# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S27
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1884. 25

example. That it will help nothing at all if someone has followed some saint outside Scripture. . . For God looks upon, searches and tries the hearts and reins, Ps. 7:10, that is, inward desire. Hence it comes that God pardons and forgives one man an error which he condemns in another, because they have unlike hearts in faith and humility. . . Since we have now recognized the error, it is not fitting that we go on erring and hold the Mass to be a sacrifice. For it would be sinned against the whole faith and our own conscience. Here no faith, no confession could excuse. You cannot say: I will err in a Christian way. A Christian error comes about through ignorance. . . Those who now know and recognize the error, and cling to it nonetheless, as if it were no error, they follow the Fathers, but they will not come to them, for this reason: that they follow, as an article of faith, what the Fathers finally abandoned and for which they obtained grace, and persist in it to their end." (On the Abuse of the Mass. From the year 1522. XIX, 1381–85.)

This we must also hold up before our opponents. For it will also help them nothing at all one day before God's throne if they should say: Have we not followed our fathers, such great enlightened men? For God would then answer them: Have I not given you my Word, and am I not the true Father? It seems, to be sure, a very small, excusable, easily forgivable sin to accept an error for the sake of pious and, besides, highly regarded men. But woe to us when our conscience once awakes! Then it says: What have you done? You have held flesh for your arm and have departed with your heart from the Lord. Woe to you for ever and ever! Then the laughter will be dear even here. And happy is he whose conscience awakes even here, for there is still help then, but only then.

Secondly, as Luther reminds us in our passage, there is also a great difference who errs and how one errs. I may have committed a sin and it is forgiven me. Another commits the same sin and goes to hell. Why? I believe in my Lord Jesus Christ, the other does not believe. So it is also with error. One errs in a doctrine, but he does not know that he errs. No one has ever refuted him with arguments, and so he goes on quietly in his wrong opinion, but is nevertheless saved in spite of his error. Another cherishes the same error, but the light of God's Word has been held before him and all his grounds have been taken from him, and nevertheless he remains in the error, yes, even says: I am once for all in our synod, and unity must be, I will not for that reason tear the bond; if I err, we all err. He who stands so has so