# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1900_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 Proceedings of the eighteenth convention

by which a secure foundation for a truly well-ordered and harmonious commonwealth can be created. To be sure, we meet with much contradiction in this assertion. If anything stands firm for our American people in its complacency and self-confidence, it is the fact that our state school is quite properly the pillar on which not only the continuance and prospering of our form of government but also of our civilization in general securely rests. Let us examine this assertion, heard and defended so often precisely in recent times.

It is generally granted that for the preservation and healthy development of the commonwealth, especially of the republican one, the virtues must be found among the citizens which are absolutely necessary for the preservation of the right relation and conduct of men toward one another. The structure, the method of instruction, the aim of the state school force upon us from the outset the conviction that it offers no guarantee that the citizens walk in these virtues. It has the Word of God neither as a subject of instruction nor as a means of education; when it seeks to educate toward such virtues as are required in the second table of the divine Law, it does not do so with reference to God's most high will, but points only to the fact that this and that is recognized among men as good or evil, and will bring benefit or harm to him who does it.

True virtue, however, can be achieved only by a man's being made a Christian. For not even the Law of God can produce true virtue in the sinful man! It only works wrath. How should the civil law accomplish anything higher! No, only through the preaching of the Gospel can virtue be planted in the hearts of men. The 119th Psalm, this glorious song of praise on the Word of God, says: "When you comfort my heart," not when you smite my heart with the hammer of the Law, but comfort it through the Gospel of the gracious forgiveness of sin, "I will run the way of your commandments." In vv. 98 to 102 we hear that the wisdom from which the avoiding of evil ways and the doing of good flows comes into our heart only through God's Word, and indeed not through the demands and threats of the Law, but through the testimonies of him who is gracious and merciful and patient and of great grace and faithfulness, who shows grace to thousands and forgives iniquity, transgression and sin. Whoever has this wisdom subjects his will completely to the will of God. And that is then true virtue, the habitus [settled disposition], the habit, from a free will determined only by God's Word, of doing the good and avoiding the evil. Such true freedom of the will only the Gospel can give, which offers the freedom in Christ and appropriates it to believers. Without the Gospel it cannot be attained.