# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

42 Preface to the 1862 Volume.

have set upon the teaching-chair — teachers who, thank God, still enjoy among thousands upon thousands the confidence that they were faithful stewards of the mysteries of God, a confidence which no living theologian now enjoys.

It is true, what Pastor Fengler writes, that "the ancients must pass into flesh and blood" and that "confession must come from the innermost part, where faith dwells." But that this is the case with us, we know. We think that the very manner in which we have hitherto supported a doctrine with citations shows that we did not go looking for these citations in indexes, but that we have made the whole of the old doctrine our own and grasped it as a living thing, that it is our own most personal possession, the jewel of our heart's faith, for which we have not only joyfully taken upon ourselves all the reproach poured out upon us, but stand ready to sacrifice still greater things. Whoever thinks that one can cite in this way without having become master of the whole doctrine and carrying it in his heart — let him try to do the same without it.

For the rest, let the more than seventeen volumes of our Lutheraner, which have had dealings, often enough, with avowed non-Lutherans as well, themselves bear witness whether, by God's grace, we understand how, over against those who acknowledge no Lutheran authority and for whom the question is not whether a thing is Lutheran but whether what is Lutheran is biblical, to ground and defend Lutheran doctrine from the Bible and to refute the opposing error.

We would never have wasted a word on this last point, had we not been compelled to it by the presumptuously judicial sallies of Pastor Fengler in Ehlers's periodical.*) For what we have accomplished as, in a sense, our own

*) Ehlers, that is, lets Fengler write in his paper: "Christianity is always a confession of faith, and confession comes from the innermost part, where faith dwells. But for the Missourians, Christianity is more a matter of reciting all sorts of quite correct, excellent articles of faith." Not even our worst enemies have written anything more presumptuous or more judicial. Such a spiteful remark is not improved, but made all the more venomous, when Pastor F. further writes: "In fact the Missourians are learned and experienced in the wisdom of the Lutheran fathers.. Yet something good is also to be found in the American journals. Everything has great clarity. And the zeal for Lutheran doctrine — which, indeed, the Missourians hold in certain particulars better than it is generally held elsewhere — is only worthy of imitation. Thus I found instructive an article in Lehre und Wehre, December 1859: a comparison of Luther with Johann Arndt and A. H. Francke. This exposition seems to me excellent." It appears, then, that there are people even in Germany who praise the Missouri Synod — this thorn in the eye of the false Lutherans — in order to be able to disparage it all the more as "impartial."

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