# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S134
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

134 Excerpted Communications from This Year's Preface, etc.

The remaining of believing and church-minded people within the larger ecclesiastical communion can only be commanded and permitted so long as it serves its purpose, so long as it remains possible for them, fulfilling their calling, to be a salt of the earth. They can persevere in the communion of the Church only so long as, on the whole, the principle that animates them remains the ruling one within it, and exercises an educative or at least a restraining and containing power over those estranged from it. Should the prince of this world succeed in carrying out his plan, already clearly discernible now; should the Church be brought under the rule of majorities estranged from her spirit, and this rule even be formally sanctioned through the introduction of a democratic church constitution; should the masses be set in motion as soon as it is a matter of removing bad, or introducing good, ecclesiastical orders or books — as we see just now in a sad example in Baden, where, dreadful to say, "the whole people from every quarter" rises up against the summons issued by the church government: "come, let us kneel and fall down before the Lord who made us"; should the Union be carried further in the sense that the validity of the church's confession is formally assailed; should Caesaropapism, that dangerous evil, attain to dominance; should the thought ever be entertained of putting, by decree, a Prussian, Saxon-Gotha, or similar religion in the place of "God's Word and Luther's teaching"; should such mischief break in not merely temporarily, as it did in various places in the year 1848, but attain a lasting existence — then we shall know what we have to do and where we stand. But now the time for that has by no means come; now the activity for the kingdom of God within the existing Church is still decidedly the most blessed; now it is not yet the moment, in order to be able to withstand pressure from outside, to unite the church-minded into a closed band. Now everyone must defend his post to the utmost, and, should anyone try to put him out of doors, hold fast to every point of purchase. Just as little as it is permissible to make concessions, just as little is it now the time to go voluntarily. That would now amount to desertion — to abandoning the flag under which our Lord and Savior has placed us, to willfully destroying the means by which we can bear fruit for him. At every breach that is made in the Christian state, we must place ourselves into the breach; the more gladly people would like to push us out of the Church, the more foolish it would be for us to help our opponents — who understand their own advantage well enough — to the fulfillment of their wish. We must make ourselves familiar with the thought that we may one day have to go, but we must not scatter our strength; we must either remain together or go together. But going together can only take place once the call of God comes far more clearly than is now the case. Incidentally, going over to the separated Lutherans also has this against it, that their concept of the Church is of such a kind that in it