The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

powerful within our borders, and that it is coming to be in every way so
vast an ecclesiastical power in the land; while it ought to be the prayer of
all, that this power may be so exercised more and more as to be a principle
of wholesome redemption and preservation for the universal Protestantism
of the nation.
Mission of the Lutheran Church in America.
That such a Church has a mission of extraordinary importance in this
land in which exist such dangerous tendencies to sectarianism and
radicalism, and whose greatest need is the cultivation of historical feeling,
under the restraint of a wholesome conservatism, requires no argument.
The Lutheran Church daily becomes better known through the translations
of her literature, though most of them are very bad ones; but her work of
good cannot be consummated till she renders her genius and life
themselves into the idiom of the new nationality into which she is here
passing. Protestant to the very heart, yet thoroughly historical, happy in her
liberty of adaptation in things indifferent, while she is fast anchored in the
great doctrine of justification by faith and the doctrines which cluster
around it, popular in her principles of church government, which, without
running into Independency, accord such large powers to the congregation,
principles free from the harshness of some systems, the hierarchical,
aristocratic, autocratic tendencies of others, the fanaticism and looseness of
others, possessing liturgical life without liturgical bondage, great in a
history in which all mankind are interested, her children believe that she
bears special treasures-of good to bless the land of her adoption.
Immovable in her faith and the life it generates, our Church, the more
heartily and intelligently, on this very- account, accepts the great fact that
God has established her in this western world under circumstances greatly
different from those in which her past life has been nurtured. New forms of
duty, new types of thought, new necessities of adaptation, are here to tax
all her strength, and to test how far she is able to maintain her vital power
under necessary changes of form. The Lutheranism of this country cannot
be a mere feeble echo of any nationalized species of Lutheranism. It
cannot, in the