# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran and Missionary. 23

whether it is to be believed that a preacher or pastor could be so hardened and malicious as to keep silent about this and let both parties go on, each in its own delusion, believing that they receive one and the same sacrament, each according to its own faith. But if there is such a one, he must have a heart harder than any stone, steel, or diamond; he must indeed be an apostle of wrath. For Turks and Jews are far better, who deny our sacrament and confess this freely; for by that we remain undeceived by them and fall into no idolatry. But these fellows would have to be the very highest archdevils, who give me mere bread and wine and let me hold it for the body and blood of Christ, and so pitiably deceive me. That would be too hot and too harsh; God will strike back for it before long. Therefore whoever has such preachers, or trusts himself to them, let him be warned against them as against the devil incarnate himself." (XVII, 2446.) —

The thought keeps forcing itself upon us that the Lutheranism of the General Synod has too great a respect for the other large, fashionable denominations, too great a longing to be recognized by them as well, to appear somewhat fashionable before the American world too, together with too great a dread of belonging to the sect "which is everywhere spoken against." And yet a Christian must resign himself to this: that true Christianity in the world must always bear only the form of a sect everywhere much disliked, and that he may not, through unionistic endeavors, shrug off from himself the disgrace of belonging to the small, despised band of the despised Jesus of Nazareth. —

We do not fail to recognize that the struggle of the English Lutheran preachers within the General Synod is an extraordinarily difficult one, for the English congregations have, on the whole, remained almost throughout more protected from rationalism than the German ones, but have, on the other hand, been all the more deeply leavened by Puritan fanaticism and lack of understanding, and are very little open to good churchly order. Our demand upon the General Synod does not, therefore, consist in this — that it should, headlong, with hasty measures, turn upside down congregations still entangled in so many prejudices — but rather that it should, for the present, only once acknowledge the principle that everything which is contrary to Scripture and confession is to be recognized and rejected as sinful and un-Lutheran.

We shall now wait and see whether the editors think it worth the trouble to answer our concerns of conscience. It is not, now and then, approving judgments and apparent flatteries that we seek, and that would be wholesome for the furthering of brotherly unity, but rather acknowledgment that they are unionistic and that their union is sin — or proof that neither the one nor the other is the case, but that their affair is in keeping with Scripture and the Confessions. —