110. Endorsing Walther's Views on Christian Union.--In opposition to the unionistic tendencies of the Lutheran synods in the United States, especially those affiliated with the General Synod, Walther had maintained that church union dare not be advocated and effected at the expense of any doctrine clearly revealed in the Scripture. It was in complete agreement with this view that Krauth, in his address before the Pittsburgh Synod, October 1866, declared: "With her eternal principles, what shall be the future of our beloved Zion in this land? Shall it be conflict, division, weakness, or shall it be peace, unity, zeal, unfolding all her energies? It is unity. Every difficulty in her way, every barrier to her progress, proceeds from the lack of unity. But what is the unity of the Church? That question was answered three centuries ago by the Reformers, and fifteen centuries before that in the New Testament. True unity is oneness in faith, as taught in the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are one with the Church of the apostles because we hold its faith; one with the Church of the Reformers, alone because we hold its faith. Outward human forms are nothing; ecclesiastical government, so far as it is of man, is nothing; all things are nothing, if there be not this oneness of faith. With it begins, in its life continues, in its death ends, all true unity. There can be, there is, no true unity but in the faith.... The one token of this unity, that by which this internal thing is made visible, is one expression of faith, one 'form of sound words,' used in simple earnestness, and meaning the same to all who employ it.... You may agree to differ; but when men become earnest, difference in faith will lead first to fervent pleadings for the truth, and, if these be hopelessly unheeded, will lead to separation. All kinds of beliefs and unbeliefs may exist under the plea of toleration; but when the greatest love is thus professed, there is the least. Love resulting from faith is God's best gift. Love that grows out of opposition or indifference to faith, God abhors. There can be no true love where there is not also true hatred,--no love to truth without abhorrence of error.... In Christ we can alone find unity. Only when we meet in this center of all true unity will we have peace. And we can be in Christ only in a faith which accepts His every word in His own divine meaning, and shrinks with honor from the thought that, in the prostituted name of peace and love, we shall put upon one level the pure and heavenly sense of His Word and the artful corruption of that sense by the tradition of Rome or the vanity of carnal reason." (Spaeth, 2, 162 f.) With respect to the Missouri Synod Krauth wrote, April 7, 1876: "I have been saddened beyond expression by the bitterness displayed towards the Missourians. So far as they have helped us to see the great principles involved in this disputation [concerning the Four Points], they have been our