# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S136
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

136 The League of the Sister Churches.

surely ought not to get away without a taste of the rod, especially when they make such a display of public spirit, and by that very means — binding the bond of love around everything that has breath, even if not exactly Christian breath — threaten to swallow up all true love entirely. It could well happen even here in America that one person or another might grow warm when such warm love breathes upon him, and in the end forget that hell, too, is warm, and that the devil likes, especially nowadays, to disguise himself as a warm angel of light. We may also learn afresh from this tidy conclusion how much foolish salt is being peddled that cannot really season anything, and therefore prize and purchase all the more the genuine salt of our own precious Lutheran church. I would rather save my life safely amid a sea storm on the bare rock of my chaste Lutheran church, than be wretchedly drowned aboard the leaking ship of a false church, in the bed of a gaudily adorned harlot, amid her flatteries and caresses.

So far, then, has one already come, over yonder across the sea, in kinship with the Catholic church, that one is permitted to write such sentences out into the world in a highly respected evangelical church paper: "To the Catholic church there also belongs the evangelical; or one may equally say the reverse: to the evangelical there also belongs the Catholic. The Roman Catholic church is a sister of the Wittenberg-Catholic church; the papal cannot do without the Lutheran, nor the Lutheran without the papal." That hangs together. First sweet, then somewhat sour, then thoroughly sour and bitter as gall. First a beautiful garment on the body, then something dirty, then rags, and underneath the horse's hoof peeks out. The last sentence brings clarity. It settles the all-the-world union once and for all. And not only that. It also hands over the Lutheran church to the papal one as spoil, hide and hair. The Lutherans must have the Pope. Otherwise something is missing. The sick man lacks his physician, the ship its helmsman, the constitution its head. For there must be one flock under one shepherd, who can be no one else than the Pope. So the histories demand — even if the Bible's history does not.

The first sentence, "to the Catholic church there also belongs the evangelical," can still be tolerated. Nota bene, if one understands it correctly. One then takes "Catholic" in a good sense, and thinks thereby of all people in all places who hold fast to Christ's gospel and grace as their one and only anchor of hope. In that sense, to be sure, the evangelical church too belongs to the Catholic church, insofar as it still clings, with heart and mouth, to the word and work of grace in Christ, and is not on the road to the high priests to betray Christ and his word for thirty pieces of silver. The author of the conclusion, then, does not belong to this evangelical church. He says: no one so far has had cause to change his church. In plain German that means: it should never occur to any Roman Catholic Christian to become a member of the Lutheran church. Why not? Listen! "It would in the end only amount to—