# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1910_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the twenty-third convention

Gospel he cried into our heart: "Let there be light!" And as he
spoke, there was light. The Holy Spirit laid his hand on
the blind eye of our soul and said: "Be seeing!" And we
became seeing. And what we recognized, what we now see, is
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We have
believed and recognized that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living
God. And through the Son we know the Father, the living
God. In Christ we recognize the splendor, the glory of the divine
grace. We know that Jesus is our Savior and the Savior of the world, who has
brought sin, death and hell to nothing and has brought life and
immortality to light, the Lord who is our righteousness, the God and Rock of our salvation. And Christ has
taken shape in us; he lives in us. The life we now live
in the flesh we live by the faith of the Son of God. We
reckon ourselves dead to sin and live
unto God in Christ Jesus. And in Christ we see heaven opened,
look into God's Father-heart. We have in Christ a gracious
God in spite of all our weakness. And this sun of grace
remains unmoved before our eyes in life and death, and
by virtue of its radiance we shall one day awake on the glorious morning of resurrection
in God's image, in perfect knowledge of God.

O that all people had this blessed knowledge of God,
this light that shines unto eternal life! But countless
millions still go their way without it, sit still in darkness and
in the shadow of death; their understanding is darkened, and they are
alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that
is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. And to these belongs
also the majority of the 9,000,000 and more Negroes of our country;
yes, they sit in deeper night than others. They are for the most part
still, as it were, bound hand and foot with the chains of darkness. Their ignorance of divine things is beyond
description. Their superstition, which like a cancer has eaten through the whole
people and gnaws at its marrow, is so boundless that
people who meet them in ordinary life have only
a slight idea of it. Naturally the consequences of such
unbelief and superstition cannot fail to appear. They lie deep in sins
and vices of every kind. They are in fact to a great extent the
degraded and sunken people they are held to be.
Even of many among them who wish to be considered Christians
the word of the Apostle Jude in his epistle holds true: "They
speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally,
in those things they corrupt themselves, like brute beasts." Often they drag
themselves along here, heaped with shame and disgrace and branded with
the curse, wretchedly through life, until through a miserable
death they pass into an eternity of which one can think only with horror and