of God's sacramental host,
degrades the Lutheran Church, the Mother Church of the Reformation,"
Brown declared in his pamphlet against the assailants of the General
Synod. (22.) And when asked, in 1868, in the lawsuit of Hebron
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Leechburg: "Do you believe as Professor
of Didactic Theology at the Seminary of the General Synod that the
doctrines of the Augsburg Confession agree with Holy Scripture?" Brown
answered under oath, "I hold the Augsburg Confession to be a correct
exhibition of the fundamental doctrines of the divine Word." Asked
again, "Do you believe as such Professor that the Augsburg Confession
teaches some things which are not in harmony with the Bible?" he
answered, "In certain points there are, according to what appears to be
its true and original sense, some things taught in the Augsburg
Confession which I do not consider as taught in the Bible or in
agreement therewith." Requested to enumerate fundamental doctrines of
the Word of God found in the Augsburg Confession to which the
constitution of the General Synod referred, he mentioned seven of the
twenty-one articles as fundamental, one as not fundamental, and all the
others as containing doctrines of fundamental character, but not
fundamental in their exact expression. In his pamphlet, "The General
Synod and Her Assailants," Brown wrote: The Lutheran Church has its
confessions, liturgies, etc., "but she enforces none of them upon her
members in the form of rigorous and compulsatory law; ... it does not
lie in the genius of our Church to enforce her utterances, in all their
details, as if they were indispensable, either to Christianity or
herself." (12.)

80. Dr. J.G. Butler and the "Lutheran Evangelist."--Dr. Butler, pastor
of the Lutheran Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., and editor of the
_Lutheran Evangelist_, was among the most liberal of the General Synod
pastors and in every respect a unionistic-Reformed-Methodistic
theologian, who rejected every doctrine distinctive of Lutheranism. (_L.
u. W._ 1908, 321.) In 1895 he wrote: "I have become almost entirely
indifferent to theological and even to denominational differences of
practise and belief." (1895, 251.) In 1899: "The things which separate
us [evangelical denominations] are of a speculative nature and have
nothing to do with the substance of that faith which saves souls and is
the only hope of a lost world." (1899, 124.) At his fiftieth jubilee, in
1899, address