# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1916_S58
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

58 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth convention

all creatures!" And in this also we fight against Rome, that we obey this command of our Savior. The more zealous we are in the work of missions, especially also in the work of so-called Home Mission, the more we harm Rome. We must make it ever more our task to fill our broad land, so richly blessed by God, with the sound of the pure Gospel, that it may ring out from north to south, from east to west, that more and more people may hear it and hear it again. When we send out our traveling preachers and missionaries with the preaching of the Gospel into such lands and places where it has not yet been heard, or only mixed with ruinous human doctrine, when we help with our goods that these traveling preachers may be sent out and supported, when we help that poor congregations are assisted in building churches and schools, as places for the preaching of the Gospel, then we wage the battle against Rome thereby, and indeed an important, successful battle. Every soul that is won for the Gospel by God's grace is thereby lost to the Pope and his kingdom.

To this, however, there must still be added, "that we," as Luther advises, "confidently go on as we have begun, to bring the knavery and deceit of the Pope and the papists among the people with speaking and writing, until he is bared in all the world, recognized and put to shame." Especially our Lutheran Church, which recognizes best the abomination of the papacy, ought to be zealous in this, that we show the papacy in its true shape to the people, not only to our Christians, say in Reformation sermons in our churches, but also to our fellow countrymen, and to whoever will hear us. Before all the world the Pope's hideous nature is to be uncovered and put to shame. We ought, in tracts and articles, and wherever else opportunity offers, to set before our people's eyes the Pope and his accomplices in their true shape and tear from them the mask of their lying and hypocrisy. And indeed we ought to place the abominations of the papacy in the light of the Gospel, that is, we do not want merely to point to them as harms and dangers that threaten the outward welfare, the moral health, the freedom of our people, but to show them up as they endanger men's souls, as shameful blasphemy of God and destruction of the Gospel, by which alone men can be rescued from their perdition and be saved. Here there is still a wide field of activity open to us. How diligently the Roman Church works to put its Church in the best light before the great public and to ward off all attacks! How it labors to undermine the standing of the Protestant churches! On our side comparatively little is yet being done here, even if we have made a beginning. We, precisely we, are called and made fit to open our people's eyes about the papacy and its dangers, especially in respect