# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1877_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 18 —

nowhere else but built up from the schools. Just as little as one can, without violation of conscience and harm to the Christian confession, hold with the churches, sacrament and worship of the papacy, so little may it be permitted to send the children to their schools. Besides this, and secondly, the poor and innocent children are led away from the saving faith by this deed of their own parents. Who can express what harm is hereby done by such parents to their own flesh and blood, what irretrievable damage is hereby inflicted also on Christendom as a whole, what a terrible deed is hereby committed by the parents themselves! So this is a true tempting of God: to lay such dangerous and ruinous snares for children before their understanding and age are strengthened, snares from which even experienced and aged people sometimes find it hard to work themselves free, and to rely on the fact that one has instructed them in the catechism. No one is easier to lead into all evil than youth precisely." (Dedeken, Thesaur. Vol. I. P. II. fol. 986 f.)

One can easily convince the parents not to send their children to schools where enthusiasts and unbelievers teach before confirmation; but one must also warn them not to do this even after confirmation if they are still ungrounded. For a little leaven leavens the whole lump, and the human heart is like tinder, so that when it comes into contact with evil it catches fire at once.

From one quarter a warning was now given that one should not oppose the public schools too strongly and call them outright devil's schools, as is sometimes done. Christians ought rather to be friends of the public schools, for a work pleasing to God would be done in them too, and the dreadful abuses found in them were only an accident [*Accidens*].

To this it was replied that, first, there can be no question of real education in the public schools, for that must happen through God's Word. One does not object to the state establishing its schools, only to our congregation members using them. But one may not declare them a blessing either; it is only a lesser harm if the youth are brought up in the public schools than if they grow up without any instruction like wild animals.

What is to be taught in the schools is shown by Luther in his well-known writing To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, on the Improvement of the Christian Estate, from the year 1520, where he writes:

"Above all things the foremost and most common lesson in the high and lower schools should be Holy Scripture, and for the young boys the Gospel. But where Holy Scripture does not rule, there I advise