# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S254
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

254 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

foreign, that it is not hard to turn opinion against it and to stir up the notion that the best course would be radical opposition, rather than patient endurance in evangelical work. But with these writings the ground is entirely abandoned on which hitherto the principles guiding the work of our mission rested, and on which the much-discussed "Decision" also stood. For whereas that Decision, in agreement with all previous declarations and measures on the part of our mission, rests on the view that a double aspect is to be distinguished in caste — the civil and the religious — and that combating the former is not the task, or at least not the immediate task, of evangelical preaching and of the church in general, unless one wishes to turn the Gospel and Christianity into Law; and that whatever in caste stands in contradiction to the Gospel must fall away, but that whatever is compatible with it, and does not close itself to its transfiguring influence, may remain, however strange and repugnant it may still seem to our views and customs — Ochs, on the contrary, and with him Moraht, especially in the second treatise, proceed quite explicitly from the principle that this distinction between the civil and the religious side of caste is impossible, and that therefore not a single step may be yielded to caste even in politicis. But if Ochs acknowledges that among the Tamils all "custom" is inseparably bound up with caste, then it would follow that it is the task of the mission to combat all national custom. But what it means to take from a people its national custom, every sensible person knows who understands the value of custom for morality. This is doubly weighty, moreover, in the case of a people like the Tamils, who, more than most, need the support of custom and tradition, since individual personal independence is so largely lacking to them — so much so that custom and habit are the third word in their every speech and the greatest power in their life. If the radical spirit is not, in general, the right spirit of the mission and the church, then it is doubly reprehensible when applied to the Tamils. One can more readily understand this inclination to radical proceedings among the English, who have no feeling for foreign national peculiarities and no respect for them, and who accordingly like nothing better than to stamp their own way of life upon every people. Thus, for example, they have taken from the evangelized Armenians their beautiful traditional manner of prayer with hands raised, and brought in the English one, of resting the head on the right hand; and thus they turn Christian Tamils, in part, into anglicized East Indians who, torn loose from their connection with their own people, then fail to exert the proper influence upon it. That is why they throw themselves chiefly upon school work, because in the school, to be sure, one can more easily carry through principles against which real life rebels. But through their schools they help in no small measure to raise up a "young India" which, emancipated from the practice and custom of the fathers in a false manner, is scarcely the hope of India's future. That our mission, in the spirit of our church, goes its own ways of evangelical activity is unbearable to the English. That is why they heap reproach upon reproach on it. But it is the German failing to let oneself be overawed by the judgment of foreign countries. It would well become Lutherans to free themselves of this, and not to blow the same horn as the Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, that organ of the foreign Alliance. The Lutherans of the Missouri Synod in North America, when the caste question became public, were not for one moment in doubt how they should take a stand on it. They had gone through a practical school on the slavery question; for this branch of the Lutheran Church of North America must preach the Gospel in slave states as well. There they soon learned — and we can learn it from them — that the church has no calling to overturn civil institutions offhand, even when these seem hard to reconcile with the spirit of Christianity, but rather to preach the Gospel and make it a power in men's hearts. Then the rest will soon find and make its own way, and that in a healthy manner, because evangelical and organic, and not legalistic and contrived.

But let us, after this excursus, return to the report! Our mission has in the past year been much visited by sickness. Schwarz and Ouchterlony were seriously ill; Kelber had to set out on the return journey, and it is doubtful whether he will again be fit to return to the Indian climate; Kremmer is exhausted and must, in