We now have men in our Church who understand just as much of the Bible and of theology as our fathers. If this were not the case, we must be stupid scholars, a degenerated generation." (_L. u. W_. 6, 252.) In the same year: "May those, then, who are opposed to the progress backwards, to liturgies, to priestly gowns, to bands, candles, crucifixes, baptismal regeneration, the real presence, priestly confession and absolution, and all other phases of the half-papists, stand firmly by the old _Observer_." (_L. u. W._ 1860, 318.) In the _Observer_, December 26, 1862, Kurtz said: Wisdom did not die with the Reformers; nor would it die with the present generation. Giant strides had been made in science, history, chemistry, philology. The progress in astronomy enabled us to understand the Bible better than our fathers. Geology taught us to explain the first chapter of Genesis more correctly than a hundred years ago. Even if we were dwarfs compared with the Reformers, with our increased advantages we ought to understand the Bible better than they. A dwarf, standing on the shoulders of a giant, can see farther than the giant himself. A confession of faith, therefore, ought not to be like the laws of the Medes and Persians, but subject to improvement and growing perfection. Luther and his colaborers explained the Bible more correctly than any like number of their contemporaries. But we do not believe that they understood it as well as God's enlightened people of the present. Indeed, an intelligent Sunday-school child has a clearer insight into the plan of salvation, etc., than John the Baptist, the greatest of prophets. Is it, then, to be assumed that since the middle of the sixteenth century no progress was made in Biblical learning? (_L. u. W._ 1863, 92.) However, always guided by expediency, and hence able also "to do otherwise," the _Observer_, April 13, 1866, wrote: "We have all agreed that the Unaltered Augsburg Confession is the only general platform upon which all of us can stand. There are some among us, to the number of whom the writer belongs, who have always believed and still think that an American Recension of this venerable document, as presented in the Definite Platform, would give us a faith more in harmony with the Scripture. But where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, the greatest liberty compatible with the unity of true Evangelical Protestantism. To make concessions within reasonable limitations we have accordingly deemed our religious duty." (_L. u. W._ 1866, 185.) In its issue of January 17, 1908, the _Observer_ again claims the liberty of revising the confessions. (_L. u. W._ 1908, 90.) Self-evidently, the _American Lutheran_ was in sympathy with the Platform. In 1873 it declared its standpoint as follows: "We American Lutherans adopt the Augsburg Confession only in a qualified sense, _viz_., as teaching the fundamental truths of religion in a manner substantially correct, but