t to Christianity and the Church. Fully realizing that
adulteration of any part of the Christian doctrine was bound to infect
also the doctrine of faith and justification and thus endanger
salvation, they earnestly warned against, and opposed, every deviation
from the clear Word of God, no matter how insignificant it might appear.
They loved the truth more than external peace, more even than their own
lives. Hence they found it impossible to be silent, apathetic, and
complacent spectators while the Philippists and others denied, attacked,
and corrupted the truth taught by Luther from the Word of God.

Accordingly, since the Leipzig Interim involved and maintained doctrines
and principles subversive of genuine Lutheranism and was prepared,
introduced, and defended by the very men who were regarded as pillars of
the Lutheran Church, it was evident from the outset that this document
must of necessity precipitate most serious internal troubles. From the
moment the Wittenbergers cast the Interim as a firebrand into the
Church, a domestic warfare was unavoidable,--if indeed any true
disciples of Luther still remained in the Church of which he, and not
Melanchthon, was the founder. While the Augsburg Interim resulted in an
external theological warfare of the Lutherans against the Romanists,
the Leipzig Interim added a most serious domestic conflict, which
conscientious Lutherans could not evade, though it well-nigh brought our
Church to the brink of destruction. For now the issue was not merely how
to resist the Pope and the Romanists, but, how to purge our own Church
from the Interimists and their pernicious principles. And as long as the
advocates of the Interim or of other aberrations from the old Lutheran
moorings refused to abandon their errors, and nevertheless insisted on
remaining in the Church, there was no real unity in the truth. Hence
there could also be no true peace and brotherly harmony among the
Lutherans. And the way to settle these differences was not indifferently
to ignore them, nor unionistically to compromise them by adopting
ambiguous formulas, but patiently to discuss the doctrines at issue
until an agreement in the truth was reached, which finally was done by
means of the Formula of Concord.

True, these controversies endangered the very existence of our Church.
But the real cause of this was not the resistance which the loyal
Lutherans offered to the errorists, nor even the unseemly severity by
which