nt branches of the sciences by pious and well-trained teachers of
our faith. Now, by our Seminary, the Church may be supplied with learned
and pious preachers, who are able to instruct their hearers in both
languages. And from this institute they will always go forth as
brethren, inspired by the same spirit and led by the same principles."
(_Proceedings_, 1831,22.) In 1857, Krauth, Jr., defending the General
Synod, said: "She is the offspring of a reviving Lutheranism, born in
the dawn that followed the night which fell upon our Church in this
land, when the patriarchal luminaries of her early history had set on
earth to rise in heaven. When the General Synod came into being,
Rationalism still was in the ascendant in Europe. The names of Gabler
and Bretschneider, of Wegscheider and Roehr, were names which had been
held high in honor in the Lutheran Church in Germany. That Church had
become what such men might have been expected to make her. Where their
influence prevailed, she had become rotten in doctrine, destitute not
only of the power of godliness, but even of the decencies of its forms,
and ready, at the command of a royal devotee of Dagon, for a conjunction
which she once would have regarded as the adding of a scaly tail and
fishy fin to the fair bust of woman; but the bust was as fishy as the
tail now, and they were frozen into happy conjunction. But this was not
the Lutheranism which the General Synod desired to plant and perpetuate
in the New World. When the Lutheran Church looked around her in her
adopted land, she saw ignorance of her principles and prejudices of
every hue prevailing against her. When she looked to her native land,
all was thick darkness there. What was there on this side of the
Atlantic or beyond it to inspire hope? Why not abandon the experiment as
a thing foregone, and yield to the process of absorption into
surrounding sects? It was at this crisis that the life of the Church
displayed itself in the formation of the General Synod. The formation
was a great act of faith, made, as the framers of her Constitution
sublimely express it, in reliance 'upon God our Father, in the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ, under the guidance and direction of the Holy
Spirit in the Word of God.' The framers of that Constitution should be
as dear to us as Lutherans as the framers of our Federal Constitution
are to us as Americans. When the General Synod became completely
organized by the acknowledgment of the doct