We are surrounded [in America] by the children of those Churches, which claim an origin in the Reformation. We sincerely respect and love them; we fervently pray that they may be increased in every labor of love, and may be won more and more to add to that precious truth, which they set forth with such power, those no less precious doctrines which, in the midst of so wide an abandonment of the faith once delivered to the saints, God has, in our Confession, preserved to us.
But how shall we make ourselves worthy of their respect, and lift ourselves out of the sphere of that pitiful little sectarianism which is crawling continually over all that is churchly and stable? We must begin by knowing ourselves, and being true to that knowledge. Let us not, with our rich coffers, play the part of beggars, and ask favors where we have every ability to impart them. No Church can maintain her self-respect or inspire respect in others, which is afraid or ashamed of her own history, and which rears a dubious fabric on the ignorance of her ministry and of her members. Whatever flickerings of success may play around her, she will yet sink to rise no more, and worse than this, no honest man will lament her fall; for however such a moral dishonesty may be smoothed over, every reflecting man sees that such a Church is an organized lie, with ministry, congregations, churches, and societies united to sustain a lie. -- Krauth, *Conservative Reformation* p. 208, 209
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"...No Church can maintain her self-respect or inspire respect in others, which is afraid or ashamed of her own history, and which rears a dubious fabric on the ignorance of her ministry and of her members. Whatever flickerings of success may play around her, she will yet sink to rise no more, and worse than this, no honest man will lament her fall;..." --Krauth
Amen.
Even more sadly, a joke to the unbelieving, for who would imagine a church which persecutes its faithful Pastors while rewarding the worldly "entertainers"?
Helen
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