# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S175
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence from Germany. 175

stands, so untenable, and since therefore everything rests all the more on his personality, the danger is all the more pressing. But precisely for this reason we cannot suppress our grief that a man to whom God has granted, as to few others, the gift of being a forerunner and leader of others on the way to life, takes pleasure in choosing new and precipitous paths rather than the well-trodden and proven ones. If, of the souls that bind themselves to him, one or another now or hereafter comes to a fall, whose will the responsibility be?

(Submitted.)

Correspondence from Germany.

In the previous volume of "Lehre und Wehre" (see the July and October issues) we published, on account of its general importance, the continuation of a correspondence between a dear member — a friend of ours — of the Lutheran church of Germany, and us, the members of the Fort Wayne District Conference here. Since then a most kind and at the same time highly gratifying reply from the dear brother has come to hand, answering our last letter of August of last year, and justice alone requires that this too be given to the public. We do this, moreover, with all the greater joy and all the more fervent thanks toward God, in that in it the dear brother himself confesses, with joyful thanks, that after earnest inner struggle and careful consideration all his misgivings — formerly against our doctrine of church and ministry, and now likewise against our practice in constitution and church government — have vanished, and that he knows himself to be entirely at one with us in every point. That is, in our days of rigid clinging to subjective opinions and of unabashed departure from the pure confession of our church amid constant, often so brazen, assertion of the Lutheran name, certainly a most gladdening and, though rare, no less comforting event. It furnishes actual proof that even in a time of lamentable confusion — such as ours undisputedly, alas, is — nothing more is needed than a sincere love of the truth and a searching examination and study of our dear, thoroughly Scriptural confession, in order, by God's grace, even amid difficult circumstances, to ascertain with sure certainty, in this or that disputed point, what the right doctrine and practice of our church is. Moreover, this reply of the dear man, like his earlier one, is written in so heart-winning a manner that on that account alone its communication will doubtless be most welcome to his many friends among us. And besides, it contains so much that is important from the contemporary history of the Lutheran church of Germany that it will certainly be read with interest by everyone who takes a living part in the welfare and woe of the Lutheran church of our old fatherland.