# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1920_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1920. 9

shrug of the shoulders when we deny ourselves the pleasures of this world, but we say it with a certain pride, because we have a better homeland. Therefore we do not lay up treasures on earth, are not covetous of vain honor, do not seek pleasure; indeed we are ready to bear the cross, to take upon ourselves poverty and disgrace, to let ourselves be hated. The goods that God may let fall to us we enjoy with thanks, but our eye remains always fixed on heaven; that we seek to reach for our own person, and we seek to bring others along. In this we see our highest, indeed our only task here on earth, to which we sacrifice everything.

In this spirit all instruction and all education in the Christian parish school is conducted. All learning is pursued in the sense that it is only dung in comparison with the Gospel; that everything has real value only so far as it is conducive to salvation.

The state school, on the other hand, pursues purely earthly goals. The pupils are to be trained into capable citizens of the earth, good citizens of the country, patriots. The Christian school achieves this goal too, much better even than the state school, because it brings up the children in the right spirit; but it pursues a much higher goal, whereas the state school knows none higher.

When they teach morals in the state school, they teach on the one hand that one must beware of vice, for example of drunkenness, cheating, whoredom and the like, because of the evil consequences for health, property and honor before God and men. On the other hand they press for the practice of ordinary benevolence out of natural sympathy, on account of the honor one gains by it, the feeling of satisfaction one has in it, the thanks one reaps. That is an earthly mind, a coarser or finer Epicureanism.

We certainly cannot withdraw ourselves from the influence of this spirit. Since the Fall the earthly mind is natural to man. In our day it is also, so to speak, in the air. The daily press, periodicals, universities, the political platform, conversations, etc., everything breathes it. If now we bring up our children in the Christian sense, so that they strive toward the right goal, they can, by God's grace, expel the poison again. But if we let them be brought up from the start in the earthly sense, it cannot fail that soon our whole church life will be infected with it. That is the ruin of the church.

The spirit of a school shows itself also in the presuppositions from which one proceeds, in the foundation one assumes in order to build upon it.

The Christian parish school presupposes two things; first, original sin. The understanding of children is not only weakened, it is perverted in spiritual things. Its principles are perverted, and the truth appears to it as foolishness. — The taste of children is