was prepared according to the plan decided on by about twenty brethren, and claimed no authority until acted on by Synod.  The Definite Platform could never, with truth, be regarded as the work of a few individuals.  Its inception was the result of a consultation of a large number of influential brethren, especially of the West, who had been convinced by the aggressions of surrounding symbolists, that a decided, but also a more definite stand on the ground of the General Synod, was necessary in self-defence.  It was prepared and published at their request, not as an official document, but as a draft of such a basis as they had agreed on.  It was presented to them, and taken up for consideration by their several Synods; and the unanimity with which they adopted it is conclusive proof that it was prepared according to the stipulated principles.  By denying the right of the several Synods of Ohio, and of any other Synod, to improve or decide on their own doctrinal basis, within the fundamentals of Scripture as taught in the Augsburg Confession, the enemies of the Platform renounce the principles of the General Synod, which expressly allows this right; and they also renounce the original and universally acknowledged Independent or Congregational principles of Lutheran Church Government, avowed by Luther, Melancthon, and all the leading divines of our church, one part of which is the right and obligation to form our own views of Scripture truth, and to avow them to the world.

No individual can justly pronounce the Platform an invasion of his rights; for it has never even been proposed by its friends to any Synod other than those at the request of whose members it was prepared; and should it, at any time hereafter, be presented, it will possess no authority unless conferred on it by Synodical action, in which each minister has a right to participate.  The war that has been and is still waged against the Platform, by old Lutheran Synods, and papers, to whom it was never proposed for adoption, is wholly offensive; and whilst we do not deny the right of any Synod to take it up by way of counsel, the intolerant and aggressive principles avowed by Old School papers, is a direct assault on the rights of American or New School Lutherans, which cannot in the end fail to unite them in measures of self-defence.

Secondly, the Plea is mistaken, in supposing that the friends of the Platform profess to be the true representatives of the Lutheran Church in the symbolic sense of the term:  for have they not reiterated, in a score of publications, for five and twenty years past, that they do not hold all the views of the former symbols; and does not the Platform itself explicitly disclaim any such idea, by publicly protesting against the errors of those books?

Thirdly, the idea of our “unchurching others,” is openly disclaimed by the Platform, as was proved above.