# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S119
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Bavaria. 119

But I ask still more, and something higher. I know well that in the past, difficult days many faithful servants and members of the church prayed for us. They prayed that God would preserve us for them. But if it pleased God the Lord, He could easily raise up, in our stead, more skillful and more faithful servants. Therefore I ask: bear us also in your prayers, that God would preserve us from error and misstep, even should the most faithful and honest zeal underlie it. I am, indeed, not conscious of any such thing; yet I am not thereby justified. Indeed, I might say that we have declared everything too openly and too comprehensively all at once, more than we intended, and that this was too much for some to bear, and to many seemed misleading or even repugnant. But truly, what we intend is clear and unambiguous. We do not wish, like the Pharisees, to burden consciences with unbearable loads, but rather to preserve the means by which consciences are set free and released from their burden. We do not think to restore the church with outward forms, but we intended only to give back to the congregation the "rights and customs of our fathers," which it is our duty to restore to it. Precisely because in many places evangelical faith and evangelical knowledge have again awakened, we wished to prepare a place for this life as well, where it might feel at home, to secure the order within which the new spirit might pour itself forth in such a way that arbitrariness, and even the best-intentioned self-will, would henceforth be curbed. We have done this faithfully to the confession of our church, and may God the Lord preserve us all from falling away from this confession. For as our fathers were ready to sacrifice goods and blood for this confession, so I hope in God that among us too there are still sons and grandsons of these fathers ready, who do not shrink from goods and blood, when it concerns the preservation of the inheritance of these fathers.

In this hope I take my leave of you. Let the prayer of this hope rise up, again and again, to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the strengthening of us all. Accompany us too with such prayer, us to whom the difficult office of the supreme direction of our church is entrusted. Then the right spirit will unite us. May the peace of our Lord accompany you back into your houses, into your office, into your calling. May the peace of this Lord be with us for time and eternity! —

The general synod of 1857 is hereby declared closed.

After the closing words of the presiding officer, it is customary for one of the synod members — usually an older man, standing in especial regard — to address a few words to the presidium. Here this was the church councillor and dean Bomhard of Augsburg, a veteran among the Bavarian soldiers of Jesus Christ, still held by many in good remembrance from the "Homiletic Correspondence Sheet," in which he, together with his brother who years ago went home to the Lord, and likewise with Dean Brand, who also passed from the church militant to blessed peace, exposed the rot of rationalism among the Bavarian clergy and helped pave the way for the newer ecclesiastical development and shaping among us; an old man, indeed, of seventy years, but a youth in courage for the fight and joy in confession. He turned first to the Royal Commissioner and said to him, among other things, the following:

Your Excellency has been the attentive witness of our entire synodal activity, and will therefore, as we may ask and hope, gladden the heart of His Majesty the King, as the patron of our church, with the welcome news that the wounds,