# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S360
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

360   The Ecclesiastical Development of the Last Decades, etc.

did this advance toward the confession of the church take place. Upon the age of pietistic blissful feelings of love there followed the age of manly earnestness, of unwearied, tenacious labor. Unforgotten must remain the labor of the men who won for us, under much hardship, the good that a quick-witted younger generation now appropriates all too easily without trouble or work. At that time it became evident in many that the seed of pietistic believing, which had sprung up so merrily, was rooted only in thin soil and could not withstand the heat of the burning rays of the sun. And not seldom, down to our own days, pietism and rationalism in the church authorities have united to wear down the representatives of confessionalism by disciplinary measures, or even to remove them from office. Our church has its unity in the confession, and on principle wants no other that would be necessary to it. Every other unity is a peripheral one, which it will gladly accept, yet in such a way that it could also do without it. With the confession and with an administration of the means of grace conformable to the confession we therefore have the church. It was then natural that, proceeding from the confession, men should also shape the administration of the means of grace in conformity with the confession, but that from this point they should go on to the restoration and renewal of such churchly orders in general as might be most appropriate to the essence of the churchly confession and most conducive to the confessional administration of the means of grace. So men soon began to emphasize the churchly orders still more than the confession — the orders in which the church presents itself as an objective institute, as an outward organism. The center, however, and the bearer and administrator of all these orders is the churchly office.

That is the third stage of the development, which lays all the emphasis upon the churchly office. This tendency has not yet separated itself from the second-named, either in general or in many individuals. The difference is therefore still more one of substance than one already emerging clearly throughout in personal party alignment. But it is there; it has been taken, the fateful step. Various outward circumstances came together to support this step and to call for it. The spirit of insubordination demanded — so it seemed — authority. But for this the confession is little suited, since it asks for free acknowledgment. Obedience, submission to definite orders, including those of church life: that seemed the most necessary preaching which our age required. The undisciplined masses must be taken in hand. The church that is straining apart must be held together by firm order. The church — men said — is not primo loco an assembly of believers and only then a gathering institution, but essentially an objective institution, formed into this world by the LORD in order to gather men into a congregation. Herein lies the incomparable importance and significance of the office of this immediately divine institution. Over against the emphasis on the office, the emphasis on the confession recedes into the background. It appears more important to be strictly churchly than