# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1862_S94
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

94    Church News of the Day.

connection with everything created. Because this false, God-estranged development was present at the appearance of the God-man, the action of Christ had to appear, as the action of the absolute spirit-man, simply as miraculous. His entry into the world presents itself as the entry of an immediate, absolutely new principle, which this course of the world, after an immeasurable breakthrough through the old form of the world, communicates as a new, higher, God-manly form of life. — What was at issue in the case of the God-man was not a calm and undisturbed harmonious development, as with the first man, but rather a breaking-through and overcoming of every hindrance that might stand in the way of the regaining of man's lost dominion over nature." And so it goes on. With great self-satisfaction the editor refers to this pearl in his Messenger and admonishes his readers "not to be frightened by the difficult words, here and there, unintelligible to the ordinary reader (!). The whole," he continues, "pleases us and shows that the brother has grasped his subject." If a manner of speech and thought such as that essay contains is repugnant even in the writings of the newer theologians, it is doubly repugnant in a sectarian sheet whose contributors can scarcely write orthographically, let alone develop a thought coherently. Nothing looks out from it but a ridiculous conceit, which only shows all too clearly what the future of sectarian theology will be.

How the German language is being lost here is a matter on which the editor of the Fröhlicher Botschafter, organ of the "United Brethren in Christ," shares, in the issue of January 30, the experiences he has had in the midst of his own community. The cause is not so much any swiftly setting-in lack of knowledge of the German language, as rather a haughty shame at using it, often precisely on the part of those who themselves speak a dreadful English. The said editor writes, among other things: "That among some of us Germans there is too much of an inclination to splash about in English cannot be denied, and in this position we limp on both sides and get only half as far forward as if we kept only one goal in view. This was the reason why our German preachers who came out West became wholly English here, stumbled along past the German inhabitants, and always wanted to preach only in English. Thus we were told of an old German brother from whom it was requested that he make a call in a German neighborhood and preach in his mother tongue, but who excused himself with the words: 'No sar, I isch afraat it will sphile my anglisch.' Consequently, so that his broken jargon-English might suffer no harm, the dear German people had to be content to do without."

The Synod of Canada. It was reported in the November issue of this journal that this synod does not acknowledge all the symbols of our church, and that it has united with the General Synod. Both statements are erroneous. We have therefore been glad to correct both statements already in the "Lutheraner." The present chairman of the said synod, the Reverend Pastor C. F. W. Rechenberg of Toronto, C. W., has asked us in a letter of January 17 to give this correction also in "Lehre und Wehre." We naturally comply with this just wish just as gladly and from the heart. We are, moreover, obliged to Pastor Rechenberg for informing us himself how our erroneous report, particularly as regards the first point, came into our journal. The synod had, namely, written that it confesses itself "especially" (namentlich) to the unaltered Augsburg Confession and to Luther's Small Catechism; but this "especially" (namentlich) had been translated by the Missionary as "namely" instead of "especially," through which the sense of the synodical resolution was altered entirely in the way we conveyed it. Our report, however, had been taken from the Missionary. The Missionary therefore alone bears the blame. To be sure, Pastor Rechenberg writes us that the resolutions in question had been correctly printed in other papers. We hope, however, that no one will expect of us that, once we have read synodical resolutions in one journal, we should read them over again as often as they are reprinted in other journals. That editors must read all sorts of newspapers is, we think, cross enough for them to bear, so that one cannot fairly condemn them, on top of that, for not always rereading what recurs in the various papers. And this all the less, the more it is the fashion here for one editor always to copy from another, or from otherwise well-known books, calendars, and the like. From what source, incidentally, we drew the report that the Canada Synod had joined the General Synod, we can no longer at all recall. We remark only this much: that if the Canada Synod shares our aversion to that synod on account of its shameful mingling of religions, no one can be more glad of it than we ourselves.

"A New Fellowship of Protestant Christians." Under this heading the Observer reports, in its latest issue, the origin of a new churchly fellowship which has arisen out of the Episcopal Methodist Church, and which