# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1922_S20
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

20 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth convention

whoever gives them room spoils the school struggle thereby. He who has such a victory in view will quite naturally also arrange his fight so as to win it. And when the probability of such a victory vanishes, he will resolve on a more or less skilful strategic retreat in order to save what can still be saved. Both, such a manner of fighting and such a retreat, mean a defeat, since it does not flow from the character of a witness of Jesus.

But is it then something wrong if opponents come to know our school system, if they notice that they have hitherto formed a quite mistaken picture of it, if they now admit their error and pay our schools a certain recognition and admiration? Is it wrong if the enemies notice that for the sake of their own political future they must leave the school question alone? Is it wrong if we rejoice over such a victory over our enemies? Or is it wrong if we strive for such a victory? Then we would have to condemn our fathers, who more than thirty years ago, especially in Wisconsin and Illinois, carried on such a school struggle. Then we would have to ungratefully fail to recognize an earthly good that God has given us in this country, the universal franchise. But we are not to imagine that this is the real victory promised us by the Savior, to which we would have to give all our attention.

Such a victory the Savior nowhere promised us. He sharply corrected his disciples every time they dreamed of such victories. Last of all, at the moment of his ascension, he says: "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power," Acts 1:7.

God has at various times given his church such victories. One thinks, for example, of how he publicly documented Abraham before all the world as the future possessor and true lord of Canaan by granting him the brilliant victory over the allied kings of the East, Gen. 14. Many a one may also, as a result, have lent a more willing ear to Abraham's preaching. Or one thinks of the time of the Reformation, when Charles V, through world politics, through his frictions with King Francis of France and through the harassments from the Turks, was again and again prevented from taking more energetic measures to suppress the Reformation. Or one thinks of our own school struggles toward the end of the eighties of the last century. At that time it was the Republicans who saddled the two states of Wisconsin and Illinois with the Bennett Law and the Edwards Law respectively. When a storm of indignation then arose in the church circles that maintained their own parochial schools, the Democrats saw a favorable opportunity to make political capital of it and to let this wave carry them into the offices that had been denied them for many years. Many