# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S135
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The League of the Sister Churches. 135

"Lutheran does not lack the papal one. And both again each have a sister behind them: the Greek and the Reformed, to whom they are directed by God's providence. Not one of these four has yet fulfilled the mission to which the Lord has appointed it; each still has a precious work before it, outward and inward. For this reason no one so far has cause to change his church; it would in the end only amount to exchanging a thaler for a florin and a half, or for thirty silver groschen, and that may sometimes be more convenient in form and better suited to individual needs, but in the matter itself nothing is gained or lost, or at least as much is gained as is lost. Let everyone remain in the calling wherein he is called, not for the sake of a worldly indifference that knows no different talents at all, but for the sake of a Christian sobriety that seeks only to trade profitably with the talent it has received. The time will surely come when the Lord reunites all his servants once more into a single household. The household of the Irvingites is a strange enthusiasm, because apostles preside over it (the Pope is a better head!) [Insertion of the transcriber] — men who have never seen the Lord with their eyes nor touched him with their hands, and thus know nothing else to testify of him than we others do as well. But it is a sign of the times nonetheless. Even if the Lord does not now come again in the manner the Irvingites expect, he will surely come in any case in fearful judgments, which begin at the house of God and are completed upon the world; and this time of distress, in which the whole church, in doctrine, constitution, and worship, will be delivered into the hands of the world, will be what unites the church (not the one truth, not the one right faith) [Note of the transcriber]; and when the world, over the grave of the church (so things really do go entirely downhill with her; she becomes stone dead) [Note of the transcriber], tears itself to pieces, then the one believed dead will rise again (from nothing, of course, since her doctrine too has been delivered over to the world and, naturally, put to death by it) [Note of the transcriber] and will heal her own murderess, while the winding-sheets and grave-bands of her old quarrels will remain left behind in the grave." (For the devil will by then also be dead, or converted; the world is healed, and so likewise dead; and the flesh, too, will have to be dead, because it cannot possibly maintain itself without its two friends. — O sweet, refreshing, delightful thought of a future Capital-Universal-Union of peace and love!) [Note of the transcriber.]

To write something against such a thing can really provoke one to anger, even when one had otherwise not thought of writing at all, and would gladly leave it to someone better qualified. One thinks that such ideas, or such people—