# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 Proceedings of the tenth convention

taught. All laymen who understand no Latin word, also all the preachers who likewise cannot read Latin or at any rate have never read these Fathers, are to say blindly, without examination: Yes, in this point we go with the teachers of old. Such a thing has not yet occurred in Christendom, with the exception of the papacy, that dear simple Christians (and of these there are doubtless many in the Ohio Synod also) are led to believe what they do not know at all. The poor farmers have never in their lives had a Latin book in their hands, and now they are to confess publicly and solemnly before God and the whole of Christendom a doctrine which is set out for the most part in Latin books and which is therefore not known to them at all, as their faith! Only in the antichristian papacy, as said, does it still happen that one says: If you believe what the Church believes, you can be content, even if you do not know what the Church believes. Among us one can at least have the good opinion of the older congregations that, if we were to make such a demand of them as in the Ohio Synod, they would say to us: Are you mad? What do we know of what the dogmaticians write, and you want to bind us to something that we have not read? It is quite evident that our opponents practice idolatry with the Fathers. And God has let them fall into it. They will indeed say that it does not occur to them to teach that one should found one's faith on the Fathers. But we fairly ask: Why then do you act so? Why have you led your people to profess the dogmaticians without their knowing what is taught in them? That is cheating the congregations. But if it is said: The Fathers were after all more learned than you in the Synodical Conference, so it is surer to go with them than with you — then we admit, to be sure, quite readily and as a matter of course that we are not so learned; but with this very reason such opponents prove their dreadful idolatry which they practice with the Fathers. Is it not dreadful, in deciding matters of faith, to weigh who among the teachers is more learned? Is that faith?! No, that is not faith, that is superstition. Just hear what Luther says about this: "So the papists also say now: they believe what the Church believes; and as it is said of the Poles that they are supposed to say: I believe what my king believes. . . So it is told how a doctor, out of pity, as for a poor layman, asked a charcoal-burner at Prague on the bridge: Dear man, what do you believe? The charcoal-burner answers: What the Church believes. The doctor: What then does the Church believe? The charcoal-burner: What I believe. — Afterwards, when the doctor was about to die, he was so hard assailed by the devil in his faith that he could nowhere stay nor have rest, until he said: I believe what the charcoal-burner believes. As it is also said of the great Thomas Aquinas that at his end he could not stay before the devil