This one was tougher than the others. The main source was from http://www.archive.org/details/americanluthera00schmgoog which was not as clean of a scan as the others I have worked with. And when you look at the raw page scans, you can see why the OCR is messy. In addition, it is longer than any of the other books I have released here. They DO have a good cover picture of Schmucker that can be used there.
The OCR failed to capture the greek texts (and in one case hebrew) that well. My knowledge of greek is a bit weak, and I don't claim any hebrew, so errors are quite possible due to my limited abilities in this area. Most Greek texts are actually copied from one of the many versions of the Textus Receptus I have in Logos. This helped me with understanding (or maybe not having to understand) some differences in how Greek was printed then compared with now. However, on Pg. 260 for the Athanasius quote, I had to manually transcribe the greek. Some of what I put there, frankly, does not make sense to me. To my eyes, it looks like the book is using terminal miniscule sigmas for the two letter combination of sigma tau in the middle of words like pistis, esti, and Xristw. In the end I went with trying to reproduce what I saw instead of trying to convert it to a form that makes sense to me.
Finally, Schmucker and I are quite far apart theologically when it comes to the doctrinal basis of Lutheranism here. Reading as much of his work, I do understand him a bit better. It has also been quite frustrating for me. It is quite a reminder of how the gifts of God always come from unworthy ministers. As Schmucker was writing these addresses, the 19th Century renewal of Lutheranism that started with Pr. Harms in Prussia was influencing things on the other side of the ocean. One of the leaders resisting Schmucker was one of his students - Charles Porterfield Krauth, and another was his own son, Beale Melacthon Schmucker. This is the way the Holy Spirit works - it comes in "clay jars" as St. Paul puts it.
With regards to links: I have inserted a few links to the Book of Concord whenever a particular article is discussed. I did not include a link whenever it was mentioned in passing. This is a judgement call, I know. I have also coded these links to the BookOfConcord datatype. This means they SHOULD work with any of the editions of the Book of Concord out there. That said, I already know that they do not work well with the Kolb-Wengert in the Augsburg Confession translation of the German text. They work with the Kolb-Wengert translation of the Latin text, as well as with the Tappert, but there seem to be issues with K-W with regards to linking.
I do have one request - I want a report back from someone who has both this and the Hoffman "Broken Platform" to tell me if the links in the Hoffman to this work are functional for you. I want to know if this works before I release Mann's Lutheranism in America.
SDG
Ken McGuire
