# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S245
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What a Precious Gift of God We Have in Our Synodical Fellowship. 245

discipline of the Holy Spirit, it also does not come to a blessed knowledge of the truths of salvation. Either the deeper teachings of Holy Scripture become repugnant to us, because the soul cannot bear the secret judgment which the Word of God exercises over us, and one neither hears them nor gladly preaches them; or, as the godly Scriver says, one has the letter of Holy Scripture diligently indeed in the mouth, at hand, in the pen, but does not let the power and the spirit reach into the heart. It is, moreover, exceedingly dangerous for one's own soul to preach the mysteries of the kingdom of God without wanting to apply them to oneself. Easily there arises from this a habitual and frivolous lip-babble, an unbelieving and at bottom indifferent passing-on of what one has received, whereby the highest and mightiest things lose all power over the mind; or a habit arises of carrying on devotion and pious emotion in oneself only up to the point where the imagination indeed grows warm, but it does not come to the sanctifying of the will. Neither the one nor the other suits a true witness, who ought not to speak according to hearsay or according to his own imagination, but out of experience and what he himself has lived through. But the preacher ought to be a true and not a false witness. A worldly-conformed life, however, must in the end produce false witnesses. Everything that is now commonly adduced in excuse of soul-deadening distractions — the habit, for example, of card-playing, which in many regions the common people call a reading in the devil's book, is sufficiently well known. But in any case it is questionable when a preacher engages in things which he must laboriously excuse when he is asked about them. "Be examples to the flock," it is written. A pastor may still count himself fortunate if, having through poor upbringing in youth, or through a life spent in worldly households and in a spiritless environment, habitually brought a worldly, pleasure-seeking disposition into his office, and having arranged his own domestic and non-domestic life accordingly — perhaps supported by a like-minded wife — he happens into a congregation where the people keep watch over their pastors, whether they do anything offensive to a Christian conscience, and, should they notice any such thing, let it be plainly felt. Through this many a one who sinned in ignorance is brought to conversion. But how rare are such congregations. In most places people concern themselves very little with the pastor, insofar as he is the steward appointed for them over the mysteries of God; it is enough for them if he is a peaceable, agreeable man, sociable, not stingy, or a sensible advisor in business and bodily needs, if his motto is live and let live; then he is fully satisfactory. The pastor is content with the congregation and the congregation with the pastor, "who is a good man and does not belong to the hypocritical pietists who at once condemn everyone who once takes innocent delight in the joy of his life." Naturally the worldly-conformed life thereby gets a broad base.