# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S60
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

60 Does the Doctrine of a General Invisible Church Require Union?

take the peace from the earth. If we speak gently, we are not believed.
Faithfulness to the truth is called fanaticism; the language of love,
hypocrisy. What then? If only our own conscience bears us witness that
our speaking and doing spring from the truth and are not against love, we
may confidently commit to God what reception he will prepare for it on
its way among men."

Now Luthardt lets an extract from the Darmstadt General Church Gazette
follow, and then continues as follows:

"Now, this at least is not spoken unclearly: this much credit at
least must be granted to this expectoration. And one has not proceeded
very delicately with the boy Absalom. The epithets have been heaped up in
such a way — I have come to their aid by underlining them — that so many
arrows driven into the heart might well be enough to kill. But joking
aside, such polemic is in truth distressing. If the reporter means to
provoke us by it, to make us also violent or bitter or unjust: truly,
that shall not succeed with him. But I shall not attempt to refute him
either. Let our article defend itself. Whoever will take the trouble to
read it will be able to judge, without commentary, on which side truth
and love lie, and on which they do not. But to put the reporter to shame
— which would be the only thing I could wish — I dare not hope for. Let
him see to it himself how he will answer before God for his sin against
the eighth commandment. But whoever loves the truth will, I hope, hear
its voice well enough out of our words. If such polemic were the only
intercourse between the different camps of Christendom, then one might
well wish, weary of the strife-filled life on earth, to bow one's head to
rest sooner rather than later, so as to enter into the land of peace.
Thank God that there is still another kind of intercourse!

Next to the joyful certainty of the sin-forgiving grace of God, there
is no greater joy on earth than that which grows out of the fellowship of
believers. Whoever loves the Lord Jesus can have nothing dearer befall him
than to meet him in his saints, in whom he has taken form in manifold
ways. Thank God that we may know and experience that he has his children
in all churches and among all tongues! We will gladly confess that the
strife of the churches sometimes makes us forget this too much, and lets
love grow cold. Who does not experience that? We must all strive against
it, certainly not least those who boast of love above others. May the
Lord keep all our eyes ever open, "that we may know his way on earth,"
and our hearts wide, to greet him in all the forms in which he meets us.
There is a congregation of believers on earth, which is the people of
Christians here and there, the bride of the Lord, the beloved, which is
the one true church within all the churches; there is a fellowship of
faith and of love, which in the Lord also binds together those who upon