# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1904_S48
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

48 Proceedings of the twentieth convention

carnal, as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able."

But we must not give them up either, for even if we refuse them the Sacrament for the present, until they have reached the necessary maturity, we nevertheless exhort them with Peter, in order to tear them loose from all sinful ways, to bind them to Christ instead and to win them for him, as Peter does in 1 Pet. 2:1–4: "Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings, as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious."

On the basis of Holy Scripture we can take only this position: that to a fellow member in the congregation who has joined the lodge we do not give the Sacrament of the Altar until he has recognized the sinfulness of the lodge system and has withdrawn from the lodge again. By his entry into the lodge he has separated himself from us. And if he wants to remain with the lodge, then, because of the nature of the lodge, our position toward lodge people is governed by what Luther writes on Matt. 7:6: "So Christ now wants to say: Where you see that people will despise your preaching and trample it underfoot, have no fellowship with them and withdraw from them, as Matt. 18:17 says to you: Whoever does not hear you and the congregation, hold him as a heathen and publican. So that one should tell them that they are not Christians but damned heathen, and that one wishes nothing preached to them and lets them have no share of our goods, as St. Peter says in Acts 18:20, 21 to Simon Magus. So I do, and all who preach in earnest, that we not make ourselves partakers of their sin. For God does not want us to dissemble thus with our factions, as if their doctrine were right, but we must hold them as enemies, as separated from them with the Gospel, Baptism, Sacrament and everything they teach and live. So also we must tell our own people, if they want to have a share in the Gospel, that they are not to despise us altogether, but show their fruit, that they mean it in earnest, and at the least hold the Word and Sacrament in honor and approach it with humility.

"We preach and exhort everyone who will accept it and hold with us; but whoever will not, and yet with the appearance and name of the Gospel or of Christian brotherhood despises us and wants to trample us underfoot, against such we also use the art of letting them keep the appearance but in the ground taking everything back to ourselves, so that they retain nothing at all. For we have the command that we separate ourselves from them, though we do not do it gladly, and would rather,