# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S328
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

328 The Gymnasium at Weimar.

spoiled much, indeed sown unspeakable mischief. They have opened door and gate to the most miserable Enlightenment-mongering, have set the Holy Scriptures aside, have given heathenism the honor before Christianity. The writer of these lines remembers, out of the religious instruction he enjoyed in the upper classes of the gymnasium, nothing further than this: that the New Testament Greek of the apostles had to be translated into classical Greek, whereby we thought no little of ourselves that we understood more Greek than the apostles. A Prussian general superintendent related some years ago in a large church assembly how, at the beginning of this century, a gymnasium director of a Thuringian town, when he had gone with his school and at the head of it to the Holy Supper, held the Jena Literaturzeitung in his hand and read in it! No wonder if whole armies of unchristian and unchurchly officials came out of such schools and scattered the poisonous seed far and wide among the people! — Yet it is not the learned schools as such that we would accuse; they were children of their time, and did their part of what the Church, or rather the theologians in it, had brought upon themselves by their guilt. — They are still children of the time today as well. They cannot withdraw themselves from the new life that has awakened in the Church. They too are everywhere beginning to remember their churchly origin and their calling to labor for Christ's kingdom. With joy one reads in the old Luther town of Eisleben, over the door of the gymnasium, the new inscription: Gymnasium Christo sacrum!

The Wilhelm-Ernst Gymnasium at Weimar as well — the most important for Thuringia, of ancient renown and largely attended — is advancing along this path. According to the charters of its founders and benefactors, the dukes of Weimar, it is to help toward this, that "these lands be preserved in the true evangelical religion of the holy Word of God and in the unadulterated use of the sacraments." This purpose had long been forgotten — in the time of the rationalism that reigned so excessively precisely at Weimar there was at the gymnasium no more talk of pure evangelical doctrine; indeed religious instruction receded wholly into the background and was scarcely regarded any longer. In more recent times it has become better, and the inaugural address of the new director, Dr. Heiland, breathes an earnest Christian spirit. "Let us rejoice," he says, "that the gymnasium is again reflecting more deeply upon this, that it is to be a nursery of Christian knowledge and Christian life, and that it must be the breath of the Gospel that blows through the schools if they are to be workshops of the Holy Spirit. As a workshop of such a Spirit it plants in the hearts of its pupils the Gospel of redemption and leads them, by the hand of thorough exposition of Scripture, into the understanding of the divine plan of salvation. We speak and boast so much of the most precious achievement of the Reformation, that it prepared a new home for the Gospel in our mother tongue, and yet we must confess it with shame, that acquaintance with the Book of books,