od. To satisfy this alleged need of the
Church, the Platform was offered to the District Synods with the
direction, for the sake of uniformity, to adopt it without further
alterations and with the resolution not to receive any minister who will
not subscribe to it. Thus, in publishing the Platform, Schmucker and his
compeers cast off the Lutheran mask and revealed the true inwardness of
their intolerant Reformed spirit--a blunder which served to frustrate
their own sinister objects. The reception which this document met was a
sore disappointment to its author. In the commotion which followed the
publication of the Platform the conservative element was strengthened, a
fact which, a decade later, led to the great secession of 1866, and
gradually also to the present ascendency of the conservatives within the
General Synod, and the subsequent revision of its doctrinal basis,
completed in 1913. H. J. Mann wrote in 1856: "The Platform controversy
will, in the end, prove a blessing. The conservative party will arrive
at a better understanding. In ten years Schmucker has not damaged
himself so much in the public opinion as in the one last year." (Spaeth,
178.)

56. Viewed Historically.--In explanation and extenuation of the Platform
blunder Dr. Mann remarked in 1856: "The more thoroughly we investigate
the history of the Lutheran Church of this country, the better we will
comprehend why all happened just so. No one is particularly guilty; it
is a common misfortune of the times, of the conditions." (Spaeth, 175.)
H. E. Jacobs explains: "The ministers, in most cases, did not obtain
that thorough and many-sided liberal culture which a college course was
supposed to represent, and this was felt also in their theological
training. ... It may serve as a partial explanation of the confusion
that prevailed that there was not a single professor of theology in the
English seminaries in the North who had obtained the liberal training of
a full college course, except the professor of German theology at
Gettysburg. The controversy connected with the 'Definite Platform,'
prepared and published under a supervision characterized by the same
defects, may be more readily understood when this in remembered."
(History, 436.) The explanation offered by Dr. Jacobs might be
reenforced by the report of the Directors of the Seminary in 1839: "It
is to be regretted that the students generally spend so short a time in
theological studies. But few attend