# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S205
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Declaration of the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia, etc. 205

...-an-minded members of the Prussian territorial church — an occasion for which is furnished both by their present situation generally and by particular expressions addressed to us from their midst — this we did not wish to omit, because we hoped that such a testimony would not remain unblessed, both upon ourselves and upon those who together with us bear heartfelt grief over the separation of what ought to be joined in the obedience of faith. For it is without doubt a thing displeasing to God that those to whom the Lutheran confession is the confession of the truth should nevertheless not stand in the bond of peace and not dwell together in one house in churchly fellowship. A deep sorrow over this passes through our soul: that so many worthy men, who profess to love the eternal goods of our Church and to hate the denial of them, are nevertheless in churchly union with those from whom they ought to be separated, while on the contrary they are churchly separated from us, with whom they ought to be united according to God's Word (Ephesians 4). God knows that we speak the truth: we heartily long that the prayer of our great High Priest for the unity of His believers may be fulfilled in us and in all who hope to be saved through the same grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, but especially in us and in those members of the Prussian territorial church whom the Spirit of God has convinced of the truth of the Lutheran confession, around which we are gathered as a church.

We do not conceal our joy that this conviction, wrought by God, is far and wide in perceptible increase, and that the recognition of the nullity of the Union has become almost the common property of all who are minded to build their house upon the rock and not upon sand. And how could we do otherwise than rejoice over this new confirmation of the word about the mustard seed, over this divine seal upon the struggle to which the little handful of the first witnesses against the sin of the Union — despised by all the wise and lofty of this world — were called? And we will not let this joy in the heart-winning, victorious power of the truth be taken from us even by the lamentable fact that the way along which we see many friends of the Lutheran confession, held captive in the Union, striving after churchly liberation is no way of truth and has no promise. They want to raise up the Lutheran Church again, and they reject the Lutheran Church which God has raised up; they aspire after an independent unfolding of the Lutheran confession, and yet they do not love independence there where, to be sure, a poor outward form veils the heavenly riches of the Church. In this God can take no pleasure, as surely as He cannot deny Himself. Should anyone give himself over to the illusion that everything which seems to have been won from the Union within the Prussian territorial church had thereby weakened the Union itself, he would have to be convinced of the contrary by the manner of battle in which the members of the "Lutheran associations" in particular contest the Union; for by their actual connection with a church whose bond of unity is precisely the Union, they strengthen the very thing they suppose themselves to be overcoming.