# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S244
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

244 What a Precious Gift of God We Have in Our Synodical Fellowship.

become unskillful! For it was not to that end that they became pastors, and gain for the conduct of their office is yielded by such occupations at best only when they serve as recreation after strong mental labor. But if the latter is lacking, they only drag a man down into the profane. And when now and then a brief flight from the depths toward the heights is undertaken, the wings soon fail in the unaccustomed exertion. To all this are added, besides, cares of poverty, which gladly settle upon the spirit like a poisonous mildew, so that the word is fulfilled all the more: "When the heart is troubled, courage fails also." (Prov. 15:13.) Then the difficulties pile up. Without means to continue his education through good books and to remain to some degree in touch with scholarship; bound by his poverty to the soil and hindered from taking part in the great, quickening, and fruit-bearing churchly assemblies and associations, the one living in isolation nourishes himself meagerly on derivative, meager trickles, and his own inner energy, perhaps already slight from the outset, sickens and wastes away by degrees. Even the mother tongue, though it has become flesh and blood to him, is forgotten in solitude or among people who speak a foreign tongue. A single coal goes out quickly, while the glow of many mutually heats and kindles one another. Thus many a strength left to itself alone smolders away; and where the rushing of living waters ought to be heard, stagnation has set in. Woe to him who is alone! —

Still worse does it turn out, however — and this is a frequently occurring fact — when the country pastor seeks to enliven his solitude through a worldly-conformed life. Pressure and anxiety can drive the heart to prayer, can make the disposition deeper and more inward; but fleshly freedom makes the soul cold and self-assured, insolent and proud, eats away the oil of faith, and leaves nothing but rotten wood. Not to all pastors can the word of the Psalm (119:63) be applied: "I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts." Many a clergyman who is called to be a witness of Jesus Christ lives in intimate association with persons who, though of rank, standing, and worldly culture, notoriously despise the Word of God and preaching, unashamedly profane the Sabbath in all manner of ways, take delight in unspiritual, idle chatter, and live on without repentance and grace, whose whole religion consists in a certain savoir-vivre and whose social life is summed up in the words: "They sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play." Such persons may indeed be so-called genial people, that is, people of a certain sensuous comfortableness which never lets things come to real earnestness in any respect; but this fleshly geniality gives and receives nothing essential, always merely grazes the surface of things, and in time makes the soul thoroughly dry and stale. Whoever lets himself drift in such a worldly-conformed life runs the greatest, indeed an unavoidable, danger of going blind in the inner eye. Where life is not placed under the