# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S374
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

374 The Evangelical Supreme Church Council and the Evangelical Church Gazette.

-such the flock follows better than it follows any drivers." Indeed, if one does not follow the admonition, "become examples to the flock," if one therefore does not have the free sympathies of the Church on one's side, the temptation lies very near to want to enforce obedience for one's decrees by compulsion. That is the genesis of the terrible evil of ecclesiastical bureaucracy, from whose return may God in his grace preserve us!

What, then, is the ultimate ground of the strict distinction, which Scripture and the Church following it establish, between the leadership of the Church and civil authority? It lies in the word which he, to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth, spoke shortly before his departure: "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." The kingship which Christ ascribes to himself before Pilate, John 18:37, is no mere name, no empty shadow, but the most real thing there is. He lives and reigns in his Church for eternity. Wherever only two or three are gathered in it in his name, there he is in their midst. He walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands, by which the congregations on earth are represented, ever ready to teach, to admonish, to punish, to help. He stands at the door and knocks. If anyone hears his voice and opens the door, he goes in to him and holds supper with him. But against the apostates he wages war with the sword of his mouth, and upon the lukewarm and the dead he comes like a thief. He indeed has in his Church instruments and servants of his lordship, but no vicars, no ones who may place themselves between him and his subjects, none whom one must believe on their word alone, whom one must obey without further ado. It is said of Stephen, when he was tried before the high council and its members gnashed their teeth at him: "But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said: Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God." Stephen represents the Church here; it is Church only insofar as it is the true union of believers with the Lord present in their midst, insofar as it walks in his footsteps in this respect. If the eyes of some ecclesiastical authority were ever opened so that it saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God, then the self-designation as "authority" would die on its lips.

If, in accord with the Right Reverend Evangelical Supreme Church Council, the Minister of Public Worship also, in the session of the House of Deputies of April 8, spoke, with reference to the Evangelical Church Gazette, of that "anti-revolutionary, genuinely revolutionary fanaticism," and if in a later session he accused us of "rebellion against the ordained authorities in Church and State,"*) then such harsh reproaches should surely never

*) The remark, "This conduct I believe I must chastise," we merely note. It shows how near the danger lies of overstepping the mark when one sees one's support at the gate, when one is certain of having the majority on one's side. Against