# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The League of the Sister Churches. 141

—hands of the world will be delivered over, will unite the church." Concerning the father of the house, the pope, who he might be, what his name might be, whether his name should be Pius the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, or Twelfth, here too nothing is said. But the pope is nevertheless hinted at a little, both in our conclusion and in what precedes the conclusion. In the conclusion it says, as we know: "the Lutheran church cannot do without the papal one." And before the conclusion: "It (the constitution) is the weakest point of the evangelical church, the strongest of the Catholic. Here division, there unity — that is precisely how the difference presents itself to Catholic eyes, and also to so many sorrowful, longing evangelical eyes." — May one not sufficiently conclude from this under what paternal head this new Catholic-Lutheran, and Catholic-Reformed union-pyramid is to be governed?

It is a pitiful thing to have to watch how, by such false flirtations and rotten peacemaking, the armor, the weaponry of Israel is mocked, and the anchor of truth is betrayed and handed over to the web of the lie. The Word alone prevails, and nothing else; and whatever holds fast to the Word prevails along with it. Here is Immanuel. Where do we Lutherans stand? And where do you stand, Evangelical? We know that we stand upon the Word. Therefore we will not yield so much as a finger's breadth. It is not we who must submit, but rather they who must submit — those who have not until now submitted themselves to the Word. For in the Word is the voice of the Lord. His sheep hear this voice, and not the voice of a stranger. They are to submit themselves to us. For this we pray, toward this we labor, for this we fight, for this we suffer. That is love. So the world stands, and sees the light upon the mountain, and may thereby become light itself. Not otherwise. Woe to us, if we lower the torch of light which the Lord has placed in our hand to be held faithfully and manfully aloft. Woe to us, if we draw as near to the Catholic church as the author of the conclusion does. He does indeed say, in what precedes: "Whoever draws nearer to the Catholic church and to its members with a friendly disposition can have remarkable experiences there." But we fear that such remarkable things conceal and gloss over the most remarkable thing of all — a thing that must never be concealed or glossed over — namely, that the Pope is the Antichrist, and the papal church the antichristian one, because it has blasphemously robbed the one Lord and Savior of his merit, his adornment, his honor, his glory and his renown — his perfect, fully valid righteousness, so dearly won at the cost of his own blood, which according to Scripture is his alone, and which alone, according to Scripture, saves those who possess it by faith — and has set up in its place, against Scripture, a stinking, filthy, worm-eaten righteousness of man, and has raised the Pope to the throne as steward of that righteousness — for which very reason he is, and must be, the Antichrist.