# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S195
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Glosses on This Year's Sessions of the So-Called etc. 195

(who have accepted Harkey's speech) set themselves against the Holy Spirit.
Their principle is: not to make all people think exactly alike. From this
it is clear that the "Lutheran" G. Synod would, if it only could, tear out
and destroy this passage of Holy Scripture; that it would, if it only
could, summon the Holy Spirit and punish him for his unintelligible
speech, and for his partisanship with the narrow-minded Old Lutherans.
From this it is clear that they hate this word of the Holy Spirit — indeed, that they
hate the Holy Spirit altogether; and it cannot be otherwise, for the
actual driving spirit of the G. Synod is the spirit of union, but that
is the spirit of the devil, which is against Christ and his Spirit. The
Holy Spirit wills the salvation of mankind, and therefore, as the means, "one
faith;" the spirit of union wills the damnation of mankind, and therefore
hates "the one faith," persecutes "the one faith,"
reviles it as a miserable "dead level;" instead of "faith"
it wants opinions, views, delusion, Christian feelings — and indeed different
opinions, views, a "partition," instead of "one"
faith, but a "union in partition," that is, a horrid unionistic
mishmash of faiths. And then this spirit boasts to the world: "such
union gives strength," because, being naturally the spirit of lies, it will not come
out with its actual meaning; otherwise it would have said what it means and
wants and strives for, would have spoken plainly: such union gives money. —
Ah, such a poor freeborn American Doctor of Divinity wants so freely, so
independently to stand, to develop American Lutheranism on his own account,
and yet can do nothing more than warm up for his worthy colleagues an old,
threadbare German unionist cliché. Many years ago
it was once fashionable in Berlin to hold forth in unionistic scientific
twaddle about "unity in diversity" — Harkey's version of it: "union
in partition" — and many a green student was at first befogged by it,
until he soon saw through the sham union-swindle. Holy
Scripture indeed speaks of a unity of the manifold "gifts," but never
of a unity of the manifold "faiths." That is exactly the deceitful
trick of the false spirit of union, secretly to confuse the two with one another.
— — —

What blindness holds the members of the G. Synod captive is made
quite plain also by the fact that, when pressed in earnest to cite even
a single word of God on which they could ground their synodal practice,
especially their disgraceful mixing of faiths, they
bring forward passages that positively demolish their whole position. Thus a
G. Synodist cited Ephesians 4:3 to me: "be diligent to keep the unity
of the Spirit in the bond of peace." What is one to say to that?
One does not trust one's own ears. For there it says: "unity of the Spirit,"
not unity in "humbug." Unity in the hypocritical assumption of a
"Lutheran" name amid inner spiritual disunity and division.
The G. Synod does indeed do just the opposite of what the Holy