# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S361
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Evangelical Conduct Proper to a Christian-Minded Congregational Schoolteacher, etc. 361

in the good Pelagian and rationalist manner, to take newborn unbaptized children
as pure and innocent, or, in the good Reformed manner, to take them, as begotten
of Christian parents, to be formed of nobler stuff than all other
children of Adam; for it is not man as Christian, that is, as spiritual man,
but man as natural, man corrupted by original sin, who begets bodily
children. In the second place it is no less perverse and contrary to Scripture,
in the good Pietist and legalistic manner, to regard baptismal grace in children as null,
to assume only sin in them, and to consider them simply
like the unbaptized children of the heathen. Every schoolteacher, then, who
stood either on this Pietist or on that rationalist standpoint,
and arranged his school discipline accordingly, would necessarily miss
the right way one way or the other, and could not exercise sound,
Christian discipline in his school. For in the one case he will mostly employ
the lever of pride and ambition in the children; and even if he thereby
drove out all manner of vices of the flesh, the remedy would still be worse
than the disease, and it would be as if merely a stronger devil had driven out
a weaker one, in order to settle himself the more firmly in possession of the
vacated dwelling. In this case, too, the teacher would gladly and often handle
the soul of his pupils in a Pietist-legalistic way, in order as quickly
as possible to bring about in them a kind of Methodist conversion.

If the schoolteacher, however, is an upright Lutheran, that is, a truly
believing and rightly believing Christian, then his school discipline too will be
Christianly sound and wholesome. Accordingly he will, with the Law
together with its threats and punishments, also, when needful, by pointing to
judgments of God already executed, attack in his schoolchildren the nature
corrupted by original sin, or the flesh, in its manifold outbreaks
in word and deed, whether these be open transgressions
of the divine commandments, such as anger, defiance, pride, lying, deceiving,
unchastity, laziness, hatred, quarrelsomeness, unlovingness, theft, and the like,
or temperamental faults and vices, such as thoughtlessness, distractedness,
talkativeness, or shortcomings from lack of discipline and training at home,
such as negligence, disorderliness, uncleanliness, and whatever else there may be of that kind.

In this handling of the Law, however, the punishing earnestness that is
zealous for God's honor is, in a governing way, at the same time pervaded by
the Christian love of a father's heart and watched over and guided by the eye
of Christian wisdom, so that the punishment, in degree and kind, may be
proportioned to the transgression or omission, and, under God's grace
and blessing, may turn to the healing and betterment of the punished schoolchild.

The schoolteacher will therefore, for example, not punish temperamental faults —
which perhaps, besides, have not received due discipline and restraint
at home from the parents — with the same severity as manifest sins
against God's commandments, such as, for example, lying, grosser unchastity, and so forth.

But the Christian teacher will not stop at punishing such individual,
definite sins, each according to its kind and degree,