# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S247
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

New Literature. 247

Peace!” they cry, where there is no peace. In wartime it is no time to celebrate festivals of peace or to make sentimental speeches about the absence of peace. It is better first to win peace through resolute and courageous struggle. Oh, that someone would give us true peace, union in the truth! Such peace, such union, for which our whole soul thirsts, we would purchase at any moment with our blood, if that were possible. May the Lord, who is our peace and who alone can accomplish it, help His poor Church toward this goal through all strife and struggle! —

New Literature.

The Inner Course of German Protestantism since the Middle of the Previous Century, by Dr. Karl Friedr. August Kahnis, Full Professor of Theology at the University of Leipzig. Leipzig, published by Dörffling and Francke. 1854. Octavo. 262 pages.

Now that we have finally found time in recent days to read this work at our leisure, we cannot close it without most earnestly recommending it to our esteemed local fellow ministers and to inquiring, educated laymen. The work presents the development of German Protestant theology during a period whose treatment in all the general works of church history known to us today leaves much to be desired. And yet, in order to understand the present, it is so important to become familiar also with the events in the scholarly world, especially the theological world, during precisely the past hundred years. The more difficult the task Kahnis has set himself in the present work—namely, “not to offer a history of the Protestant Church since the middle of the previous century, but to provide, for the understanding of the present-day Church, an overview of the currents that have moved Protestantism since that time”—the more gratifying it is that a theologian such as Kahnis, to whom even Stier felt compelled to apply the designation “thinker,” has undertaken to solve this task. The book does, to be sure, presuppose knowledge of the external development of Protestantism during the period treated, but it is by no means therefore a wearisome chain of merely ingenious reasonings; rather, it is nevertheless a richly stocked treasury of the most interesting historical material. The work is made especially instructive and engaging by the method followed in it: allowing the various currents to characterize themselves in the words of their representatives. The usually few words from the work of an influential writer that Kahnis quotes for this purpose are, by virtue of their apt selection, generally sparks by which the man and his current at once appear to the reader in a bright light.