# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S286
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

286 Church-Related Contemporary History.

income of only seven dollars and fifty cents last year. For books
of unbelief that were sold, the receipts last year amounted to
only six dollars and twenty-five cents.” Alas, there is, to be sure, no
comfort in this — that unbelief is on the decline here. On the contrary, the lack of
efforts to spread it through organized societies that carry this purpose
on their brow may well have its ground in the fact that such efforts of theirs
are no longer needed — the newspapers and the secret societies have taken this work
off their hands.

Methodism. Pastor C. F. Böhmer, as secretary of the Northwestern Conference
of the Wisconsin Synod, sent a report on the religious conditions here, and particularly
on the doings of the Methodists, to Germany; it appeared there and has here
been reprinted in several newspapers — a report in which the sect named,
especially the Methodist Evangelicals or Albrecht's People, is shown
in its full nakedness. A cry of indignation went up through all the Methodist
periodicals, and severe threats were hurled against Pastor Böhner. So he found
himself moved to send a kind of retraction to Dr. Nast. In it he writes from
Fond du Lac, under date of July 27, among other things: “In fairness to the truth I must
hereby declare that in my report to the Evangelical Society at Berlin I went too far
and portrayed many points too exaggeratedly. I hereby take it back.”
Indeed a sad affair. But that is, alas, the way of those Lutherans who, without
possessing a pure Lutheran understanding, want to become knights against the sects. At first
they talk big against them, and then, at the first storm-wind that rises against them,
they soon turn faint-hearted and retract. In this way they only strengthen
the sects the more; indeed, not infrequently such ill-advised heroes against the sects are
the most promising candidates for the very sectarianism they fought.

Disgusting! — So writes the “Evangelist” of August 15: “A few weeks ago
English newspapers reported that in Massachusetts more children are being born
of immigrants — mostly Irish Catholics — than of native-born parents.
This subject is now further discussed by them, and on this occasion
complaint is made that among many American women, even pious ones, childlessness
is brought about by themselves.”

The “Apologete” of August 3 gives its Methodist preachers the following
advice, surely well-intentioned and urgent for them: “Make it a matter of conscience
to visit as many families as if you were to receive a dollar for every visit, and the
dollar will come without your having to ask for it.” — In the same paper are found “Resolutions
of the German” (located in Germany) “Missions Conference on the
circumstances of the Union.” It says there, among other things: “Resolved, that we, in the name
of humanity(!), of freedom and of the law, declare ourselves for the vigorous prosecution of the war,”

and further: “Resolved, that we express our approval to that branch of the American Church
to which most of us have the honor of belonging, for
its glorious participation in this momentous drama. We assure our
brethren in America that we point, with well-founded pride, to the testimony of the
Episcopal Methodist Church in this crisis of national life. With admiration
we have read the patriotic utterances of its official and other organs, and with the most
intimate interest we look upon the fate of its sons in the army. It gladdens us

that in the fullest sense it is entitled to the name of a militant Church.” One
sees from this that the Methodists across the sea are filled with the very same spirit,
confounding Church and world, confusing Christianity and civilization — in short
the very same spirit of the age — as those here. — The “Apologete” speculates,
among other things, on gaining a good increase in subscribers among the soldiers
in the field, and so it flatters the soldiers in almost every number in the most
nauseating manner. In the number cited it says, among other things: “The army is, as far as
the great questions of the day facing the country are concerned, far ahead in general of the people who