# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S338
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

338	From the General Synod.

we, in this or any other matter, should give way to a portion of the synod.

The committee's report on the proposed establishment of a German professorship at the institution in Springfield was adopted almost unanimously; so that you may see, gentlemen editors, that when professors from different climates — of different dialects and different theological views — can bring about the prosperity of an institution, then the Illinois State University must succeed!

The foregoing document shows with what sorry means people in the General Synod seek to preserve unity. The so-called "confessional believers" are, to please our Wisconsin friends, orthodox and stand on the unaltered Augsburg Confession; toward the "Americans with the spirit of '76" they are liberal and push the confession aside, in order to extend the hand of brotherhood to them on the general playground of freedom of conscience and of speech. They confess the Augsburg Confession and deny it in the same breath, as expediency demands. For what are those "lesser points" in which they consider no agreement necessary for the sake of church fellowship? They are the doctrines of baptism, of the Lord's Supper, of the election of grace, of the Sabbath — all matters of the highest importance for faith and life, in which one cannot teach falsely without at the same time teaching falsely in every other article. Our fathers — the very ones who made confession at Augsburg — held these to be so weighty that on their account in particular they refused church fellowship to the followers of Zwingli and Calvin, and in the Augsburg Confession they expressly reject the opposing doctrines. The "confessional believers" of the Northern Illinois Synod, on the other hand, grant "the most complete and fullest freedom" in doctrine, and consider errors in the matters named too insignificant for the "brotherly harmony" in the General Synod to be disturbed by them. Do they not thereby make their own claim, that they stand on the unaltered Augsburg Confession, a lie? Here the liberals in the General Synod certainly appear far more respectable. These are at least honest and say outright that they will have nothing to do with Lutheran faith and confession, and so confess that they bear the name of Luther only for traditional reasons. One knows, at any rate, where one stands with them. For those members of the Northern Illinois Synod who wish to pass for "confessional" will, after such proceedings, no longer in earnest expect us to take them for that.

Who could believe that Mühlhäuser and his synod do not notice what game is being played with them? Must one not rather think of the proverb: birds of a feather flock together? Were they sincere, their conscience would have to smite them for putting up with such a compromise; indeed, they would recoil in horror at the formation of the