# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S374
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

374 Church and Contemporary History.

and is, in fact, admirably suited to throwing the door wide open for
Anabaptism in the American Lutheran church. But it is also, at the same
time, Romish; for what else is it, when the Roman church baptizes
children on the faith of the church?

The Synod of Southern Illinois, which consists of ministers living
partly in Illinois, partly in Missouri and Tennessee, held its annual
meeting this year on October 4 at Mount Pisgah, Illinois. Of it the
Lutheran Observer reports: "In consequence of the continuance of the
war in Tennessee, the members living there were not able to be present.
Some living in Illinois honored (favored) the Synod with neither their
presence nor an excuse for their absence. Shame on such unpastoral
brethren!"

Politics and Religion. How far, among Americans, the mixing of
religion with politics, of church with state, now goes, may be seen,
among other things, from the so-called patriotic resolutions which the
"Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Northern Illinois" adopted on the
occasion of its annual meeting on October 2 at Peoria, Illinois. It says
there, according to the Lutheran Observer of November 7, among other
things, in the third resolution: "Resolved — that we are inflexibly
opposed to any peace that might be made with the rebels, until they lay
down their arms and submit themselves to the Constitution and laws of
the land."

Methodism. A correspondent of the Reformed Evangelist of
November 8 speaks as follows on its relation to abolitionism and to
politics: "That Methodism forms the main army corps against slavery
seems strange, since Methodism in earlier years was silent on slavery,
and many slaveholders are themselves Methodists. It is a historical fact
that Methodism, more than 15 years ago, split into a northern and a
southern, a pro- and an anti-slavery, church. This step compelled it, in
justification of itself, to preach constantly against slavery in the North
and to defend the divine institution of slavery in the South. Whatever
consequences the present war may entail, honor or shame, curse or
blessing, Methodism will not deny, and no one will refuse to grant it,
that it contributed the most toward bringing it about. I repeat here the
well-known word of Henry Clay, the wisest of American statesmen.
When he once met, in the railway cars, a number of Methodist
preachers returning home from their conference, and they told him that
they had split the conference into a northern and a southern one, he
said: Gentlemen, you have dissolved the Union (of the United States),
for if you, as Christians, cannot hold together, what are we poor sinners
to do?

English Methodism has, in recent years, taken on a religio-political
stance and has everywhere most zealously advocated the resolute
waging of war against the South; indeed, as Methodism itself, through
the formation of whole Methodist regiments and other measures, it has
wanted to go into the war. These are visible facts. Here we have an
abolition church. Has Methodism reckoned the cost of this step? We
doubt it, for who can. Whether it will emerge victorious from this
struggle, the future must teach. We cannot join ourselves to it. The
radical spirit, which can at first stand for a cause and then suddenly turn
against a cause, is not the Reformed spirit, in which, as we are
reproached, rational reflection plays an important role. Its whole
doctrinal position has certainly pushed Methodism toward this step. As
against Calvinism, Methodism has taken an Arminian and Pelagian
direction. Free will determines itself to conversion, not prevenient
grace — that is its basic doctrine. It attributes far, far more to human
strength than we Reformed do, and has accordingly bound itself too
closely to the world in practical matters, so that we are often anxious
about its future. The writer of this has, in his eighteen years' position as
a preacher, not yet come to know a single English Methodist preacher
who does not belong to a secret society, who has not thereby bound
himself under oath to worldly men, to reform the