tecting the General Synod against what they
regarded as the Western peril. "Now or never!" they whispered. Indeed,
Schmucker and his friends had long ago decided that a new confessional
standard was needed. As early as 1845, at Philadelphia, the General
Synod had appointed Schmucker, Kurtz, Morris, Schmidt, and Pohlman to
formulate and present to the next convention an abstract of the
doctrines and usages of the American Lutheran Church on the order of the
Abstract requested by the Maryland Synod, in 1844. And though, in 1850,
at Charleston, the report of this committee was laid on the table and
the committee discharged from further duty (27), Schmucker did not
abandon the idea of substituting a new "American Lutheran Creed" for the
Augsburg Confession. Moreover, the conviction of the dire need of an
American restatement of Lutheranism grew on him in the same proportion
as confessionalism swept the West and threatened the East. His
brother-in-law, S. Sprecher, was of the same opinion. In 1853 he wrote:
"I hope that this unhappy condition of the Church will not continue
long, and that the churches of the General Synod will do as the churches
of the Augsburg Confession did in 1580--exercise their right to declare
what they regard as doctrines of the sacred Scriptures in regard to all
the points in dispute in the Church. I do not believe that the present
position of the General Synod can long be maintained; it will either
result in the Old-Lutheran men and synods gaining the control of the
General Synod, and reintroducing those doctrines and practises of the
symbols which the churches in this country and everywhere ought to
abandon and condemn, _and say that they do;_ or the friends of the
American Lutheran Church must define what doctrines they do hold, and
what they do reject, and refuse to fraternize with, and to make
themselves responsible for, and to give their influence as a Church in
favor of, men and doctrines and practises which they hold to be
anti-Scriptural and injurious to the spiritual kingdom of Christ. I do
not see how we can do otherwise than adopt the Symbols of the Church, or
form a new symbol, which shall embrace all that is fundamental to
Christianity in them, rejecting what is unscriptural, and supplying what
is defective. _A creed we must have_, or we can have no real church
union, and we must have a catechism which shall be a standard in the
catechetical instruction of our children, in which there sha