# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S62
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

60 Proceedings of the tenth convention

bility of the Pope, by virtue of which he is the highest judge in matters of faith, no one may contradict him, and by virtue of which he alone finally decides every dispute in matters of faith and life. Of these and similar dogmas the Pope says they are not new but old doctrines, which have only now come fully to light and been taken from tradition. Luther therefore rightly calls these traditions the Pope's conjuror's bag. A conjuror's bag is, as is well known, a bag with which a juggler or magician is accustomed to appear. When the juggler asks: What shall I fetch out of my bag for you? a spectator quickly says: A rabbit. So the juggler reaches into the bag and behold! a live rabbit comes to view. The conjuror goes on: What more do you want brought out? A snake! is the answer. And behold! he fetches that out too. Naturally he put it all in first, and his accomplices give the answers among the crowd. Such a conjuror's bag, then, are also the Pope's traditions. Out of them he can fetch everything that is asked for, or rather whatever he himself wants to have.

Let us now hear what the Council of Trent, which was ready to seal the papal errors, resolved on these traditions shortly after Luther's death, on 18 April 1546, in its fourth session: "Recognizing that this truth and rule is contained in the holy books and in the unwritten traditions, which, received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or handed down by the same apostles, as it were from hand to hand, by the dictation of the Holy Spirit, have come down to us, and following the examples of the orthodox fathers, (this Tridentine most holy council) accepts and venerates with equal pious devotion and reverence (pari pietatis affectu et reverentia) all the books of the Old as of the New Testament, since the one God is the author of both, and likewise the same traditions, both those that relate to faith and those that relate to morals, as such as have proceeded either orally from Christ or from the dictation of the Holy Spirit, and have been preserved in unbroken succession in the Catholic Church." (The Canons and Decrees, etc., of the Council of Trent. In faithful German translation by D. W. Smets, canon of the collegiate church at Aachen. Bielefeld, 1851. p. 14.)

By the expression "unwritten traditions" they do not mean that they were not written at all, but only that they were not written by the apostles and are not found in Holy Scripture. Since the papists now call the traditions the unwritten Word of God, a papist can also for appearance's sake concede that everything may be judged solely by God's Word, and yet this concession is nothing but swindle. Tradition is therefore above all the dreadful