# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S194
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

194 Some Glosses on This Year's Sessions of the So-Called etc.

obedient, has much work and sacrifices its best time in its sessions to the
subjects of doctrine in general, and especially to the articles of the faith
that in recent times have again been called into question even by Lutherans;
so that the members of the synod may be bound ever more closely to one
another, may hold ever more firmly together in one mind and the same
judgment, and may also learn ever better to speak the same thing,
and so, in this dangerous time, watch ever more faithfully that no divisions
break in.

Of this urgent, adjuring exhortation of the holy apostle
the General Synod has no notion whatsoever. Not one of all the
intelligent gentlemen has ever read the passage, or if he has read it,
he has had ears and has not heard, or has supposed that it was not the holy
Lord God speaking to such wretched, sinful children of men walking in darkness,
who ought indeed to fall on their knees in reverence when God speaks
to them; but rather that some silly goose was hissing at them. And why should
such pious and learned gentlemen, gifted besides with so much love and Christian
feelings, have to answer for such hissing. "To speak the same thing?!"
— is that something even for such great American General Synodists!
"All of you alike to speak the same thing!" — just listen to that! Is that
not utterly dreadful! Does that not mean enslaving the spirits?! Is that
liberality?! Dead orthodoxy may well press for it, green German Old
Lutherans may well work toward it, Lutheran popery may well want to make
slaves of people; — but living Christianity, the new American
development of Lutheranism, the purest Lutheranism, which has the greatest
future, will naturally not let itself be told anything by so narrow a
spirit. What, after all, is the poor Holy Spirit against the great American
spirit! — It genuinely, shamefully annoys the G. Synod that the Holy
Spirit wants "the same speech, one mind, the same judgment"; that is
something so utterly unreasonable, so utterly dreadfully unscientific,
and, especially for freeborn Americans, so basely humiliating —
how can the Holy Spirit presume to want any such thing! — Dr. Harkey,
conscious of his lofty position, accordingly also takes the Holy Spirit, as a
schoolmaster takes a stupid boy by the ears, and teaches him mores [manners].
"He," says the D.D. (cf. Pittsburgh Gazette), "would not desire to reduce
all to the dead level of exact uniformity, he would not make all people
think exactly alike." To him the exhortation of the Holy Spirit toward "the
same speech, mind, and judgment" is nothing other than: to enforce a grand
system of slavery; to him it is "Roman tyranny." Because the Holy Spirit
knows only of "one faith," it naturally also wants, in all matters of faith,
perfect unity — both the outward "same speech" and also
the inward "one mind and the same judgment" — that is, precisely "exact
uniformity," the very thing the great spirit Harkey does not want. The holy
Spirit's earnest, holy endeavor is: to bring "all alike — πάντες [all] — all
people" to one mind and judgment. Dr. Harkey and his colleagues