# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S63
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1884. 61

instrument of Antichrist, with which he seeks to support all his abominations and to overthrow the gospel.

It does not, of course, occur to us to want to impute to our opponents that they subscribe this decree of the Council of Trent; on the contrary, they hate and condemn this shameful doctrine together with us. But they have, alas! entered upon a road that leads to that papistic doctrine. For it is all one whether I must believe what Augustine, Jerome and other church fathers, or what a Hunnius, Pfeiffer, Hollaz, Baier and other dogmaticians have taught. For these were men capable of error like those. The only difference, indeed, is that the fathers of the Lutheran church have almost throughout written pure golden truth, whereas in the writings of the old church fathers there is a whole multitude of errors, although they were not on that account heretics. Their errors are just *naevi*, blemishes. But woe to him who declares precisely these blemishes to be the most precious thing in the teachers of the church! What would it be if someone handed me a "blank book," but made a big ink blot in it and then said to me: That is the finest thing in the book? So our opponents do in the doctrine of election [*Wahl*]: much that is quite right and beautiful in the writings of the dogmaticians they leave lying aside, but the doctrine shines for them like a star in the heaven of the church teachers: God foresaw that so-and-so will behave in such and such a way, therefore he elected him before others, while he rejected the others on account of their bad behaviour. The latter we grant, but the former we cannot grant, on our salvation. When I, says a member of the Conference, was at the university with my late brother, we both came to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Now at that time there were, besides us, students, young men of such strictly moral and at the same time such lovable character that we thought that if these only also came to know the gospel, they would surely soon follow us. But what happened? Just these so lovable young men became, precisely for the gospel's sake, our bitterest enemies, mocked us that we could still believe the old, long-abandoned doctrine of salvation through Christ's blood and wounds, and took us for fools. Then we often asked ourselves: How is it possible that just we have recognized the blessed gospel and these have not? We had to admit to ourselves: The only ground of our conversion is nothing other than God's incomprehensible mercy. This assumption is what our opponents now take offence at. They ask their reason here for counsel, and it tells them: No, one must look for the difference in man's better behaviour. But that is against the whole of Scripture. Whatever grounds God may have had for electing me and you, the ground he did not have was: that we had behaved better than other people. On that no