# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S106
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

106 Dr. Hengstenberg on the Slavery Question.

and thus, naturally, also upon the slavery question that brings them about. We see with joy from this that this theologian — who, although in the midst of the Union church, nevertheless possesses in many respects more light and a truer judgment than hundreds of so-called Lutheran theologians — agrees, on the point of slavery too, with our highly enlightened, sober, pious fathers, and has the courage, despite all the askance looks of the spirit of the age, to express this his conviction freely and without evasion. He sees, indeed, where this agitation actually leads, and to what anti-Christian current of the age it belongs — which, unfortunately, so many here in this place, even some who bear the Lutheran name, fail to recognize. For their shame and instruction, and for the guidance of truth, we cannot forbear letting the solid utterance of Hengstenberg, as it is found in the third number of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, follow here word for word:

In the United States of North America the division between the slaveholding South and the slave-free North has advanced to a formal and embittered civil war. Christian conviction has in many quarters held it self-evident that it must unconditionally take the side of the North. At the Geneva assembly of the Evangelical Alliance, Dr. Kerr of America said that among the population of the great West the conviction had gained ground that it was a religious duty to take part in the present war, and expressed the hope that God would not permit the continuance of slavery. His view of the matter was adopted by a resolution of the assembly. The well-known American theologian Beecher, the brother of the mother of Uncle Tom, has declared the present war outright a crusade, a holy war; the trumpet of war, he says, must not rest until the last slave is freed; it is indeed sad, he grants, to shed brothers' blood, but the continuance of slavery is far more atrocious still. We cannot associate ourselves with this view of the matter; we are, rather, of the conviction that in the slavery question, no less than in the case of Romans 13, there has asserted itself among Christians of the English-speaking tongue a significant and troubling alteration of Christian views, a displacement of the same by principles that have sprung from an entirely different soil, and that the American war is a sorrowful consequence of this displacement, and a judgment upon it.

Restless agitation against slavery, incitement of the slaves to disobedience, promotion of their running away, measures of violence for their liberation, the blowing of the trumpet of a holy war in order to bring this about — a war in which a Methodist preacher has won for himself the fame of being able, better than all others, to cut off heads with a single stroke — all this has against it Holy Scripture, and likewise history, the practice of the whole of the older Christian church. It has its ultimate ground in a view sprung from circles wholly unchristian,