# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S207
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Matters Concerning the Division within the Leipzig Mission. 207

To this declaration Director Hardeland, the present editor of the Leipzig
Missionsblatt, appends an afterword, in which it first reads as follows:

"It is not easy for the publisher of the Missionsblatt to add anything
further to the foregoing collegial declaration; for one particular reason,
however, he believes himself to be in a manner obliged to do so.

At the close of my letter to Pastor Moraht in Mölln, published in No. 15 of
last year's volume, I held out the prospect of a further discussion,
especially of the writing issued by the latter on 'the Lutheran mission and
caste in East India.' I hoped at that time, by a calm discussion of the
matter drawn strictly from the records, perhaps to be able to convince even
the writer of that pamphlet and his friends how completely groundless and
untenable the whole presentation given in it is. Unfortunately I can no
longer hold fast to this hope; rather, from the replies which both my letter
and the later address of the three pastors Ahlfeld, Closter and Meurer (cf.
Miss.-Blatt 1860, No. 21) have met with, I have had to recognize to my sorrow
that for the present even the first conditions for a sincere understanding
between us are lacking. I therefore see myself moved to break off the
negotiation on my part herewith. For where a man seeks in such a way as
happens in these replies, in part by new suspicions wholly plucked out of the
air, to evade the weight of the facts adduced and documented from the
records; where a man does not shrink from suddenly calling those records —
which he himself had expressly appealed to as long as they seemed to speak
for his own cause — 'dusty' records, out of which not 'everything is to be
hunted up'; where a man can even bring himself either downright to defend the
gross untruths laid bare brightly and clearly for all in the address of the
three pastors, or at least to restamp them as 'some hard and wounding
expressions': there the conceptions of truth and honesty on the two sides do
indeed lie far too far apart for a refutation of the particulars brought
forward against my letter, or a continuation of the quarrel at all, to be of
any use whatever. — To what a degree of aberration the Ochs party has in part
lately advanced is shown very plainly by the latest writing published in this
matter by the teacher S. in Dresden, whom Ochs in one of his letters
expressly acknowledges as a 'witness and fellow combatant for his cause.'
Whoever has not yet lost all moral judgment will turn away with disgust from
the spirit that breathes in it, even should he be too little acquainted with
the actual state of affairs to see through the pervasive untruth of that
writing in whole and in detail. To characterize this spirit, here only one
passage from a letter of the author addressed to me, in which the same, while
granting