# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S301
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence to Germany. 301

what deficiency in the exposition of the doctrine, and by what one-sided assertions toward our opponents, we might after all have aroused this concern, we must say, to the honor of God and for the furtherance of the truth, that our conscience bears us witness that we have never, knowingly and willfully, bent the truth or in any way distorted it even by a slanted, one-sided, unseemly presentation, but that even to this day our opponents have not been able truthfully to demonstrate this against us in any particular. To be sure, in combating the hierarchical antitheses that assert themselves here, we must again and again bear witness to the same truths, indeed give them special emphasis, but in doing so we do nothing but God's will and our duty, do only what in like cases the prophets, what Jesus and the apostles, what all faithful teachers, and especially Luther, have always done — what the latter, in the preface to his Small Catechism, made a duty for all faithful pastors, namely, to drive home with special diligence exactly that part of the doctrine which is especially needful. It is, of course, not the case with our opponents, as it is with you, that it is a loving concern lest we go too far to the other side in the heat of the conflict, when they keep crying out that we are becoming extreme in our emphasis on the rights of the general priesthood; rather, being unable to meet victoriously the truth held up before them, they heap this unfounded reproach upon us in order to divert attention from their pitiable defeat and to be able to keep asserting, again and again with a brazen forehead, their long-since-refuted error. Should you yourself become more and more entangled in similar struggles, you will soon come to know this from your own experience, and see that one must again and again call out to such stubborn opponents: you lay a sacrilegious hand on the sacred rights of Christians. But do not let your own view be clouded by the outcry of such people; rather, continue to free yourself from all the consequences, even the last, of the false doctrine of Church and Ministry. We are, indeed, only heartily grateful for every brotherly admonition made with the caution that we not go too far in the heat of the conflict. But if you, misled by mistaken presuppositions and unclear views, do more than this — if you again voice the misgiving that we may really already have gone too far in this matter and made ourselves guilty of a one-sided emphasis on the rights of the general spiritual priesthood as against other parts of the doctrine — and if, in doing so, you appeal in the first place to the inaugural sermon of the Rev. P. Beyer in Altenburg, it should indeed be easy for us to show, in part, how P. Beyer — even though, in keeping with his text, he had by no means set himself this as his task, nor do we have any occasion, for our congregations, who know and believe nothing else, to always preach the doctrine of the divine institution of the preaching office even where the text does not call for it — has nevertheless, in fact and repeatedly, said what you find missing, even if with