# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S184
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

184 Irvingism.

refusal of ecclesiastical obedience (3. 154.); but then
it could not demonstrate the legitimacy of its mission to Christendom at
all; it lacked the divine commission, wherefore also no reformer dared
to trace his legitimacy back to a divine call and sending
(3, 152 f.); this lack of divine authorization
it had sought to cover over with all manner of untenable theories, and moreover
had left the shaping of ecclesiastical affairs to chance, to the pressure of
events. (3, 156, 159.) Now, however, since the days of the Reformation, the
further decline had gone hand in hand with the schism, penetrating deeper and
deeper, until at last we have come so far in the present shaping of ecclesiastical
affairs that the factors actually effective nowadays are the majority
and the power from below (3, 160.), instead of the dispensing of spiritual
goods always proceeding from above, from the government of the Church,
in such a way that a gift of grace corresponds to every commission, every
appointment. (1, 14 f.) So there stands before our time, as the new order of
things toward which it presses with power, nothing less than the organic
shape of apostasy (3, 164). — Now, however, precisely where the dreadful
devastation had reached its peak, God has had mercy on his Christendom;
everything that the Church had painfully missed and sighed after for 18
centuries has now appeared — most certainly a new theophany; for now God,
according to his old word of promise, has brought about the time in which
"judges are given to us again, as before, and counselors as in the beginning."
(Isaiah 1:26.) Now the Lord has found servants who take delight in the stones
of Zion and pity her dust. He has bound them spiritually to all the baptized,
not through any dead theory, however consistent, but through the fellowship
of life. He has taught them to honor all the old churchly ordinances, so
that every division of the Church may see its own excellences embodied
among them. They do not set themselves up as innovators; they do not
contend as rivals; they do not separate themselves as schismatics. They
have no new baptism, Bible, or gospel; they have no other root; their
position is that of the truest, innermost catholicity; indeed, they are the
only true Catholics. (4, 79 ff.) — But as for the act of instauration itself,
the meaning is by no means the founding of a new church, but only the
rebuilding of the ruined temple; present-day Christendom is the womb out
of which the new future household of God must proceed. (3, 49. 55.)
Therefore all should proceed with forbearance; the good and true that
already exists in many forms must in no way be disregarded. (1, 94.) The
starting point is to be taken from a general great act of repentance of
Christendom, which not only embraces all the baptized without the
divisive separation of the confessions, but in which we feel the sins of
the whole body of the baptized, from the beginning, as our own sin.
(3, 39.) To this is joined the reawakening