child becomes a Christian, and is
endowed with faith, in Baptism. (_Luth. Witness_ 1918, 341. 356.) Rev.
Brenner: "How long ago has it been considered a good policy in the
General Council for its Mission Boards to agitate 'working together with
the denominations about us for the best interest of our fellow-men,' and
to 'agree on a program to lift the world to a higher level' by
'petitioning, demanding, and insisting upon special legislation for
abolishing the saloon,' and doing a thousand other things which is the
business, not of the Church, but of the State.... Individual synods have
passed prohibition resolutions. Individual pastors have gone entirely
too far in this matter. They are fanatical on the subject. Some have
almost gone daft over the liquor problem." (_L. u. W._ 1917, 465.) The
_Home Missionary_, December, 1916, declared that what the Lutheran
Church teaches in reference to the separation of Church and State is
"rot" and "fool" theology. (464.)

132. Qualified Confessional Subscription.--It was an ultrasymbolism, not
countenanced by the Lutheran Church, when the _Lutheran and Missionary_
maintained in its issue of September 27, 1867, that it was false,
dangerous, and inconsistent to declare it the duty of Lutherans to
compare for themselves the confessions received from the fathers with
the Scriptures, and if found erring, to correct them; that this
unbridled and radical theory, resting on the false assumption that
private investigation of the Scriptures is the foundation of our faith,
could not be proved by the Scriptures, and, reduced to practise, would
endanger all purity of doctrine, and finally destroy all ecclesiastical
communion. (_L. u. W._ 1867, 371.) In the _Lutheran_, March 5, 1908,
however, Dr. H.E. Jacobs, defending the other extreme, wrote: "Some of
the difficulties that men whom we esteem have urged against the
acceptance of all our Confessions are due to a misunderstanding of what
is involved in a confessional subscription. They conceive of the
Confessions as an external law that binds the conscience to a mechanical
acceptance of all [doctrinal matter] that may be found in these
documents. What is properly confessional in these documents is their
answers to the questions that rendered the framing of a confessional
statement necessary.... We must study our Confessions as an organism,
and appreciate the relation of each part to the other parts and to the
whole Confession. Where the heart of e