# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S152
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

152 Survey.

brought, and will, God willing, keep bringing them ever more and clearer proofs. For now he reminds them only of the growth of the Lutheran church in Prussia, which in the last three to four years has increased by 10,000 souls; he reminds them of the Lutheran societies within the united territorial church of Prussia, which are indeed nothing other than the waters of that confessional current which press out through the veins of the earth in every direction and break forth here and there as wellsprings, still turbid though they be; further, he reminds them of the confessional shaping of the mission societies in Thuringia and the growing interest they find; of the wrestling and struggling of the faithful Lutherans in Hesse; of the victory which the confessional current has won in the land of Brunswick, where it at last washed away the "little Bible" and made room for a catechism faithful to the confession; of the growth of the little Lutheran congregations in Baden; and finally of how this current runs everywhere through the Lutheran territorial churches and is not swallowed up by the broad waters of the unionistic spirit which has indeed asserted itself everywhere within them, but how, on the contrary, in spite of all resistance and contention, these territorial churches have taken on confessional coloring from that current, and have indeed drawn from it more strength and life than is commonly conceded. That Freimund too is borne along by this current, that he would like to lead it everywhere and thereby bring blessing, he need hardly say. For he is of the firm conviction that a decided faithfulness to confession alone is able not merely to hold its ground and stand its stroke against the Roman church, but even to win from it one victory after another — and this all the more once both are left to their own strength alone and both sides fight only with weapons of the spirit, which is where things, sooner or later, will still come. That people will not recognize this is a remarkable blindness. By what, after all, was the power of the Papacy broken; by what did the evangelical Church stand victorious from the beginning against all its attacks, cunning, and violence, if not through her decided confession of the pure, full truth of God's Word? What, then, made her so strong and joyful, if not the unity of hearts in this confession? And now, when church-political conditions grow ever more serious, when everything presses the territorial churches toward having, in the end, to stand on their own feet, even if they themselves resist this — where will strength for it be found, except where one stands on the rock-foundation of the pure confession with decided faith? Where will the capacity be found to build oneself up from within and to hold together with one another, except where hearts have become one in the same faith and continually draw from it enough humility and love to honor the God of peace in willing subordination and joyful ordering and mutual helpfulness, each according to his own part and measure? — Therefore: "To His Word and Testimony! If they will not say this, then they shall not have the dawn."— —