# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S290
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

290   From a Country Pastor.

person, are believers united, but by means of the faith which is possible to man according to his nature.

The intercourse occasioned by spatial nearness, in which men enter into mutual communication, act upon one another through speech and through their conduct in the same surroundings, and out of necessity perform actions in common — such as a congregational union brings with it and for which it is formed — is not yet a union. For in mere intercourse men come together with different purposes. What is an end for the one, the other uses as a means to attain his own, to gain something of his own. Through a definite influence of the one upon the other they stand as distinct persons in mere intercourse. Only where mutual performance is no longer demanded, but where something is carried on in common with one disposition, have men truly associated themselves, united into a society. Not the mutual performances which the visible congregational union requires, but faith unites Christians and forms a true holy society or congregation, and that without needing a spatial coming-together for it.

If anywhere in the wide world a believer meets with another man who bears witness of his faith in Christ — let him come from the rising or the setting of the sun — these two will not merely find themselves surprised at the agreement in their disposition, as may happen among every kind of men, nor merely feel themselves drawn to one another in friendly inclination. They will at once recognize each other as members of one holy society, the congregation of Jesus Christ. As such they are not only able each to take the other's thoughts into himself and to pass over into the other's thoughts; to interpenetrate one another spiritually without being hindered by their particular personalities; to understand each other's whole disposition without further communications; they also know that the same will, the same wishes, strivings, and so forth are present in them; that one and the same divine life rules in them. They stand in true union. An error is possible only insofar as faith can be feigned, which man is by no means always able to see through.

What can become manifest in a spatial being-together of believers is present in them also without the spatial togetherness. Not merely a similar cast of mind repeats itself in all; not merely are they one insofar as an observer comprehends them under one concept; but they themselves are also bound to one another by one Spirit. What rules in them as the life of faith, no one ascribes to himself as his own peculiarity, as his private will, nor does he hold it to be the private will, the peculiarity, of the other; rather the believers regard one another in the mutual confidence that no one among them wills anything of his own, but that one will, one Spirit animates them, which no individual as