# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1882_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 26 —

With these propositions we connect no other meaning than that which the words themselves indicate, and we reject everything that stands in contradiction to them, even if it were found in our own publications. We therefore repeat here what our Delegate Synod, after the drawing up of the 13 propositions, expressly declared according to its report of the year 1881, p. 37, namely: "Whoever in reality accepts these propositions as they read is one with us in faith. With this we say at the same time that we confess nothing that does not agree with these propositions. .... We know of no secret and hidden meaning in these propositions."

This, then, is the doctrine of our Synod. It is none other than the doctrine of Holy Scripture, the doctrine of our Confession, the doctrine of Luther and of all the men whom God used as His consecrated instruments for the composition of our Confessions. From this doctrine we cannot depart; in this doctrine we will persist unto death; for this doctrine we are ready to suffer shame and persecution; on this doctrine we hope one day, by God's grace, to depart in blessedness from this troublous life full of strife and unrest and with it to appear with confidence before Jesus Christ, the Judge of the quick and the dead.

This is not the place to establish this our doctrine from God's Word and to defend it against the attacks made upon it. Both have already been done abundantly elsewhere and will, with God's help, be done further.

Our task was to state the reasons why we have lodged a protest against an unconditional recognition of Prof. Schmidt as a member of the Synodical Conference assembly. This task we have now accomplished. Our reasons are — to repeat this once more briefly — not the false doctrine into which Prof. Schmidt has fallen, about which we declared ourselves ready, already at the outbreak of the controversy, to confer with him brotherly in the Synodical Conference assembly, and would be ready today still under other circumstances, but —

1. that Prof. Schmidt continually reviles our doctrine, proved from God's Word, as ruinous error, at once publicly accuses us of Calvinism and thereby at once publicly charges us with damnable heresy, imputes to us as our doctrine the rational inferences he has drawn from our doctrine, indeed has now for years fought against us as against enemies of the truth and obstinate heretics, decried us as such throughout Christendom, and also rejected the proposal that he, with the cessation of his hostile polemics, should further hold colloquy with us, and so has in fact long since himself abolished every relationship of brotherhood in faith with us, and