# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

as it was in the days of the Reformation, but since that time it has hardened and obdurated itself still more in its wickedness. — The Roman Church is making quite special efforts, precisely in our time and in our country, to bring its cause to victory and to suppress and, if possible, destroy the Gospel and the true Church of Christ. It has also succeeded, as in other countries, so especially in our country, in gaining wide-reaching influence in many fields.

We are speaking of a struggle. If we want to bring a struggle to a successful end, it also matters that we rightly assess the enemy against whom we have to fight, that we form a right judgment of his strength and of the resources which he commands, which he can and will bring into the struggle. It matters that we neither overestimate the enemy against whom we are in the field — that could easily result in discouragement and despondency — nor underestimate him — otherwise the struggle appears to us too easy and unimportant, we become negligent and sluggish, and so the enemy can easily gain all sorts of advantages over us. Many a battle has been lost because the opponent was wrongly assessed. If we want to set before our eyes again, vividly, the struggle that it is our duty to wage against the Pope and his false church, it will be necessary that we first turn our attention to the enemy and judge him rightly according to his dangerousness, his power and his resources. This is all the more important because nowadays the right measure of this enemy has in many quarters been lost.

Is the Pope with his following really such a dangerous enemy that we must call to struggle against him with such energy? Do not we Lutherans in particular greatly exaggerate the matter? That is the opinion of very many in our country, also of many Protestants. While they readily grant that formerly, in Luther's day, the Pope was a dangerous opponent of the Christian Church, that it was then quite in place for the Reformer and his co-workers to oppose him with all seriousness and fight him, yet now, they say, the matter stands quite differently. The papacy, they say, has also learned a good deal in the course of time, it has given up quite a number of its presumptions, dropped some of its doctrines. At bottom, they say, one is after all one with the Roman Church, even if some differences in more incidental matters are still to be found, even if the Pope perhaps sometimes takes too many rights in the Church upon himself. The Roman Church is recognized as a sister church; people begin more and more to admire it and to welcome it as an ally. — The Roman Church itself, too, in many cases presents itself in the countries with a strong or predominantly