# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S221
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence from Germany. 221

—sitations within the United Church were of that kind. Least of all will the congregations be affected by it. Much will remain as it was; other things cannot be thoroughly improved, because people lack the courage to cut deep into the flesh, and there is a real danger that one will proceed only outwardly. The heart- and pulse-artery of the church — pure doctrine and right administration of the sacraments — is in many places obstructed; the pastor has become a man of business, his family his chief concern, his congregation a secondary matter; among many there is a thorough aversion to all controversy, a letting things go as they go, even a shyness toward occupying oneself with scholarship, and the fear: what will become of this? Luther's Reformation began with the reformation of the university. The scholastic studies were displaced, and the study of Scripture set in their place. Should we not have to take this same path again? Our Leipzig has again changed somewhat. We very nearly lost Kahnis — Erlangen was to have had him — but he stays after all. In Liebner's place Luthardt of Marburg has been called, a capable exegete and a Lutheran. Brückner has become first university preacher, and as second they have appointed von Zezschwitz, a man still young and unknown to the learned world, but very gifted, of extraordinary preaching talent. A sermon of his on Romans 1:16, etc., has become known, with the theme: "How the noble joyfulness comes into a Christian heart to confess the Gospel before the world in defiance of all reproach." Anger has become professor ordinarius. We still have in Leipzig a few men whom I forgot to mention in my last letter: Lindner Sr., to whom the Lord has granted great freshness in his old age, and who was among the first in Leipzig to confess the Gospel; further, Lindner Jr., who works less as a lecturer than through his writings, and Horlemann, who is likewise devoted to the faith with all his heart. Besser, too, is not without influence on the theology students. But the head of our university is still Winer, Großmann, and Tuch, even though the latter is beginning, in part, to turn gray. A thorough improvement of the lower teaching estate in our land is sorely needed. One can hardly believe how superficial and boastful, for the most part estranged from the faith, indeed hostile to the faith, this chaos of our schoolmasters is. To be sure, their idol Diesterweg can no longer work upon them so directly; he has had to leave Berlin and withdraw to Hamburg, where the Senate has given him a position, but through his Rheinische Jahrbücher, a pedagogical journal, and through pamphlets in which he spews venom and gall against believing obscurantists, he continues to work on still, and countless numbers among German teachers are devoted to him. To be sure, in the most recent period a regeneration of the pedagogical sciences has also set in, through von Raumer's History of Pedagogy, Palmer's Catechetics and Pedagogy, as well as through more practically significant schoolmen, for example Völker and Zeller in Bruggen, among others. But the matter is taking its time. Saxony and Prussia were the first to cultivate and favor the newer pedagogy, it