# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1858_S69
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Where the Doctrine Is False, There Life Too Is Not Right. 69

...of them remains alive and conscious, their soul is freed by the Holy Spirit from every stain of sin. The reader will recall that Pastor Brown had not said that Prof. Schmucker's words in question were a citation, but rather a novel interpretation of the words of 1 Corinthians 15, and will scarcely believe his own eyes when he sees Prof. Schmucker, instead of the perishable and mortal nature of children of which he had spoken in the censured passage, substitute in this glossing-over of it first "corrupted nature," then take this as equivalent to everything that remains alive and conscious of the children in death, that is, the soul — and now sees him conduct himself as though he had taught and spoken in an entirely orthodox manner.

While Prof. Schmucker wishes to be regarded as orthodox on all the remaining points, he nevertheless does not shrink, with regard to little children, from continuing to maintain as before that they are incapable of regeneration in the proper sense of the word, because they have, and can have, no religious ideas or feelings or actions whatsoever — thereby, of course, losing sight of the Bible, especially the example of John the Baptist, and also of all sound psychology, on which he himself has, after all, written a work.

To this rejoinder of Prof. Schmucker's, Pastor Brown has now replied, and, occasioned by the appearance of Prof. Schmucker's rejoinder in pamphlet form, Pastor Brown too has issued, in pamphlet form, his article first published in the Review together with his reply, under the title: The New Theology: Its Abettors and Defenders, by J. A. Brown.

As distressing as it is to see Prof. Schmucker play so pitiful a role in this controversy, so gratifying is it to greet in Pastor Brown a champion for the truth as courageous as he is skillful. There are, to be sure, a few points on which the present writer judges that Mr. Pastor Brown might have taken a somewhat different position, and he, as the present writer believes he has come to know him from his pamphlet, will certainly not take it amiss if these are mentioned here. For it does not seem profitable to the present writer to cite teachers of heterodox communions as witnesses for the truth; for, in the first place, there is certainly no lack of witnesses of our own, and whoever will not accept these will not accept the others either, having still less reason to do so; and, in the second place, one all too easily introduces something false thereby — as, for example, in the citation from Dick: "since little children are not capable of receiving instruction, their regeneration must be effected without means, through the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit upon their souls" — which is a case in which, alongside the truth that little children are regenerated, not only is something plainly contrary to Scripture taught, namely that this happens without means, but also — as few as the words are — just as plainly is manifest the mad and foolish character of reason in its own proper nature and dis-