# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1858_S379
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literature. 379

ficiality of instruction in American colleges and wishes for more earnest
diligence and more thorough study in every field, we agree with him
wholeheartedly, and just as we ourselves, in our own small measure, make
the realization of this wish — which lives in us too — our daily task, so
we would only rejoice if Dr. Reynolds were to succeed, first in
Springfield and then also in kindred institutions, in carrying out his
principles on this point, so far as that is at all possible under our
circumstances here.

But it is all the more regrettable that in such an address — one
expressly intended to lay down a confession as to position and views (see
the introduction, p. 7) — from a man like Dr. Reynolds, who until recently
has wished to pass for a Lutheran, not a single word is to be heard by
which he might have professed the faith of the Lutheran church whose
bread he eats; on the contrary, he has in it declared, with the utmost
resolve, unionistic principles to be his conviction, and has sought to
make contemptible everything opposed to them. The following sentences
occur in his address: "Can the man who recognizes in the classic
masterpieces of Greece and Rome the inherent power, the capacity for
culture, and the sublime striving of his race, remain content with the
shibboleth of a sect, which is at most only one mode of representing the
faith that is the sole form of a universal religion and the sole firm
bond for the general brotherhood of mankind?" What all is understood in
Springfield by "sect," and how, accordingly, the foregoing sentence had
to be understood by the hearers, is shown by the words of Mr. Stuart, the
president of the board of trustees, at the beginning of his address to
Dr. Reynolds, where he says that the Lutherans in Illinois wished,
through the university at Springfield, "to meet the obligation which
they, as well as any other religious sect, owed to learning." Further,
Dr. Reynolds says: "If attachment to the distinguishing doctrines of
Christianity, to the great principles of faith and life, to the great
historical efficacy of a religious society, to the memory of martyrs who
sealed their testimony with their blood, and to the memory of the
(Puritan!!) pilgrim fathers, who defied the wrath of tyrants, the waves
of the ocean, and the terrors of this western wilderness, in order to
raise up here an altar and temple of the true faith as they had received
it from God's own word — if this is the foundation on which attachment
to any particular denomination rests (and so also to the Lutheran?!),
then no one who believes in the omnipotence of truth, in the loveliness
of virtue, or in the heavenly nature of piety, or who knows anything of
the indissolubility of the bond that binds the present to the past, or
the members of the same family to one another, will have any concern
that the