# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

70 Proceedings of the tenth convention

and are lost; as has happened under the papacy." (From Councils and Churches, of the year 1539. XVI, 2629 f.)

So the holy Bernard too would know nothing of the unwritten traditions. For truly, when I stand at the spring I shall not climb down to the brook to drink, for at the spring the water is purest and freshest. But on the contrary, when I stand at a muddy brook, I use the brook as a guide to follow it up to the spring. So the Bible is the spring from which we are to draw in full draughts, but the writings of men we are to regard as little brooks which are to lead us up to Scripture. Only then have we used them rightly when we have used them solely as little brooks to come to the spring. That shall then be our concern, also in this our sad time, that it may not go with us again as under the papacy, and that we, following the little brooks downstream, do not at last with our little ship of faith drift into the salt sea of human opinions.

Finally we wish to hear a testimony from Gerhard that touches our dispute specially, namely how Augustine stood on the doctrine of election [*Wahllehre*]. Gerhard writes:

"As to the opinion of the ancients, we know that Augustine in his book 'On the Predestination of the Saints,' in chapter 17, writes: 'That God has elected the believers, but in order that they may be so, not because they already were so; that men do not believe in order to be elected, but rather are elected in order to believe'; and in chapter 19: 'Not because we have believed, but in order that we may believe, has he elected us, that we may not say that we first elected him.'" (Note these contrasts. Gerhard cites this as an objection against his own doctrine.) "But this and the like is opposed to the Semipelagians or the remnants of the Pelagians." (Pelagians are the crude heretics who said: Man can do everything he ought by his own powers. The Semipelagians, on the other hand, taught: God must indeed make the beginning, but the completion rests with man; or, conversely, man must indeed make the beginning, but the completion is God's affair.) "For those held that the beginning of faith is from us and that therefore faith is the meritorious cause of election. And that this was their real opinion appears from the letters of Prosper and Hilary to Augustine, which are found in the 7th volume. Augustine therefore rightly opposed them and denied that faith is the cause of election, indeed he also retracted what he had written in his own 'Exposition of Some Propositions of the Epistle to the Romans': 'That God elected in foreknowledge, so that he elected the one