rinal Articles of the
Augsburg Confession as a standard of faith, it was the only voluntary
body on earth pretending to embrace a nation as its territory, and
bearing a Lutheran name, in which the fundamental doctrines of
Lutheranism were the basis of union. The General Synod was a
declaration, on the part of the Lutheran Church in America, that she had
no intention of dying or moving, that she liked this Western World and
meant to live here. And she has lived and waxed stronger and stronger,
and the General Synod has been a mighty agent in sustaining and
extending her beneficent work, and is destined to see a future which
shall eclipse all her glory in the past. Heaven pity the fate of the man
who looks upon the General Synod as having been a curse to the Church,
or an inefficient worker in it--who imagines that Lutheranism would be
stronger if the General Synod were weaker, or that truth would be reared
upon the ruins of what she has been patiently laboring for nearly forty
years to build." (Spaeth, 1, 383.)

21. Spaeth, and Jacobs on the General Synod.--After referring to the
unionistic, rationalistic, and Socinian degeneration in the Pennsylvania
and New York Ministeriums prior to the organization of the General
Synod, A. Spaeth continues: "With this powerful influx of rationalism,
and with the tendency of the remaining positive elements of our Church
to assimilate and unite themselves with the surrounding 'Evangelical
Denominations,' there was evident danger for the Lutheran Church in
America of losing her historical connection with the fathers, and
surrendering the distinctive features for which they contended, and as a
religious society becoming simply a member of the Reformed family. At
this point of threatening disintegration and dilapidation, the first
steps were taken toward the establishment of the General Synod, which
was certainly an honest effort to improve the state of affairs, to
gather the scattered members of our Lutheran Church, and to preserve her
as such on this Western Continent. Viewed in this light, the formation
of the General Synod was 'an offspring of reviving Lutheranism,' as Dr.
Krauth called it. But the difficulty and danger arose from the fact that
two conflicting and irreconcilable elements tried to unite in it with a
sort of compromise, the one, latitudinarian, un-Lutheran, unwilling or
unable to prize the treasures of the Mother Church of the Reformation,
and overanxious to exchange th