# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

had denied his faith and fallen away to Calvinism, yet his land and people had remained true to the Gospel. With joy and thanks toward God the Lutheran Church was able to keep its first centennial in the year 1617. Through many waters of tribulation and persecution the Lord had rescued his Church.

On the occasion of this celebration the Romanists had prophesied with great confidence that the Lutheran Church would not outlast the second century and that a second centennial celebration would not take place. And for a time it seemed as if this prophecy were to be fulfilled. A year after that jubilee began the most terrible of all wars of religion, the Thirty Years' War, in the year 1618. The devil wanted to root out the Word of God in the German lands by brute force, by war and bloodshed. This dreadful war brought untold misery over all Germany and also over our Lutheran Church. But again God looked upon it in grace. After thirty long, hard years the war was at last over, and Paul Gerhardt could in 1653 sing again of the "golden, noble, precious peace in our fatherland." The Lutheran Church also weathered this storm by God's grace and was able to celebrate with rejoicing and thanksgiving in 1717 its second centennial of the Reformation. To be sure, in wide circles it had not kept the old Gospel entirely pure. The Lutheran Church at that time stood under the dominion of Pietism, which had pushed the doctrine of justification out of the center of doctrine and put sanctification and piety in its place. So our Church entered upon its third century. And now it went quickly downhill. Pietism was followed by the Enlightenment and vulgar Rationalism, which wanted to make a clean sweep of the Gospel and of God's Word, of all divine revelation, and intended to put reason in its place. So the year 1817 came, but it was a sad festival that the Church then celebrated. No longer was God's Word and Luther's doctrine the watchword among the great majority, but reason, enlightenment and freedom from God's Word. And those who still took Christianity more seriously celebrated the jubilee year by carrying out that false Union between the Reformed and Lutheran Churches, the joining of truth and error. It seemed as if the pure Gospel were now to perish altogether. But again God helped beyond all asking and understanding. A new life of faith awoke again in the German lands, and again many turned to the light. But unfortunately people did not return fully to Luther and the old Gospel, and so it soon went backward again, ever faster and faster on a slippery slope. Reason and a false scholarliness rule the Church over there. In wide circles the *sola Scriptura* and the *sola gratia* have long since been lost again. Open unbelief has seized many. And now, as punishment for this apostasy, the dreadful war