# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The New Newspaper on Us Poor Missourians. 49

through partisan balloting, nor do the bearers of the church's teaching office — as though mediating priests between Christ and his congregation — by virtue of any hierarchical pronouncements, hold among us, especially in matters of doctrine and discipline that touch faith and conscience, the government of the church; but the divine Word alone, as the confession of the church sets it forth and expounds it to us. To secure for the divine Word its sovereign and supreme judicial authority and sole validity in the heart, understanding, and conscience of our parishioners — on this we spend all diligence and effort, even in the assemblies of the representative congregations, "with all patience and teaching." And what is the fruit of this labor? A great many things, which bear in no way an "Americanized" cast, but a truly Christian, and therefore also Lutheran, character, and which the state-church or Romanizing preachers of the Lutheran Church of Germany can scarcely show as such in their congregations.

In the first place, namely, there prevails on average in our congregations, especially the older ones, the right Christian relationship between teachers and hearers, between the shepherds and the flocks of Christ committed to them. Just as the former regard and treat the latter at once as their parishioners and their brothers in Christ, so in turn the members of the congregation acknowledge their pastors as ambassadors in Christ's stead, as stewards over God's mysteries, as messengers of the LORD of Hosts, and yet at the same time also as their brothers in Christ, and conduct themselves toward them with as much reverence as familiarity; and neither a servile fear, as before churchly lords with the pope's ban in the background, or the secular punitive arm of the territorial prince, nor a false, bourgeois-democratic leveling — not to say presumption — is the prevailing type among us.

In the second place, through the very work of the divine Word, partly from the pulpit and in catechism instruction, partly in the care of individual souls, we have on average in our congregations larger or smaller companies of earnest, thorough Christians, who walk in the fear of God, who prove their faith in Christ preeminently through the joyful confession of the mouth, even against Christ's enemies, and through works of brotherly and general love, and who, with their richer Christian knowledge and experience, in and outside the congregational assemblies, serve their weaker brothers and go before them with a godly example in the discharge of their churchly, civic, and domestic calling.

In the third place, matters stand in our congregations such that not only, as goes without saying, the weaker but sincere Christians, but also the hypocrites and secret enemies of Christ and his Word, nevertheless stand in the fear and discipline of the divine Word and do not openly rebel against it, whether singly or in throngs, and are also kept within salutary bounds by their reverence before those earnest and more mature Christians.

In the fourth place, this too is a fruit of the Word of God and its

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