# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1864_S368
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

368 Correspondence from Germany.

was debated purely on doctrine. Fifteen members of the assembly stood
on the Breslau side, five on ours; on that side Huschke, Nagel, and
Besser led the discussion, on ours Lohmann, Frischmuth, and I. But as
much as the honesty is to be acknowledged with which not only our
opponents let us come to speak and to bear witness to our faith, but
also, for their part, seemed only to be voicing what had become to them
a genuine conviction, just as deeply distressing and dispiriting to us
was the experience that formed the result of all our negotiations: that
the grave error in the doctrine of church and ministry had taken hold of
the spirit of our opponents so deeply and so completely that we
succeeded, in no way whatsoever, in breaking even the smallest gap in
the closed wall of their system; with admirable and alarming skill in
dialectic, Director Huschke in particular knew how to evade all our
arguments and slip away by side paths. The expression of the
Symbolical Books, "the true church," was misinterpreted to mean only
this: "the church rightly constituted," that is, the believers, who are
members of the church as they ought to be, which did not exclude that
unbelievers, too, are members of the body of Christ, only not proper
ones, as they ought to be. In this interpretation of the Symbolical
Books we could naturally not yield a finger's breadth; despite all loud
protest the opponents nevertheless did not give way, but rather claimed
the wording of the Symbolical Books for themselves with great
confidence, as they pretended, so that in the end nothing was left for
us but the declaration that we could not let ourselves be led astray in
our understanding of the Symbolical Books, but had to persist in it as
a simple conviction of conscience. We closed the negotiations with the
deeply humbling impression that our testimony of faith had remained
wholly fruitless, and that rather everything we had spoken had, as it
were, rebounded off an iron wall. We had hoped that some members of the
Breslau party would at least rise up against the harshest points of
Huschke's system and unite with us in a testimony against such claims,
in part unheard-of until now in the domain of our church. But in vain.
There are, to be sure, without doubt some who do not fully agree with
Huschke, but some do not sufficiently recognize the actual roots of the
false, or respectively the pure, doctrine in the points in question, so
as to arrive at an independent judgment; others are so entirely
overawed and dominated by Huschke's learning and dialectic that no one
dares even to open his mouth against it, to speak quite literally. — So
matters stand as of now; today the synod itself has been opened, and I
hope that within a few days the question of our separation from Breslau
will be decided. By the next mail packet I will send you word of it, as
I hope, before your synod in Fort Wayne adjourns. The prospect for the
better is slight. The Breslau party itself has done what we did not
think conceivably possible: they have submitted a motion to the synod
that it should, that is, adopt Huschke's doctrine of church and ministry
with the rejection of the