# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 06 11_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162

hearers to awaken, that today the foundation is being laid for a work upon which God looks down with good pleasure, and from which Church and State, and above all the German Protestant population of our West, may promise themselves a good fruit, however small, even for distant times.

If I now set about attempting the solution of the task set me, namely to furnish the proof that the Church has always been a faithful, sincere nurse of art and science, and according to its nature and its calling always had to be, I point above all to the history of the Church; for, pointing to its history, I can confidently declare: The Church has not merely professed its love for art and science with the mouth, it has also at all times proved and practiced this love.

When the Church gained entrance among peoples already cultivated, such as the Greeks and Romans were among others, it did not suppress the sense for science and art already living among the people, but only sanctified it, gave it a higher direction and a divine inspiration. The higher schools which the Church of the first centuries found among the Greeks and Romans it took into itself, and pursued in them not only the theological but also the philosophical disciplines.*) Yea, the Church was far from banishing, in fanatical narrowness, the reading of the classical writers of heathendom from its schools of learning; it used these masterpieces of style, of design and of acuteness rather wisely for the purpose of letting its students draw from them a knowledge of language, and exercise and form their judgment and taste upon them. Already in the second century we therefore find in the bosom of the congregation at Alexandria a famous college, in which in the course of time the most distinguished scholars, among others a Pantaenus, a Clemens Alexandrinus, an Origen and others, especially several renowned philosophers converted to Christianity, labored as teachers; an institution which, together with other Christian academies, such as that at Caesarea, soon left all the high schools of the Greek and Roman sages far behind it, so that the Emperor Julian the Apostate, jealous of the progress of the Christians in learned education, forbade the Christians in the fourth century to pursue the classical writers of antiquity in their schools. But greater still was the merit which the Church earned by the establishment of its so-called catechetical schools within the individual congregations, through which a higher knowledge became the common possession also of the people, or of the laity. Whereas among the educated heathen there were schools only for professional investigators or for the youth of the higher classes, it was the Church that first awakened the need of schools for the people, and so these grew up only under the shadow of the Church and of the Gospel, and still distinguish the Christian peoples above all other peoples of the earth.

*) Eusebius names in particular grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic (cf. Lib. VI, c. 3. 18. VII, 32.).

But as the Church sanctified and fostered science, so also art. New fields the Church opened, among others, to rhetoric or oratory through the office of preaching, which was now set up and came into vogue in every congregation, even the smallest; to poetry through the great deeds of God which it preached; to painting and the plastic arts through the great subjects of sacred history and revelation which it laid before them; to architecture through the houses of God which it required; to music through the common songs that belonged to its worship. In short, there was no province of human knowledge and human art into which the Church and Christianity did not breathe new life and movement, and into which it did not bring new subjects for a holy inspiration.

Yet more brilliantly has the Church shown that it is a nurse of culture, art and science, when it sought out the peoples who were still in a state of rudeness. Whenever the Church, with the Gospel in its hand, penetrated into the inhospitable forests whose uncultivated inhabitants, sunk in senseless idolatry, roamed restlessly about in wild hordes, the Church taught them not only to know the invisible God, their Creator and Redeemer, but scarcely did the banner of the cross flutter among them when plow, spade and sickle followed it; the dark forests were cleared, and in a short time culture, civility, the art of writing and reading, and finally every higher art and science had become at home in the former wilderness, transformed into a fruitful, smiling field and sown with villages and towns. What would the German people be even now other than the people of the natives of America, had the Church not sought out our heathen forefathers in their gloomy oak forests and dreadful hunting grounds?

If one follows the course of the stream of the history of the Church only with a hasty glance, one sees accordingly how with the decline of the Church, among other things through the papacy, art also, and in particular science, declined. What is the "dark" Middle Age, so called by all the world, other than the age of the deepest decline of the Church? And the works of art and science which were produced even in that time, where else were these born than in the bosom of the Church buried in rubble? And when three hundred years ago the Church arose from her grave and the sun of the Gospel again rose brightly shining over the nations: behold! then there arose with her again art and science also, and at last, under the shelter of the Reformation, ascended the summit on which they now stand.

You therefore, who so gladly represent the Church to the people as an enemy even of true light, true enlightenment and culture, true art and science, in order thereby to make its heavenly light suspected, you will not fully attain your purposes until you have blotted out the writing which is entered in the book of history. For there it stands written in large characters on the page of every century: that the Church has proved itself by deed a friend and nurse of the education of the people.

Yet not only has the Church so proved itself, it must of necessity so prove itself; its own holy interest requires it.

The Church is, as the greatest herald of the Gospel among the Gentiles writes, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone, or upon the Word of God of the Old and New Testament. This Word, however, is laid down in writing in certain holy documents in languages which for long centuries have been spoken by no people of the earth. This shows us the first reason why it lies in the interest of the Church itself that art and science be fostered and propagated; for should the Church lose the knowledge of the ancient languages, the knowledge of history, the knowledge of antiquities, the knowledge of chronology and the like, it would at the same time lose the understanding of the Scriptures upon which it is founded. With full right therefore the great Reformer of the Church writes: "As dear as the Gospel is to us, so strictly let us hold to the languages." To this comes further that the Christian Church throughout eighteen centuries has stored up in writings of the most various languages immeasurable treasures of knowledge and experience, which would all be lost with the science of the Church of the present.

But as the Church needs the sciences for its building up and building on, so it needs them just as much for its defense. Science has from of old been a fearful weapon in the hands of enemies for destroying the Church; and quite especially in our days this weapon is being brandished against the Church by the most gifted and best informed of its enemies. Woe therefore to the Church if it were to be remiss and would not wrest this weapon from the hands of its enemies! It would soon have to bewail ever new defeats, as the consequences of its own guilt.

According to this it might indeed seem that this alone lies in the interest of the Church, that science flourish among its teachers and champions; but the Church shall not be a religio-despotic state, not a papacy, either in the great or in the small. The teachers shall not therein rule over the consciences of their hearers, nor the hearers regard their teachers as