# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Vilmar's Doctrine of the Office and the Church, etc. 21

and bears it as a whole, a full thing, as heart's-blood and pulse-beat within
himself. Whoever can lay a ripe seed-corn of his knowledge of the truth,
a ripe seed-corn of firm, undoubting faith in the whole of the
saving Word, into the soil of the future — this man, and this man only,
will see a new and wonderful blossom of holy life spring up out of this
soil, more wonderful than all the blossoms that the field of the living
God has hitherto borne, because it unites in itself the color and luster and
fragrance of all earlier blossoms: its name is the holy, universal Church
and the communion of saints."
Of this Church Herr Vilmar says: "we have not yet experienced it, or
not fully; we do not yet possess it, or only to the smallest degree, as our
own. We cannot testify of it, not with the bright joyfulness, the
rock-firm certainty, the exultant confidence with which we testify of the
Father, the almighty Creator of heaven and earth, etc. This testimony,
however, neither must nor may be given only by the invisible Church. We
must be able to testify, in the future that lies before us, of the invisible
Church as a visible one, hence of the unity and oneness of the visible,
outward, and the invisible, inward Church; of the communion of saints,
which moves and expresses itself not only in the quiet intercourse of
prayer but also in outward forms necessary to it and grown out of it;
in a word, of the communion of saints, which has one body upon earth,
as a faithful and perfect image of the body of the Church in its
glorification — the new Jerusalem — just as the soul has and keeps its
body, and receives it again, glorified, at the resurrection.
The time is coming when it will no longer be a devout, blessed hope
but a near, blessed present reality: there shall be one shepherd and one
flock, in one mind, one faith, one song of praise, one prayer, joined
together, closely and firmly, in a communion at once outward and
inward, upon this earth and in this life. Nor shall we then be joined
together in a small, hidden little band — no! as has been prophesied, in
an army of many thousand times a thousand, standing open and bright
before all the world, so that this army, in close-locked ranks, may go
forth to the last battle and the last victory over the Antichrist, over the
prince of darkness and over death."

So the last time, Herr Vilmar believes, draws near. Whether decades,
whether generations, whether centuries still pass before it comes, that he
professes not to know. But the development that leads to this end has,
he maintains, already begun. *)

That is not the point we intend to go into: we will leave the prophesying
to Herr Vilmar and wait and see. But

*) It will be seen that Chiliasm and a Romanizing Lutheranism are not mutually
exclusive.                                                              L. u. W.