# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S218
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

218 The Luther Monument in Worms.

"America," then: "Whoever wishes to form a vivid picture of the appalling
devastations that unbelief and rationalism have wrought among the German
people since the end of the last century — especially in Baden, the
Rhenish Palatinate, the Hessian and Saxon lands, and several Swiss
cantons — need only observe the streams of emigrants in the European or
American seaports, or go into the German beer-dives and gambling-hells
of New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, New Orleans, or leaf through the
German-American newspaper literature. There one must be ashamed of the
German name, and can scarcely resist the dismal thought that God has
forsaken this nation because it forsook him."
(Freimund.)

The Luther Monument in Worms.

The Worms committee for the erection of a Luther monument is, with the
permission of the high Ministry of Public Worship, having collections
taken up through the pastors in Saxony as well. We may certainly assume,
then, that the honorable men at the head of the association, in a cause
for which they claim public participation, will also gladly hear public
judgment from various quarters. In what follows only a single individual
voices his judgment, but he believes he does not stand alone in it.

Monument-building is fast becoming almost too much of a good thing in
dear Germany. That a people should honor its deserving men in this way
too, and that the fine arts can here solve one of their noblest tasks, is
not to be denied. And even though a cult of genius, vain self-admiration,
and a ridiculous small-town pretension is often at play in it — for soon
every Krähwinkel will want its own great man and its own monument —
still, the abuse should not stand in the way of the proper use. It is,
admittedly, more questionable whether it is fitting to erect proud
monuments of stone and bronze to Christian heroes of the faith. In this
connection people have more than once, and certainly not without reason,
pointed to pious and charitable foundations as a far more fitting way of
honoring the memory of such men. As for Luther in particular, an
ostentatious monument is decidedly against his own spirit, and one might
well be content to leave it at the Wittenberg monument. Even to that
one, after all, questionable memories attach. But there offers itself, in
the humble judgment of the present writer, precisely with regard to
Luther, a quite different and worthier way of honoring his memory —
namely, through the preparation of an edition of his works which,
according to their inner