# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S111
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Sacramental Conception of Confirmation. 111

they may convince themselves of where one arrives when, too proud to return in simplicity to our faithful teaching fathers, one strikes out on one's own new paths and has once, in the doctrine of the office, gone over to the Roman side.

"Only the pastor," so it is said in an essay of the Vilmar journal bearing the title, "'On the Proper Estimation of Lutheran Confirmation Instruction,'" only the pastor, not an interim candidate or a temporary pastoral assistant, is to give confirmation instruction. For although it happens often enough that, say, a younger man may give the instruction in question, as a substitute, with greater liveliness, with more learning, perhaps even with more faith, yet "in ordination the pastor alone has been granted the fullness of the gifts of grace that are needed to bring the baptized Christian to the order of the life comprised in the Word and the holy sacraments, and to preserve him in it." Now, to be sure, everything becomes perfectly plain and clear. We need only restore to ordination, as "an express institution of the Lord," the significance falsely withheld from it, in order to understand at once how only the ordained officeholders "can make the confirmands worthy guests of the Holy Supper through teaching and instruction, through example in life, and through the laying on of hands." — — — But it seems to us incomprehensible how one can pass over, with a mere remark, precisely that which forms the nerve of the proof: that everything scriptural belongs to the doctrine of the evangelical church, and that ordination, as an express institution of the Lord, is indeed scriptural; or even appeal, provisionally, to the official experience of all those who sense and recognize what the Lord in this latter time demands of the true church. Does one perhaps dare to prove that all those present-day ministers of the Word who have not had, and do not have, this "official experience," who "sense and recognize" nothing of it, that they, "according to the measure of grace bestowed upon them in ordination," are to "make" the confirmands, among other things also "through the laying on of hands," into worthy guests of the Holy Supper — does one dare, in view of the cloud of evangelical witnesses since the beginning of the Reformation who experienced nothing of all this and held nothing of it, to assert that these men did not know, or do not know, "what the Lord demands of his servants"? Or does the matter already stand so well with the scriptural proof for the "express institution" of ordination by the Lord, and for the bestowal, accomplished in it, of that fullness of gifts of grace by virtue of which the pastor alone can confirm, that one need only point to it as to something known and established, and thus be permitted to slip past the resulting contradiction with the doctrine of the church with the cheap remark that everything scriptural belongs, for that very reason, to the doctrine of the evangelical church? — — — Meanwhile, we do indeed find, in the first number of the second volume of those "Blätter," a more detailed discussion of the Con-