Lutheran Church in Prussia in the Year 1856. 203

...issued. To be sure, we have been reproached with being harsh and with spitting into their hand; but that we do not do; and if they should spit into our hand — which we must indeed expect — we will calmly wipe it off.

Superintendent Lasius takes the floor once more at the close. Thus far no one has raised any objection to the content of the letter itself. But in the letter itself our whole position toward the Unionists is expressed; it is said therein that they do what is displeasing before God. We may on no account keep silent now, but must give a declaration from ourselves. For the rest, he does not believe that the congregations can take any offense at this letter, and therefore the synod is asked to adopt it.

And this at last is what happens, as already said, unanimously; whereupon Pastor Crome further remarks: tears too might well fall into the hand thus extended, since the synod is speaking what moves all hearts.

This subject and the deliberations conducted over it formed indisputably the central point of the whole synod, and we have here wished to give publicly of those deliberations what is necessary for insight and understanding, so that we might not incur the reproach of which Pastor Wolf spoke: garruli in angulis, muti in publico (talkative in the corner, but mute in public).

Yet in order to set our churchly position once more clearly before the eyes of everyone who takes an interest in it, we will do so in the words of two motions which Count von Wartensleben and Pastor Crome brought in, and which say plainly what we want. That of the former read:

a) With joy and thanks toward God we would welcome it, should it please the mercy of God to guide the hearts of the King and his counselors to the restoration of the outward rights of the uninjured Lutheran Church, and we would regard precisely this as the point of reunion — b) yet that we do not thereby make a confession that we stand as a separate church body alongside the Lutheran Church; but rather that only One faith constitutes the Church, and that two faiths are not to be accepted within one church, from which God's Word commands us to withdraw.

The articulated motions of the latter read: a) We testify with sorrow to the separation from so many of whom we hope for sincere love toward the Lutheran Church, but who are now separated from her and thereby from us.

b) We testify that our separation has taken place solely in order not to be separated from the Lutheran Church, and that for this reason we have entered into the poor, laborious estate and will remain in it, and in it also bear the reproach of being wrongly called Separatists.

c) We testify in particular that we avoid communion with the territorial church of our fatherland for no other reason than for the sake of faithfulness in holding fast to the pure Word and Sacrament, and namely...