# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1864_S377
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literary Intelligence. 377

such a unionistic ostrich-stomach, which digests everything!). The
church (which one?) tolerates diversity of opinion and freedom of
discussion. If innovation with its skepticism, if the flood of
formalism which in the past rushed over our Zion, could bring about no
separation, then we fear none either from the conflict of opinion
between the General Synod and the Ultra-Symbolists, despite some
schismatic measures. The Lutheran Church in this land will, we believe,
remain one body. But the character of this one Lutheran church will
depend on the outcome of the struggle now just beginning. Should the
smaller party surpass the larger one in zeal, sharp-wittedness, and
strength; should the majority remain indifferent and let its
institutions and its paper languish; should its writers neglect the
matter of the liturgy, the catechism, and the hymnbook: then it would
take no gift of prophecy to foresee the consequences. On the other
hand, since the General Synod has the advantage — since it holds the
true Lutheran standpoint (sic?), the one more biblical and better
suited (yes! yes!) to the spirit of the age and of the land in which we
live, the one more effective in working for the conversion of sinners
and the edification of believers — and since it is superior in numbers:
an equally earnest conduct of the struggle on its part will put it in a
position to carry off the victory, and to pour out its liberal,
evangelical, vigorous, and truly Lutheran Christianity over the American
church. This struggle must be waged in a serious, prayerful, and
Christian spirit. Name-calling and wounding epithets from either side
will not do it. What this time requires is not the riding of old hobby-
horses, but the exertion of the church's strength in support of its
institutions and its paper, and likewise the production of a holy
literature worthy of its historic name and of the hundreds of thousands
of Lutherans who will make up the future church of this land." —

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Literary Intelligence.

To the "Religious Dialogue by Dr. H. Thiele," merely announced in the
previous number, we now add what Ströbel writes about it: "A good
little book against the Enlighteners. In the 'Religious Dialogue' there
converse 'Slicht, a respectable man; Kraulmeyer, an educated man;
Horstmann, a Pietist.' In the most courteous manner the 'Pietist,' a
skillful man well versed in matters of faith and of Lutheran
persuasion, sets out for the two others — particularly for the
ignorant, puffed-up, lazy-minded Krautmeyer — the whole poverty of
'the culture of the age,' that fluid, hard-to-define thing 'in which,
as its best part, there still swim about all sorts of scraps taken from
the table of Christianity, among others also the piece concerning the
most exalted doctrine of virtue, concerning immortality, and so on.'
As characteris-