# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S124
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

124 Bavaria.

a few more things especially suited to characterize the assembly in its sense and spirit. In the address of thanks to His Majesty the King, the Bayreuth [delegates] say, among other things: "Your Majesty has commanded us to sit in separate assemblies. It has accordingly not been possible to avoid the appearance of differing opinions here and there in the two assemblies. In spirit and in truth, however, our striving was the same. Your Majesty will most graciously convince yourself that both assemblies were animated by one and the same spirit. We are filled with the confident hope that henceforth no ground will remain for separating us, who are members of one and the same body. Whereas the general synod at Ansbach expressed its most heartfelt and warmest thanks that Your Majesty has called men equally faithful to the confession and devoted to the King and the constitution to the supreme direction of our ecclesiastical affairs, we can only join in these expressions of most reverent thanks with an equally full heart, as also in the declaration of the unshaken trust of the Protestant territorial church toward the church government set over it; and we are of the confident hope that the unanimous and conciliatory spirit of both general synods will silence all adversaries and calm all anxious minds." —

The Royal Commissioner declared the following in his closing remarks: "When at the beginning of this year's general synod I greeted you . . . , I expressed the hope that your zealous endeavor would succeed in placing this year's general synod worthily beside that of the year 1853. Thanks be to the Lord, I have not been deceived in this. Through harmonious cohesion, through confident attachment to the church government, through observance of the prescribed legal forms, and — what is the main thing — through unanimous faithfulness to the confession, you have conscientiously fulfilled the task set before you, and thereby given a new testimony that, even though our church is much threatened and assailed by its adversaries, there still stands within its bosom a firm phalanx of faithful fighters for it." —

The Chairman finally, after having thanked the synod for its conduct, spoke as follows: "I attach to my thanks also a request. You all, my dear gentlemen, know that the injuries and grievous ills from which we suffer cannot be healed by opinions and deliberations of general synods, nor by decrees of the church government. That happens by another way, and to walk this way you are all called in equal measure. You are called to it, whether you be clergy or laity. But the way I mean will only be rightly entered upon when the souls of us all are filled with the true, fearless courage to witness of a living disciple of Christ. I mean that fearlessness which is a fruit of faith, since we do not hold to what we see and grasp with our hands, but to the promises of our invisible yet truthful Lord and Master. I think of that fearlessness which meets the hatred and enmity of the world with that love with which God the Father in His Son first loved us poor sinners; with that love which overcomes evil with good, and has learned to bless those who curse us. I think of that fearlessness whose strength is the hope that does not hold to the arm of flesh, but to the Lord, who has told us that His church — the gates of hell