n of her own innate principles, without any corrupting or
dwarfing coercion on the part of the State whatsoever. Yet the very man,
Dr. Walther, who did more than any other theologian in America towards
the building up of a Church at once truly Lutheran and truly American,
was stigmatized by S. S. Schmucker and his compeers as a "foreign
symbolist," neither Lutheran nor American. But the brand of American
Lutheranism proposed and propagated by the leaders of the General Synod
was, in reality, a counterfeit American Lutheranism. The new school
movement, headed by Schmucker, Kurtz, and Sprecher, and constantly
prating "American Lutheranism," was essentially Calvinistic,
Methodistic, Puritanic, indifferentistic, and unionistic, hence nothing
less than truly Lutheran. From his professor's chair and in the press
Schmucker denied and assailed every doctrine distinctive of Lutheranism.
In every issue of the _Observer_ B. Kurtz ridiculed and attacked what
was most sacred to Luther and most prominent in the Lutheran
Confessions. In this he was seconded by Weyl in _Lutherische
Hirtenstimme_ and other publications in the General Synod. Thus, while
professing and pretending to Americanize the Lutheran Church, the
leaders of the General Synod, in reality, were zealous in denaturing,
corrupting, and inoculating it with views and ways prevailing in the
Reformed churches ever since the days of Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin, and
Wesley. The coryphaei of the General Synod, in order to impart to the
Lutheran Church, as they put it, "the warmth of Methodism and the vigor
of Presbyterianism," disemboweled their own Church of heart and lungs,
and filled the empty skin with sectarian stuffings. American
Lutheranism, according to Schmucker, was not Lutheranism in sympathy
with American institutions and the English language, but abolition of
the Lutheran symbols and rejection of the Lutheran doctrines
(absolution, real presence, baptismal regeneration, etc.) in favor of
the corresponding Reformed tenets and the nine articles of the
Evangelical Alliance. Reynolds said in a letter of January 7, 1850: "The
fact is, there is a large body of men in our Church who have no
knowledge of her history, no sympathy with her doctrines, no idea of her
true character, and whose conception of the Church is that of a kind of
mongrel Methodistic Presbyterianism, and of this party Drs. S. S.
Schmucker and Kurtz are the coryphaei." (Spaeth 1,179.) In 1873 _Lehre
und Wehre_