# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S321 # AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration) Doctrine and Defense. Volume VIII. November 1862. No. 11. (Submitted.) A Brotherly Greeting from Germany by Fr. Brunn, Evangelical Lutheran pastor at Steeden in Nassau. To the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States: Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Beloved Brethren! Through the establishment here of the Proseminary for your theological seminaries in St. Louis, I have entered into so close a connection and fellowship with you that I feel compelled, by a word of brotherly greeting to you, to give public testimony and expression to this fellowship. — I praise the gracious and wonderful ways of God that have led me into fellowship with you. For what binds me to you is not merely the general bonds of faith, by which we know ourselves united with all the members of the body of Christ on earth; nor is it merely the mission work for North America now begun, which leads me to you — no, the latter is rather itself only the fruit and consequence of my inward fellowship with you in spirit and faith. That it is the Synod of Missouri which, before all others in this present age, has found the way back to the pure and unadulterated doctrine of Luther and the fathers, as it is laid down, according to the Word of God, in the confession of our Lutheran church; that your Synod has publicly and resolutely confessed and defended this pure doctrine of the divine Word — by the grace of God bestowed upon it — amid the ecclesiastical and theological confusions and controversies that so manifoldly fill and tear even the Lutheran church at present; that the grace of God has also, after many struggles and vain searchings, helped even me, unworthy as I am, here and there to the pure and full light of biblical and churchly truth, even as I have learned and recognized this same truth together with your Synod at the feet of the old fathers and teachers of our church, chiefly Luther — this it is that unites and binds me so deeply and inwardly to you, to the praise and glory of the Lord who has let such grace befall my soul; this it is that has driven me here to help and to labor in 21