# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S273
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.   273

...history is as great a treasure as it is an ornament of our church in these last, troubled times. Only envy could have attempted to detract something from the reputation which this book has gained far beyond the borders of its fatherland. Against facts it is ill philosophizing. That the book has already gone through eight editions, in spite of the fact that it bears on its brow a name so despised for the sake of its Lutheran faith,*) is, in this age when books of every kind, church-historical ones included, shoot up daily like mushrooms, a proof of the solidity and usefulness of Guericke's work such as makes every other proof unnecessary, forces a blush upon the sycophants who would gladly disparage it, and summons everyone who does not yet know the book: Take and read it! The chief objection that has been raised against the book is this, that Guericke has, without more ado, made use in the construction of his church history of what others in more recent times have discovered, with a great expenditure of pains and acumen, toward the clarification of many portions of church history. This objection is more than ridiculous. It goes without saying, we think, that a historian is not to make the facts, but only to place on record what has happened — whether he has seen it, or heard it, or read it; and the better he thereby uses all that is available, whether immediate or mediate sources, the greater his merit. But this holds precisely in Guericke's case too. Or is one perhaps to be angry only at this, that he presses even what has been discovered by the Unionists and the Reformed into the service of the ("old-") Lutheran church? It almost seems so. The only means of forestalling such a mischief would then be that the Unionist and Reformed gentlemen should henceforth not immerse themselves so incautiously in history, and thus should not henceforth themselves deliver building-stones and weapons into the hands of the Lutherans. The eighth edition cited above of Guericke's church history is distinguished in many respects above the earlier ones: partly by the addition of the excursuses in the history of doctrine at the close of each period (first added in the 7th edition); partly by the taking into account of most valuable church-historical documents, some of them only newly discovered, and the use of new researches and treatments; partly by the omission of erroneous, or at least very problematic, assertions occurring in the earlier editions. We must unhappily lament that in the eighth edition the alphabetical index of subjects has been omitted for the sake of saving space, and only the index of persons retained. In correctness of printing and beauty of paper, too, the older editions surpass the one named. Finally, in order to exercise, even against a man whom we revere as our dear teacher, the inalienable

*) In the year 1834 Guericke was, on account of his confession of the Lutheran church against the Union, deposed from his office as university teacher and even sentenced to town arrest, and the sentence was carried out upon him — at a time, that is, "when the name of Lutheran was proscribed and a Lutheran theologian stood like a solitary ruin in the world," when one could not, as now, use this name as a shield for one's errors, but could expect from it only shame and tribulation.

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