# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S378
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

378 Church and Contemporary History.

In the Agency of the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg there appeared this year:

On the Character of Today's Popular Literature. By F. Schaubach. A Prize-Crowned Essay. — In a review of this work it is said: "At the Barmer Kirchentag of 1860 a participant in the Kirchentag, moved by the discussions of Lange's lecture on the position of secular literature toward Christianity, was prompted to offer a prize for a work that should contain 'a critique of today's pernicious popular (novel, novella, etc.) literature and an indication of the means by which to counteract it.' The work was fixed at ten printer's sheets in extent. While we cannot credit the work before us with having exhausted the subject, we do see in it a solid and worthy contribution toward the solution of the task. We should have wished for some of its portrayals to be sharper, more incisive, and less merciful, though we are well aware that the author wished only to serve the cause by his moderation. A fear of the unmeasured attacks of his opponents the author cannot have had, or he would have had to abandon the whole undertaking; for that he was striking a wasps' nest one way or another, of that he could certainly have had no doubt. The author has disposed of his material in fourteen chapters, entitled: the increase of production, the circles of readers, the romances of chivalry and robbery, calendar literature, writings for the young, popular poetry, popular-scientific writings, the literature of superstition, newspapers and periodicals, the oversight of popular reading, Christian popular writings, tracts, entertainment writings, popular-historical and natural-scientific writings, neutral literature."

Church and Contemporary History.

I. America.

F. W. A. Riedel, whom the Catholic Kirchenzeitung listed as one of the "four Lutheran" preachers who have recently gone over to Rome, belonged to no communion calling itself Lutheran, but to the Dutch Reformed body, as the "Evangelist," which has had dealings with the man named, reports.

The "Lutheran and Missionary" of Oct. 29 replies to the "Observer," which had appealed for the justification of its deviations in doctrine to "the basis of the General Synod," among other things as follows: "There is nothing in the basis of the General Synod to keep even the Missouri Synod from coming into it with the whole bundle of the confessions in its arms." — We do not doubt this either, but the confessions themselves, which allow no compromising with false teachers, would keep the Missouri Synod from that, as from entering any other united body.

Slavery. The following we read in the "Lutheran and Missionary" of Oct. 29: "Some time ago Bishop Hopkins of Vermont published a letter on the 'Biblical View of Slavery,' whose object, as he says, 'was to prove from the Bible that in the relation of master and slave there is necessarily no