# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1858_S366
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

366 Confuse Not the Consciences.

forth no more with him; and notwithstanding that St. Paul made a great part
of the Jewish Christians his enemies and brought about their separation from
the church — indeed, at times he had, because of danger of strife and
discord, to be wary even of the other apostles and of Peter himself. But all
of this was able to move neither Christ nor the apostles to keep silent
about the truth. And what would the church and mankind have gained by it, if
they had ceased to bear witness with holy earnestness to the pure doctrine
of the gospel and to refute error, and had instead, with tolerant
peaceableness, let truth and falsehood stand side by side on equal footing,
so that "the church might not be split"? There would then be no gospel and
no church left in the world. The thorns and thistles of error and heresy
would soon have overgrown and utterly choked the good seed of the pure Word.
For instead of the church being harmed or destroyed by the testimony of the
truth, it is rather the sole means of its preservation and growth. When,
therefore, Pastor Wucherer repeats after another: "A church that can no
longer bear its factions must crumble apart," we say: "A church, or a party
within the church, that can no longer bear and will not accept the
unadulterated testimony of pure truth falls, for all its outward unity and
uniformity, into error and spiritual death; but where this testimony
prevails, there it works, according to God's promise, clear knowledge in
every particular of doctrine and living unity in true faith." The effect of
the testimony of the truth is by no means the confusion of consciences, as
Pastor Wucherer supposes.

For there is, indeed, by God's will, no other means of making knowledge
clear, the heart firm, the will resolute; there is no other means of freeing
consciences from all confusion, from all wavering, from all uncertainty,
than precisely the unadulterated testimony of pure truth. And if one fears
from this the splitting of the church, that is mere human thinking. Not even
the smallest particle of evangelical truth may be kept silent, because we
must fear that it could become, though to many a savor of life unto life,
yet to some a savor of death unto death. And how much less could the
testimony of the truth fall silent, so that people who are not at one in
faith and doctrine might remain outwardly, under the same name, in church
fellowship with one another? What is to come of that? Nothing else can come
of it than a church after the pattern of the Roman one, where, above the
outward unity, the inner, living unity in faith and doctrine is lightly
esteemed and despised, where peace with men is held higher than God's clear
Word. May God graciously preserve us from such a unity, through the
unadulterated testimony of his pure truth in every particular!

We cannot close without once more expressing our astonishment at