upon the conservative side." (_History_, 427.) But while thus at Gettysburg conservative influences, in a measure, were counteracting the Platform theology, Wittenberg Seminary, at Springfield, 0., the theological center of the Western synods, was unanimous, decided, and most advanced in its advocacy. Sprecher, the leader of "American Lutheranism" in the West, wrote concerning the Platform: "It is the very thing we have long needed in our Church; it will require every man to declare that he is for or against us, and will secure our American Lutheran Church against the insidious efforts of the Old Lutherans to remodel her." "If the New School brethren do not soon decide whether they will give the Church the positive form which it must take in this country ere long, the Old School will decide it for them by making all their synods stand on the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. I do not see what difficulty can be in the way. If those five dogmas rejected [by the Platform] are errors at all, they are very serious errors, and I do not see why there should be so great a desire to be associated with those who teach them. The difference between the Old School and the New School party is of such a nature that they cannot agree except by being silent or separate. If we did not intend to push this matter through, we should never have agitated it at all." (Spaeth, 1, 359.) It goes without saying that B. Kurtz acted the champion of the new confession. When, in 1855, prior to the publication of the Platform, the Synod of Northern Illinois, in its constitution, declared the Augustana and Luther's Small Catechism a "correct" exhibition of the divine truth, Kurtz wrote in the _Observer_: "This is certainly a tremendous leap backward to the patriarchs of the American Lutheran Church. In this enlightened country of free thought and action such high-churchism cannot long maintain itself; its most peculiar fruit is bigotry, ostracism, strife, and separation." (_Lutheraner_, Feb. 13, 1855:) In the same spirit Kurtz edited the _Observer_ after the appearance of the Platform. In an issue of January, 1856, he maintained that the Platform offered nothing new; in the past every member of the General Synod had practised according to its principles; now one merely was to do openly and honestly what heretofore he had been doing with a _reservatio mentalis_. (_L. u. W._ 1856, 64.) Several months later Kurtz published the list of rejected errors of the Symbolical Books, and in a number of subsequent articles supported the Platform, and, at the same time, attacked the distinctive doctrines of Lutheranism, misrepresenting them in Calvinistic fashion. (_L. u. W._ 1856, 140 ff.; 1857,61; 1862,152; 1917,375.) Nor did Kurtz in the following years repent of, or change, his attitude. In the _Observer_ of June 29, 1860, he declared: "We are qualified to formulate a confession of faith not only just as well, but better than those who lived three hundred years ago.