# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S206
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

We testify therefore with joyfulness and great certainty that we are bound in conscience to persevere further upon the ground on which God's goodness and faithfulness have placed us, and in holding fast also to the gifts of grace of which He has counted us worthy along the way of His leading; and in so doing we patiently take upon ourselves, in our outwardly poor (earthly wretched) and toilsome estate, the reproach of being charged with a lust for separation, while it is separation that we have to suffer. For we are bitterly grieved over many pious people who walk in the simplicity of their hearts and yet are estranged from the Church of their fathers and ours, and for that very reason separated from us, who desire only one thing: to remain steadfast to the end by the pure Word and Sacrament; and we sigh over the misfortune of the untutored people, who must go without the motherly nurture of the true Church — that Church which was once Germany's highest glory and fairest crown. O would to God that this ban were taken away from our fatherland! The Church of the Lord, whose protection is His Word alone, will remain until the end of the world; but we ask in our prayer that she may remain also among us. Now she stands there with a scanty remnant of her ancient rights and privileges, in the shape of a sect before the world; we are not ashamed of this shape, for it was after all also the shape of the fairest among the children of men, and we hope to abide by the confession of the apostle, that after the way which they call a sect we serve the God of our fathers, believing all things which are written in the Law and the Prophets! But we would inwardly praise God's patience and mercy if He would once more grant His Church to dispense her full blessings as a people's church in our land. — There has been no lack on our part of becoming petitions and admonitions, grounded upon the anciently chartered outward rights of our Church which we retained and were entitled to claim, together with the faith and the confession, at the founding of the Union church, addressed to those who according to God's Word are to be nursing mothers of the Church. — God bless and enlighten our dear King for the welfare of our fatherland! But may He also remember to our beloved sovereign, unto eternal blessing, what he has done for us poor people! And may His mighty grace soon bring help and deliverance to our brethren who have not yet fared so well as we — to the Lutheran confessors in Baden and Nassau, so that in these German lands too the Church may rise again which teaches men rightly to honor God above all things and therefore also the civil authority.

We testify therefore publicly and expressly that it is not the territorial-church character, but the Union character of the Prussian, as also of the Baden and other territorial churches, that makes the avoidance of them a duty of confession for us; just as we hold ourselves obliged to cultivate communion with all Lutheran territorial churches in all faithfulness, both in receiving and in giving.

And what can we now do toward the healing of the rift, which so many...