hand.

The Lutheran Confession regards the word of God as the means of grace.
The Sacraments also are means of grace, not _ex opere operato_, but
because of the word. They are the visible word, or the individualized
Gospel. Hence, it is correct to say that the word, in the Lutheran
system, is the means of grace. This is doubtless news to many of our
brethren of other faiths, who think of us only as extreme
sacramentarians, and have looked upon us for centuries as
Crypto-Romanists. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was only
by an accident that the emphasis of polemical discussion in the
sixteenth century was laid upon the sacramental question, where it never
belonged.

In her doctrine of the means of grace, the Lutheran Church differs _toto
coelo_ from Rome. It is not the Church which, through its authority and
its institutions, makes the means of grace effective; but it is through
the means of grace that the Church is created and made both a product
and an instrument of the Holy Ghost.

On this doctrine our church differs not only in theory but also in
practice from many of our Protestant brethren. In some of their original
confessional statements the Reformed churches declared that the Spirit
of God required no means of grace, since He worked immediately and
directly. They claimed that the corporeal could not carry the spiritual,
and that the finite could not be made the bearer of the infinite. Over
against these hyperspiritual views our Church believes that through the
word and the sacraments the Holy Ghost effectively offers to the sinner
the gifts of salvation.