# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

44 Proceedings of the tenth convention

yet no true faith in them. For I believe only so much really as I have recognized as revealed by God in his written Word. A Christian has faith in the doctrines of Scripture only so far as he has won it for himself in the struggle against his own heart by God's grace. For only under struggle and distress with flesh and blood is every inch of the land of faith won. This is also what God especially wants to teach us in this controversy. Whoever believes rightly does not believe even an Apostle Paul because he is Paul, but because Paul has proved to him that the Holy Spirit speaks through him. In death and distress of conscience I must be able to say to God: See, dear God, so thou hast spoken, and that I have believed. Then God will say: Right so! so shouldst thou do.

Luther too had much trouble with himself, as he shows us in a writing of the year 1522. (For God's sake let no one misunderstand what we said above of Luther's writings before the year 1523; as if everything he wrote there were not right at all. No, there are found there only small crumbs of what is false. For example, before 1523 Luther was still very tolerant in many points of what was prevalent in the papacy. Later, however, he cursed and condemned the same with a true fiery zeal as false doctrine.) So Luther writes: "I feel daily in myself how very hard it is to lay aside conscience long-standing and held captive by human ordinances. Oh, with how much great trouble and labor, even by well-founded Holy Scripture, have I scarcely been able to justify my own conscience, that I, one alone, have dared to step forth against the Pope, to hold him for the Antichrist, the bishops for his apostles, the universities for his brothels! How often has my heart quivered, chastised me and reproached me with their one, strongest argument: You are alone wise! Should the others all err and have erred so long a time? How? if you err, and lead so many people into error, who would all be eternally damned? — Until Christ confirmed and established me with his one sure Word, so that my heart no longer quivers, but sets itself against these arguments of the papists like a stony shore against the waves and laughs at their threatening and storming." (On the Abuse of the Mass. From the year 1522. XIX, 1305.)

Yes, so it is: if one has believed something for a long time in an erring conscience and another comes and wants to take it from us, there is first a great struggle in the conscience, until the Word of God, which stands above the conscience, puts an end to the strife, and with true Christians not sooner. So, for example, the Jews were not only accustomed from youth to hold the ceremonial commandments set for them by God himself in the Old Testament as, in obligation, entirely