# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S137
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The League of the Sister Churches. 137

—amount to exchanging a thaler for a florin and a half, or for thirty silver groschen." Does that not mean making God's Word and man's ordinance, truth and lies, Christ and Belial, equal to one another? Keep, if you like, the title of an "evangelical." In your heart you are "Catholic" all the same; by which I mean, a subject and vassal of the Pope. Such people are exactly what he needs. For the papal art of governing no longer proceeds nowadays by fire and sword (for that the money is lacking in the state treasury, for that the emperors and kings and dukes are lacking as adjutants, jailers, and executioners), but rather by sympathizing evangelical brothers and friends, who then also write sympathetic writings out into the world with sympathetic inks. Beware of such false brothers, dear Lutheran Christian, as of the devil himself. For here he reveals his finest, highest, and last art. If he loses here, then his minister at Rome receives yet another mortal wound. But if you follow his sympathetic writers, then it is he who deals you the mortal wound. As it happens, the victory belongs to the Lord and to his church, which is not antichristian but Christian, and therefore lives in Christ's Word, and fights with this Word as the true weapon and armor. But you — how do you stand toward this church, and within this church? —

But to continue. The author of the conclusion goes on: "or one may equally say the reverse: to the evangelical church there also belongs the Catholic." — That, to be sure, one may also say, depending on how one takes it. If you call the heaps of rye and wheat lying here and there "grain," then you may well say: this heap of rye also belongs to the grain. But if you make a distinction between a heap of rye kernels and a heap of thistle seeds, and for that reason separate the one from the other, then you can never say: the thistle seeds too belong to the grain. Application: whatever believes, lives, and is alive evangelically within the Catholic church does indeed belong to the evangelical church — not in name, but in fact. But the Catholic church, as it presents itself as a separate church with its own particular confession and its own particular doctrines — and that is the only way I can grasp it — stands opposed to the Gospel, as surely as black stands opposed to white. She feeds her children with thorns and thistles. Among these, to be sure, a few grains of wheat are mixed in. But they are mixed in only for this purpose, that the thorns and thistles may go down into the body all the more easily. A lie mixed with a few grains of truth is precisely the most dangerous poison.

The chain of conclusions continues further still. The love-affair presents itself yet more intimately. It says: "The Roman Catholic church is a sister of the Wittenberg-Catholic church." — Sisters have the same father. Who is the father of the Roman Catholic church? Let us have Luther himself say it, in his writing: "The papacy founded by the devil." Here too, of course, we mean only the church as it presents itself in its confession. For to deal with different churches otherwise than on the basis of their confessions is fable-making, and leads to fable-making. It is by the confession that we must grasp the churches. And on that basis we speak plainly about the fatherhood of the one church, which never