# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S154
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

154 Church-Contemporary History.

homage to freedom and to shallow Enlightenment. That ought to banish sleep from the eyes of believing Christians and drive them to watch and pray." — But what do a great many do? — They think politics is a neutral territory, in which one may also go about with atheists, pantheists, Epicureans, and other devil's rabble. But they will at last see with horror whom they have been assisting on that "neutral territory." Yes, indeed, religion and politics are wholly separate domains — but how, if Satan had made a plan to let his batteries play against religion and the Church on the field of politics? And could there not also be an anti-moral, anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-biblical, anti-ecclesiastical politics? And if so, is politics really so indifferent a matter as many suppose?

In Canada, so the Evangelist reports, there are, according to the last census, 25,156 Lutherans. In the year 1852 there were only 12,107. Thus the number has more than doubled in 10 years.

Spiritualism. The Ev. Kirchenzeitung makes known the work of a spiritualist in the state of Ohio, named Hudson Tuttle, under the title: Arcana of Nature or the History and Laws of Creation (1861). The following are some passages from Tuttle's conclusions: "It scarcely needs proof, for it is self-evident, that matter is eternal. — Undifferentiated chaotic matter, left to itself, must, according to its own inherent principles, develop the ordered process of a creation such as we behold around us. — Working outward as life, it created human beings. Working outward as spirit, it brought forth intelligent beings. — To be sure, it will be objected to us that this view annihilates the existence of God. — Yes, Brahma, Buddha, Jupiter, and Jehovah must all give way before it; the sublime principles of reason and love, on which indeed all those notions of a deity were themselves founded, remain, on the other hand, in full possession of their rights. All the gods of mythology and of delusion must beat a retreat before this view, for their borrowed nimbus fades before the unveiling of the great Unknown who is enthroned in the universe. — The outer, material form of the world we call Nature; its inner, spiritual form, God. To be sure, this is no theological God, but in Nature there exists no other." These few sentences, says the Ev. Kirchenzeitung, suffice to mark out the speculative and religious standpoint of the author. From spontaneous primal cells, as Tuttle instructs us, the whole plant and animal world has arisen through progressive development. He himself has already succeeded, by the application of galvanism, in generating mites (Acari). The immediate forebears of man were the orangutans. The transition from orang to man must, however, have been a very gradual one. The Negro cannot be derived from the Caucasian; both, rather, descend from orangutans of different color and different character. Nor is the difference between man and ape nearly so great as is commonly stated: the African orangs bury their dead under foliage and branches, whereas it would prove just as impossible to teach morality to the Hottentot as to the orang; moreover, the faculty of speech separates man from the animal only by degree. As to the age of the human race, however, we may date it back to no less than a hundred thousand years before historical times. This is fully proved by the geological evidence, despite the mockery which the advocates of the popular faith have seen fit to heap upon it. We see from this that Spiritualism too is eager to transplant the world-famous "German science" to our poor America by way of table-rapping. The celebrated naturalist Andreas Wagner, who takes notice of Tuttle's book in the Ev. Kz., says of it: "We have here only to answer the question, whether his book can claim scientific significance and has discovered new arguments for disputing the Mosaic account of creation. We must answer this question completely in the negative. To be sure, the book has a very learned veneer, in that it is crammed almost from every field of natural science with factual evidence,