# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S196
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

196 Editorial Correspondence.

nonessential points — that is, in matters on which God's Word does not decide clearly, or does not decide at all — whereas everything is essential to us which God has revealed to us in His Word for the awakening, preservation, and strengthening of saving faith. Of that which has once been delivered to the saints, we let nothing be bargained away from us. We hold with all our hearts to the well-known principle: In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas (in necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things love) — not, however, in the sense of unionism, which reckons even the doctrine of the means of grace among the doubtful things, but in the sense that we gladly leave everyone to his private opinion in matters that are not contrary to God's Word, and that no one presumes to lord it with his own conscience over another's. Unity in the form and method of doctrine is so little the goal of our endeavors that we rejoice, rather, with all our hearts over the diversity of spiritual gifts, which have ample room here to unfold. Ceremonial unity conditions our going together only insofar as it concerns the confessional ceremonies of our Church, and unity in practice has a high value for us only insofar as the unhindered edification of the Church upon a common foundation depends on it and fidelity in confession requires it. However united we now are among ourselves, our unity is nevertheless so far from being sectarian that, rather, an inward longing for unity with all other church communions animates and quickens us; and the less our unity among ourselves is a cold, abstract one, but rather a unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace, a unity of hearts and of cordial love, the more it drives us to strive after unity with all Christians, especially with those who carry before them the same banner of confession as we do. In this we have already, through God's grace and impulse, shown so much diligence that we must, on that account, bear the disgrace of hearing the reproach from false brethren that we harbor "designs of conquest" in our bosom.

Not infrequently, and particularly in Germany, we are reproached that our unity is a dead, unfruitful one, a unity of stagnation rather than of living movement, because it is a unity of repristination and not of reproduction. It is demanded of us that we should not learn and receive pure doctrine from our fathers, but rather generate it anew, freely and independently, out of Scripture — invent it, so to speak, a second time. Then, it is thought, our fellowship would at last become a green, fruitful branch on the tree of the universal Church, which could look upon us with hope, and we would then also add something new to the old treasure. Otherwise, withering and disappearance without a trace await us. But let us look, indeed, at those who in our time wish not to repristinate but to reproduce the old, pure doctrine, and we shall see with alarm how the alleged reproduction consists in this: that the orthodox Church is corrected on every side, the fathers are called to