# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18                    From a Review, Etc.

...conviction, be misjudged, indeed even be slandered and mocked as an empty pretense and a mere wanting to come off whitewashed. For this is true: that lazy irenicism of today's founders of religions and makers of churches, who cry without ceasing, "Peace! Peace!" and yet there is no peace — that we do not so much as look for in the "Handbook." Nor could it be otherwise: how could a sober, serious writer of church history, who has the very real development of God's kingdom before his eyes, and in it has found the firm standard for assessing the present state of the Church and for a relatively accurate reckoning of what is to come, cast fond glances at the hollow fantasies with which our contemporaries — like children with high-floating soap bubbles — amuse themselves so long, until the many-colored glory bursts in the air and leaves no trace! Because he must believe in the future of the Christian Church on earth and of its ecumenical faith and confession, the church historian cannot and may not believe in any future churches built in the air, nor in their hazy future religions and confessions — even at the risk of seeing his truly irenic intentions viewed with suspicion by the peddlers of a lazy peace. True irenicism — a thing known to most religious parties only by name, yet a wholly unavoidable outflow of an ecumenical way of thinking and feeling — has as its center the biblical charge: If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men. It is entirely compatible with impartial historiography — that is, historiography that takes the side of truth — because it does not seek peace at the expense of truth. This irenicism, and only this, Guericke demonstrates through the whole of his work, as every attentive reader will recognize even without any further pointing-out. But of course, whoever wishes to earn the gratitude of the faithful of the day on the field of church history must be ready to trade away the biblical "if it is possible" for a love of peace that robs truth of its honor and is therefore impossible for the Christian; he must know how to give such a twist to the theme of church history, the struggle between faith and unbelief, that the modern religious fancies are spared, and the two newest, many-shaped chief representatives of unbelief, unionism and materialism, are handled with the utmost delicacy and, if not indeed treated as bulwarks of the faith, are at any rate under no circumstances called by their true name or characterized according to their innermost nature. The two volumes of the "Handbook" now before us understand nothing of such an irenicism — in plain German: falsification of history — although occasion enough was offered for it; the third volume, it may be foreseen, will understand just as little of it, — to what else, then, than a target for its hostility, can the irenicism of this book and its author serve the holy world? "Earnest, steadfast, ecumenical, irenic" — what theologian adorned with these Christian pearls would remain unassailed by the hatred and slander of the world, and that, too, in our own times? In vain do we often gnaw and wrestle with the thought whether we might perhaps