# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S93
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Broken Platform. 93

the guilty nothing good already. The little book is divided into 5 chapters,
of which the first contains an address to the friends of the Definite Platform,
who are duly torn down in it, if we may use an expression that is not exactly
noble but is certainly characteristic. He holds up before them their ignorance,
their foolish pride, their dishonesty, which latter consists in this: that those
who have been called by the Lutheran Church to serve her instead turn
against her, and seek to hide this by crying out again and again: American,
but no German Lutheran Church! In the following chapters, whose subjects
are the Mass, exorcism, the Sabbath, and private confession and absolution,
the author turns directly to Professor Schmucker in Gettysburg, as the
principal figure among the friends and at least a co-author of the Definite
Platform. He accuses him of having charged the symbolical books of the
Lutheran Church, against his better knowledge, with Roman errors, with
the intent of turning friends and foes alike against them and moving them
to reject them, and of having in fact accomplished this with many. And we
must, alas, confess that, given the facts to which the author appeals, we do
not see how Prof. Schmucker can justify himself. Under such circumstances
it can only be irony when the author says, on p. 38, that he holds the
greatest personal respect for Prof. Schmucker; for one can scarcely conceive
of anything more base than that of which the latter stands accused, and, we
believe, convicted — especially when one considers to whom the wrong is
done: to the holy, divine truth, and by whom: by a professor and doctor of
theology.

The esteemed author seems to us to represent the doctrine of the Lutheran
Church well, and to be well versed in our best older dogmaticians from
Chemnitz down to Baier. Only in what he says in the 4th chapter concerning
the Sabbath can we not agree with him. He maintains there, namely, that
the Sabbath or Christian Sunday is a divine institution, and that the
Lutheran Church also teaches this in her Symbols; only in the manner of
its observance, which the Lutheran Church wills, does she differ from the
Calvinistic one; the former wills an evangelical observance, the latter a
legalistic one. The contrary is made clear enough already from Article 28
of the Augsburg Confession, and one could scarcely understand how it
came about that the author did not recognize this, were it not that there
plainly appears in him the wish to make the sanctification of Sunday just
as binding a duty as any other contained in the Ten Commandments, and
the concern that this is possible only by asserting the divine institution of
Sunday. But the matter stands thus. We learn from Scripture that we
Christians are commanded in the Third Commandment, as Luther says: not
to despise preaching and God's Word, but to hold it holy, gladly hear and
learn it. If, then, the church fellowship to which we belong assembles
regularly on a certain day to hold public worship, then we have