# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S330
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

330 A Brotherly Greeting from Germany, by Fr. Brunn.

there must also be Christians, there the church must be, there too are genuine Christian works being done by such a crowd, even if only a few men among them were doing it in true faith. Thus the rights of the spiritual priesthood are exercised by every visible church or congregation — not as though the crude, unconverted mass, as is falsely shouted and complained, were thereby made the actual lord and possessor of these rights, but only because it is the organ or intermediate member through which the indwelling Spirit, the true and proper church, carries out its priestly works. — Only along this path can I conceive of a right government of the church, without falling either into the hand of a pope or into the horror of a mob-rule in the church that dissolves all churchly order, provided that, within the visible church and congregation, the invisible church is recognized as acting, administering, and governing itself (whether immediately, or mediately through synods and authorized organs). Only then is a genuine exercise possible of the rights and duties that Christ has given to His church on earth, as we confess in the Catechism; and yet it is not the crude, unconverted mass to which any right or power in the church would be assigned, but only to the truly believing who are hidden within it.

So let us now hold fast to the confession of the hope that is in us, beloved brethren, and not waver amid the general apostasy and confusion of these last times. I can now regard it only as a special and praiseworthy providence of God that, precisely in America, the Lord has raised up a Synod of Missouri which, with such faithfulness and steadfastness as has been given to you by God's grace, has publicly raised the pure and full confession of the Lutheran church as a banner against all seduction into error, and has faithfully preserved and defended it up to now. This is of such immeasurably important and far-reaching significance precisely for America, since there not only does the English-Reformed sectarian spirit in general increasingly seek to seize sole dominion for itself and, as in a great current, sweep everything along with it, but also all the various spiritual tendencies which, unfortunately, are found nowadays even among Lutherans find in America the freest field for churchly development and formation: how important, how indispensably necessary it is, over against all this, to set the confession of the truth, in its whole full extent, in all its purity and integrity, in its unchangeable eternal validity, high upon the lampstand, so as thereby to establish the foundation and groundwork of a Lutheran church also in the vast lands of America — one which, amid the confusion of the sects and all the false, self-chosen paths that people walk in America, can stand firm for future times, spread abroad, and grow ever more completely to a holy temple in the Lord, in which many can dwell and become drunk with the rich goods of the Lord and of His house. — I am, therefore, so very far and completely removed from taking offense at your churchly struggles in America, and especially at