# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S11
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1922. 11

take no pains, that perhaps we shrink from the sacrifices, that we are afraid of the danger of passing the Gospel on to our children, would show that our attitude toward the Gospel is not healthy. And what sort of fruits do we expect if we carry on mission work in an unhealthy spirit? Our work must become unhealthy and naturally bring forth unhealthy fruits. If, therefore, we let the education of our children lie, the harm is at once twofold. Where our Christianity is healthy, the Gospel is the highest treasure of our souls, in which we have comfort and refreshment, strength and life. Without the Gospel we do not want to be, we cannot be. Better to have risked everything, done without everything, suffered everything, than to let the Gospel go. Such a mind the Gospel itself creates in us. In that case it is impossible that we should not also seek to pass this treasure on to our children as our most precious inheritance.

Therefore the business of education is the most important work that we carry on, that grows most directly out of our personal life of faith. This work we must carry on, not from an external compulsion, but from a most inward urge of the heart. This work we must therefore also carry on with all energy. But this work we must also carry on wholly free and unhindered. For the sake of our Savior we cannot let anyone interfere. We cannot let anyone prescribe to us how we are to carry it on; it flows, after all, from our life of faith. We cannot share the work of education with anyone who does not stand fully and wholly with us on the same ground of faith; that would be possible only if our faith were no longer faith.

Like faith, education too is a matter of the heart. Even unbelieving pedagogy feels this. The proposition is generally accepted that only he can educate who is himself educated, or better, who continually keeps working on his own education. Thereby the truth is conceded that the work of education is a matter of the heart. Only what hovers before my own heart as an ideal can I rightly take pains to plant in the hearts of the children. Educational work that does not come from the heart becomes external and sinks to hireling's work.

The attitude, therefore, that a church takes toward the education of its children, and the manner in which it carries out this work, shows really most directly the spirit by which it is ruled. As we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, we can hardly show by treating a more suitable topic that we are permeated by the same spirit as our fathers, the founders of the Synodical Conference, than by this topic, which we did not choose for this purpose, but which God himself has set before us through circumstances.