ll be no
doctrines which we do not want our children to believe, and which shall,
notwithstanding, be thoroughly orthodox, so that our children may be
made strong in the faith of the Gospel in these times of doctrinal
looseness and confusion. As long as the General Synod regards with equal
favor, and is ready to receive, the Old Lutheran as well as the American
Lutheran Synods, the symbolical men have a vast advantage, and they, no
doubt, regard it as a triumph when the General Synod, meeting after
meeting, continues to hold out its arms to every Lutheran synod, and
recommends as heartily the reviews and institutions which are laboring
to upturn its present foundations, as it does those which are known to
hold the sentiments which it has hitherto fostered." (Spaeth 1, 347.)
Five months before the readmission of the Pennsylvania Synod, Sprecher
declared: "I fear there will be divisions, no matter what course is
taken. As to the hope of gaining over the Symbolic Lutherans, I consider
it altogether delusive. If they ever join the General Synod, it will be
with the hope of controlling it eventually into their own views and for
their own purposes." (353.) Thus, realizing the giant strides which
Western confessionalism had already made, and the steady growth of the
conservative element in the East, and, at the same time, fully
understanding that Lutherans loyal to their Confessions would give no
quarters to a counterfeit substitute of Lutheranism, Schmucker, Kurtz,
Sprecher, and others decided on a _coup d'etat_ in order to force the
issue, to create a test-question, to separate the parties, to eliminate
the "symbolists," and thus forever to make the General Synod immune
against genuine Old School Lutheran confessionalism and safe for their
own mongrel Puritanic-Calvinistic-Methodistic-American Lutheranism.

55. Casting Off the Mask.--In the early part of September, 1855, leading
ministers of the General Synod received a pamphlet: "Definite Platform,
doctrinal and disciplinarian, for Evangelical Lutheran District Synods;
constructed in accordance with the principles of the General Synod."
Spaeth: "The new Confession came without a confessor. It appeared as an
anonymous document, proving by that very fact that the men who concocted
it were not called by God to lead the Church on this Western Continent
to a better, fuller, purer conception and statement of the faith of the
Gospel than that of the Fathers." However, it was not lo