# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1874_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 26 —

can, where it cannot be carried out, this can never be burdensome to conscience. For to wish to carry it through at once in our circumstances is precisely against love, as Luther so beautifully says: as soon as the order brings harm, it is disorder. After all, we are not lords over our congregations either. Indeed, even congregations cannot always, in accordance with the truth, resolve and carry out something without thereby acting against love. As true, as indisputably true and confirmed by experience as it therefore is: "If no territorial delimitation exists, nothing else can arise than disorder, confusion and perplexity," it is nevertheless also true: the carrying out of this order depends on time and circumstances. God's will is above all things that all men be saved, and that therefore the weak be borne. Therefore not everything is to be carried through at once. One should then choose the lesser of two evils.

Above all, however, in this Thesis it must be well kept in view that it is the rule. When one sets up a rule absolutely, one does not thereby deny that exceptions can occur. We by no means wish to deny that God can do much good through His grace, but He does that not through disorder but in spite of disorder. The rule is and remains correct. Whoever overturns altogether the order which the apostles, indeed the whole Church after them, observed, necessarily brings about disorder. The speaking here is quite general, and therefore the words in the four points may not read otherwise, if what is said here is not to be entirely weakened. Consider, then, that here the constitution of the whole Church in all the world is spoken of quite in general, and not of individual congregations and persons. This is the question: Whether everyone must not confess, if in the whole world at no time the Christian Church had been territorially delimited and were not so even today, whether then what is said in the four points could be carried out? Everyone will say: Certainly not! A preacher could then perhaps know and oversee some souls that are committed to him, but impossibly all. For God also sends him newly arriving baptized Christians, that he may take care of them; he shall and may not regard them as heathen and let them run. His call is not set upon a number of heads, otherwise with the death of all the persons who called him his call would also have expired.

No, he shall say: God has called me to this place; whoever lives here is committed to my care. If another preacher comes in here, he is an interloper. — Now let each one ask himself whether that is possible here in our circumstances! If two preachers live together with their congregations, how is each to avoid encroaching on the other and doing him harm? His Christian duty already teaches him to take care of the souls. But he does not know what he is to do, which souls

[Three handwritten pencil marginal notes in the left margin, largely illegible: beside "nothing else than disorder ..." perhaps "wozu?" [?]; beside "When one sets up a rule absolutely ..." two slanting lines, perhaps "Ausnahmen" and "von Regel" [?]; also a vertical pencil line beside "No, he shall say ..." with an illegible marginal note.]