# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S1
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang II.               January 1856.               No. 1.

Preface to Volume 1856.

"Lehre und Wehre!" ["Doctrine and Defense!"] That is the watchword we have set before ourselves in publishing this journal, and by which we have let ourselves be guided. This watchword shall, so long as God grants us strength and opportunity for it, continue to guide us further.

We know quite well that in this we set our course against the current of the taste of the age. This taste does not so much want to be instructed as to be entertained. It speaks again with Pilate: "What is truth?" and laughs at such a one as a fool who dares to say that he has found the truth and brings it. The taste of the age wants to hear only of "views," and only "unassuming" thoughts, expressed moreover in fine form. Its own age shall be celebrated as the age of maturity and enlightenment, while the centuries lying behind it are smiled upon as an age of childish simplicity, darkness, and superstition. The propositions set up in former times as truths shall be assigned their place only in some compartment of historical presentation. Of men who always possessed the truth, of a church, there is to be no talk. But if the taste of the age will hear nothing of doctrine, it resists still more, of course, the defense of it. One wages war, it holds, over things that have reality — over land, money, honor, and the like — but to want to fight for the truth? — Folly! — Who would or should fight for a phantom, for a thing that no one possesses, that no one can conquer? Truth, the spirit of the age holds, is the riddle of a sphinx that has not yet found its Oedipus, and whatever of truth is to be found here below is, if not divided among the various principal religions, at least divided among the various parties within Christendom. All the various so-called churches are to it the various branches of one tree, and the diversity of their doctrine only different refractions of the one sun, only the different colors of the one rainbow. They are all sisters, and only lovelessness and spiritual pride can stir up the fire of discord between them.

1