# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S218
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence from Germany. 218

...are at times truly worse off than the slaves in your Southern states. Naturally, in the same measure, those old spiritual powers of learning, so much at home here — which among us found a special home through the Reformation — are receding. Secondary schools (Realschulen) are overrunning the gymnasiums of the old style, and the number of students, except in jurisprudence, decreases from year to year. Philosophy has once again bloomed itself out; in drawing out its consequences, it ran off into materialism and atheism, and the few who still philosophize among us have given up wanting, in their own delusion, to embrace the whole domain of knowledge in new systems; one meets them not infrequently in the ecclesiastical field. The study of languages too, the philologia sacra et profana, has somewhat receded. The multa, after all, do not agree with the multum. The speaking of Latin, which formerly almost every mediocre mind brought away from school and retained, only a few are now capable of. Saxony, to be sure, still seeks to maintain its old renown in this field; the Saxon princely schools are loved and cultivated by our school authorities, and part of the other gymnasiums of the land is reviving as well, and yet the old zest for languages has cooled, and philological literature is fairly cheap to obtain. Mathematics and the natural sciences are exalted to the skies. How the Church fares in this atmosphere of growing materialism — or, as Professor Leo aptly puts it, of Mammonism — is not hard to guess. She preaches to deaf ears with her "Seek ye first," etc., and "Lay not up for yourselves treasures," etc. Outwardly, to be sure, she is rising again — for if the world is allowed to have its way in its pursuit of the treasures of the world, it in turn puts up with a little in return; and if the devil is quietly allowed to build a temple, he will indeed permit a little chapel to God's honor to be raised alongside it. From this it is explained that the Catholic world in Austria puts up with the new Concordat with the Pope, and in this sense wonders may well yet occur among us too in the near future. But it is certain that the Lord, too, is on the field. In the higher circles of the people a turnabout has occurred; Israel is returning to its tents — only concerning the common people, in the proper sense, can not much good be reported as yet. This, to be sure, the gentlemen at the helm of state and church know less well than the pastors and teachers who live down in the hold of the ship.

In the Union, matters are clearing up only a little. There is much crying out and little wool [much ado about nothing] — crying out at church conventions, crying out in provincial associations, crying out at the legislative diets, in societies, crying out at universities and in literature; in short, one is reminded of Luther's "Diet of the Crows" at Coburg. But over what does this outcry arise? Over Sunday observance, the remarriage of divorced persons, rescue institutions for those neglected by family, church, and state — the actual corpus delicti, the Union of churches itself, is touched upon only from afar. How many a great mind and highly gifted man is blinded by the