# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S248
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

248    Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches [Church and Contemporary History].

...has. To cause war is indeed always a dreadful sin; to wage war can, under certain circumstances, be a holy duty.

A College for the German Methodists. On June 3rd, a number of preachers and members of the Episcopal Methodist Church assembled in Berea, Ohio, for a convention, to deliberate on an offer which the English trustees of Baldwin University were making to the German Methodists, for the enlargement of the German department of the said university and the founding of a German college. Mr. Wm. Nast was elected chairman, and the initial proceedings concluded with the resolution: "That we unite to found a German college in Berea, Ohio, for the German branch of the Episcopal Methodist Church." The purpose is to be "to promote scientific education and biblical Christianity among the German people in America." At a later session it was resolved to recommend most heartily to all members, and especially to preachers, the plan that every member of the Cincinnati, North Ohio, South-East Indiana, and New York Conference should give a dollar and a half, in order to endow a new professorship in the German college. Mr. Nast says, in a report on the matter which appeared in the Apologist of June 15: "The conviction forced itself upon everyone present, that — if a higher institution of learning is at all one of the conditions of a successful building up of the kingdom of God in our days, and if German Methodism is to have a lasting mission in this land, — the opportunity now offered us to found an independent German institution of learning is the best we could hope for, and that it is therefore our duty to make use of this opportunity now." Through this, "young men called by God to the preaching office will be given the opportunity to acquire the necessary knowledge." — How the times, and with them the people in them, have changed! It is but a few years since we could hear from the mouths and pens of the German Methodists almost nothing but mockery of institutions of learning for training for the preaching office, as "preacher factories." In those days it was said that only out of the school of the Holy Spirit could a true preacher come forth, and that the higher schools produced only spiritless chatterers, puffed up with a conceit of learning and empty of heart. And how does one speak now? — Well, this turnabout within German Methodism is at any rate no step backward.

The smaller sects here are, as is well known, very averse to theological study. They want only so-called "Spirit"-taught scholars. Yet where they do at times set about directing their preachers to study, it happens in the most wretched fashion. Strangers to the field of theological scholarship, they then often resort to the most miserable of aids. Reckoning themselves among the "orthodox" denominations, they often put into the hands of those preparing for their ministry the most wretched rationalistic productions. Thus we read in the "Fröhlicher Botschafter" [Cheerful Messenger], the organ of the "United Brethren in Christ," of June 25th, the complaint of a correspondent that their "course of study" recommends the "Volks-Bibel Lexikon" [People's Bible Lexicon], although, as the correspondent shows, that very work denies the divinity and truth of Holy Scripture.

The Position of the American Churches on the Slavery Question. On this the "Apologist" of June 22 remarks as follows: "A considerable number of the religious bodies of the northern states have, from the very beginning of their organization, regarded it as the duty of a Christian church to demand of their members the immediate renunciation of slavery, and to deny church membership to every slaveholder. Among these religious bodies are the Free Will, Free Mission, and Seventh Day Baptists, the Reformed, United, and Free Presbyterians, the Wesleyans, the Evangelical Association and two other branches of the Methodist Church, most of the Congregationalist churches, the Friends, the United Brethren, and other churches. Accordingly these bodies renew, year by year at their conferences and synods, their testimony against the greatest of national sins. Many other communities,