# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1858_S68
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

68 Where the Doctrine Is False, There Life Too Is Not Right.

...(Prof. Schmucker's) writings, and that the views censured in Pastor Brown's article are therefore to be charged solely to his (Pastor Brown's) account.

This plan Prof. Schmucker now carries out in such a way that he first tries to portray Pastor Brown as a man wholly unqualified to judge the orthodoxy of his (Prof. Schmucker's) writings. He says that Pastor Brown was not yet in the world when he (Prof. Schmucker) was already preaching, that he is befogged (cloudy) and dull (obtuse), that as a practical preacher he has surely had no time to become versed in such subjects (regeneration, original sin, and justification), and that besides he received his training in another church communion (which, remarkably — as Pastor Brown testifies — is an untruth, whereas on the contrary Prof. Schmucker laid the foundation of his theology at a Presbyterian seminary).

Secondly, Professor Schmucker asserts that he is orthodox, and appeals as evidence of this to the orthodox-sounding passages in his writings. That differently-worded passages also occur in the same writings, he holds, amounts to no more than the fact that in the Bible itself passages are found from which one could accuse Moses of Pelagianism, Paul of Antinomianism, and so forth, if one were to interpret them in the same manner in which Pastor Brown had interpreted his (Prof. Schmucker's) own — namely, by not judging their sense according to their connection with the whole. On this Pastor Brown correctly remarks, in a rejoinder (which will be mentioned further below in particular), that when it comes to Scripture he knows that everything must agree, because everything is God's Word, and God cannot contradict himself, whereas Prof. Schmucker's writings are those of a frail human being. Alongside this, Prof. Schmucker makes the attempt to conceal the discrepancy between the censured passages and pure doctrine. To this end he complains of Pastor Brown's incompetence and meanwhile shifts the very point at issue. Thus he says, for example, regarding his censured definition of original sin, that Pastor Brown ought fairly to have known that the word "mental" can denote, besides the understanding, the will as well, and then adduces a series of proofs that original sin is called a sickness by orthodox theologians — as though Pastor Brown had ever denied the one or the other, and as though the point in controversy had not rather been this: that Pastor Brown declared the expressions used by Prof. Schmucker ("mental" and "disorder"), and the whole definition, to be thoroughly inadequate. Regarding the censured passage on the manner in which children who die early are saved, he complains of Pastor Brown's impropriety in regarding his (Prof. Schmucker's) words as a citation from 1 Corinthians 15, since he had not put them forward as such — the apostle, moreover, speaking only of the body — whereas he himself maintains that in death the corrupted nature of children, that is, everything that