# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S280
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

280 From the Church.

It was mentioned in this connection that Samuel does not eat beef either; we may add that the Tamils in general abstain from it. Among the heathen the cow is sacred, and the eating of its flesh is therefore entirely against religion. When they have become Christians and still abstain from beef, some Europeans have thought it necessary to charge them with lingering heathen superstition on this account. This is certainly a mistake. For on the one hand, beef in India is very poor — owing to the lack of pasture — so that even among Europeans only those eat it who rigidly carry over the habit of their homeland into other countries, where it is perhaps quite unsuitable and unnatural; on the other hand, through constant habit, especially when this is an inherited one peculiar to an entire people, human nature at length acquires needs as well as aversions that are wholly independent of understanding and even of the will itself. One need only think, for example, of how in Germany the eating of horse-flesh or dog-flesh is looked at askance.

May all this help us not to condemn and reject harshly and bluntly the national peculiarities of the Indian people, but rather to judge them carefully and fairly, and to spare them so far as this can stand together with the truth of the Gospel and with Christian love.

(Graul's Missionsblatt.)

(From Münkel's Neues Zeitblatt.)
From the Church.

The Lutheran Synod of Iowa, the work and the ward of Pastor Löhe of Neuendettelsau, held its assembly last year, from September 12 to 19, at Wartburg (North America). According to the report, it numbered 9 preachers and 2 professors. It would be desirable for this small synod to join together with the rest of the orthodox Lutherans. Löhe did not wish this from the outset, and the synod has not been able to do it. In its doctrine of the church and the ministry it stands closest to the Grabau synod, and has entered into a closer connection with it, which, however, has since been given up by Grabau himself as untenable, because, apart from the Iowans' chiliasm, one thing or another displeases him besides. With the Missourians no connection at all is to be thought of, since these stand in sharp opposition to more than one doctrine of the Iowans.

At their most recent synod the Iowans accordingly occupied themselves with the reproaches and objections that have been raised against them by the American Lutherans. In two addresses the disputed chief points were developed, and the whole synod declared its unanimous agreement with them. These addresses form the principal content of the synodical report, on which a few remarks may be offered here. One can see about them that they