# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S2
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

2 Preface to the 1860 Volume.

does a week go by without their anathematizing the General Synod and the Observer, because the latter stands on the basis of that body. To hope for union or fraternal fellowship with such selfish, such exclusive views would be something worse than folly. They are a class of spiritual Ishmaelites; their fitting place is the Roman Church, where one believes what, as one is taught, the Church believes, and not what the Bible and the Holy Spirit teach. A lifeless congregation of wax or clay may be shaped by pressing it through the same iron mold, but a fellowship of immortal spirits, whose God-given prerogative it is to search the Scripture, to test everything and hold fast the good — never, no, never! Revolutions do not go backward; the Reformation of the sixteenth century was quite properly (emphatically) a revolution in the opinions and dogmas of Christendom, and you will never bring the Church back into that night of barbarism and spiritual bondage out of which she arose in the Reformation, since the Holy Spirit makes men free with the freedom that Christ gives us. If, therefore, our good brother from New York (Dr. Stohlmann) indulges the hope of giving these extremists a heart of brotherly love, or expects to breathe into them principles of Christian tolerance by generously bearing with them, then we are sorry to have to destroy so pleasant a delusion. We have great confidence in the power of Christian love, for it has often overcome the most unbending natures; but as for such people as have drunk in their prejudices with their mother's milk, whose superstition was inoculated into them in the cradle, and whose souls have grown exactly into the mold given them by their doctrinal casting-form, and have expanded to their utmost limit — even the Sun of Righteousness might well fail to coax the gifts of brotherly kindness and love out of such hardened ground. — Years ago we refrained from passing judgment on their intolerant spirit as expressed in their utterances, as the provocations lying in the character of their articles deserved, and indeed in the hope that they would mend their ways if we showed them that forbearance which we are bound to display toward erring brethren; but that was nothing other than casting pearls before the wrong people, for they never seem so fully in their true element as when they revile the General Synod or some of its leading members and friends." So much may be communicated from a recent article of the "Luth. Observer" concerning our Synod and its organs.

Not so decidedly hostile to everything Lutheran, but just as decidedly opposed to the principles and the procedure of our Synod and its journals, and, where possible, even more unfavorable to our good name in Germany, the representative of another direction, Pastor Löhe, expresses himself in his "Kirchliche Mittheilungen aus und über