# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S216
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

216 A Fox Too.

are, to recognize. For first of all, he identifies himself with Pastor Mann as the author of what was said about “Lehre und Wehre” in the “Book Review” section of the March issue of this year’s “deutscher Kirchenfreund,” not only by generally entering the lists on behalf of Pastor Mann and defending the views expressed in the article just mentioned, but also by his exclamation: Juvat socios habuisse malorum (the “Kirchenfreund” is pleased that the censure expressed in “Lehre und Wehre” also strikes other “gentlemen”); and by his knowledge of “what Pastor Mann probably would not have done in particular, but what did strike him,” he at least presents himself as the same moral person. Secondly, he proceeds as follows. He says, “The fact that Pastor Mann did not answer Professor Walther’s slanderous diatribe in the ‘Kirchenfreund’ itself is the sharpest judgment upon this literary outburst of baseness.” Pastor Mann, or someone of like mind acting on his behalf, answers it instead in the Herold. Now anyone who reads the two articles in question in “Lehre und Wehre” and in the “Lutherischer Herold” will not find that the former uses stronger expressions than the latter; for while in the former Pastor Mann is called a fox and is addressed (we believe in righteous indignation) with the words, “For shame upon the ‘Lutheran’ preacher who supplies the pope with weapons against Luther’s heart!” the latter returns the word fox and speaks of “a slanderous diatribe.” Nevertheless, the “Lutheran Too” calls the former article an outburst of baseness. From this, then, the following conclusion arises: either Master Fox thought, you must answer “baseness” with “baseness”; but since your Kirchenfreund is too sensible to do so, lest it be defiled, see whether you cannot use the Herold for that purpose—and if he thought so, then he outwitted the Herold as surely as the fox once outwitted the raven—or he thought, since nothing can be brought forward against the article in “Lehre und Wehre,” you must make a great stir and say that the failure to answer the slanderous article in the “Kirchenfreund” itself is the sharpest judgment upon it, for then surely many a person who did not invent gunpowder and who regards the “Kirchenfreund” as an oracle will say: yes, indeed, that is the sharpest judgment. One feels somewhat inclined toward the latter opinion when, after returning the word “fox,” one hears the author say: “But joking aside!”

Furthermore, he says that the same words which he, “the Kirchenfreund,” quoted from Luther’s Table Talk were also cited in an essay in the Lutheran Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche, edited by Thomasius and Hoffmann, year 1854. By this he seeks to ward off the accusation made against him that he attacks Luther, puts him in the pillory, and so forth; and this is indeed not unworthy of a fox, insofar as at first glance it seems that there can be no harm at all in relating something about Luther which a journal as friendly toward Luther as the one cited also