# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How and Why Dr. Seyffarth Is So Angry. 57

6:8–9; Col. 4:1, in which it is shown how masters are to conduct themselves toward their servants. We recall here also the passages in which Holy Scripture speaks of man-stealing, or of the selling of a free person into slavery, and of the punishment for it: 1 Tim. 1:10; Exod. 21:16; Deut. 24:7. To work now, by legal means and with every possible resource, toward having those divine rules observed by masters, and toward having their observance also overseen by the authorities — that we therefore hold to be the true task of every Christian who lives in a state in which slavery is recognized by law. Such endeavors — in which one would indeed let the bondage itself stand, but would take care that this political and economic relation be given a Christian, just shape befitting love — would redound to God's honor and to man's salvation, and would therefore be worthy of a true Christian's most ardent zeal. They would bring in their train not rebellion, war, and bloodshed, but rest, peace, and welfare, and would transfigure both the master's and the servant's relation into a blessed school of faith and love, of humility, of patience, and of all the other Christian virtues.”

None of the many enemies of the Missouri Synod — from the Methodists and the Albright people all the way to the General Synod men, the Ohio people, and Grabau — has dared to write even a single word against the essay of Prof. Walther, for they would either have had to fight against God's manifest truth, or would have had to take refuge in sophistries, deceitful trumped-up consequences, distortion of the actual point at issue, or even malicious insinuation of political motives. That, however, none of them wanted; they would have been ashamed of it. Only Seyffarth's wounded vanity was capable of writing the following, in truly “shameless impudence”: “It is the duty of the Synod (namely, the Missouri Synod) to remove him (Prof. Walther) from the editorship of both synodical papers. A man who makes man-stealing and man-robbery into a ‘divine order,’ who declares the legal exclusion of the slave from churchly and civil rights, the forcible separation of marriages, the anti-Christian treatment of the enslaved to be no sin; who continually contributes to the preservation and spread of an institution that produces the thousandfold murder of helpless human beings, fornication, incest, robbery, perjury, rebellion against the authority instituted by God; a man who excludes and damns from the Lutheran, and thus also the Christian, Church everyone who does not think and act likewise; a man who turns the war against rebels into a struggle against God's commandments and incites resistance against the authorities; a man who, through his slanders, insults, and coarseness, has brought it about that in all the United States the word ‘Missourian’ means as much as a bad man; a man who the inspir—