# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S278
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

278
Ecclesiastical Conditions in the Kingdom of Saxony.

The Saxon Church and School Gazette, edited by Professor Dr. Kahnis, was until recently supported by the government. Namely, to those church treasuries which kept it on hand for their clergy, teachers, and congregation councils and for subsequent preservation, a third of the price was granted up to that point by the Royal Ministry of Public Worship and Instruction. In return it printed the announcements of the church and school authorities free of charge, and it was moreover also furnished free of charge in numerous copies to entirely indigent treasuries. This, however, became the cause of the paper having to stand before the bar of the second chamber of the estates. A peasant delegate namely brought forward the motion to call upon the Ministry of Public Worship to withdraw that ordinance in which the keeping of the paper was recommended on the strength of its prospectus. The delegate grounded his motion by reading aloud a letter addressed to him from a "clergyman," in which the paper was treated with abusive language of every kind, called miserable, exclusive, damnation-mongering, crypto-Catholic, and a party paper, and it was said that the church treasuries were thereby being plundered. The motion was carried in the chamber by 87 votes, a result that shows fairly clearly how strongly rationalismus vulgaris is still represented in Saxony, for the opposition to the paper plainly has its ground not in the roughly 600 thalers by which the paper was supported out of the church treasuries, but in its insistence upon the ecclesiastical confession. The Ministry of Public Worship was on this occasion itself accused of an exclusive tendency. The minister answered: "The ministry and I personally are strangers to an exclusive tendency, toward whichever side it may lean. — I must, however, add that indeed the notions of what one understands by an exclusive tendency, since they are as a rule taken subjectively, might well be quite various. In my opinion the foundation for our evangelical-Lutheran church is in Saxony especially fully given, and if we hold to it and take it not merely in a purely personal and subjective way, as each individual regards it, but objectively, then we come, as it seems to me, past all difficulties, and that is the standpoint from which I personally, and the Ministry of Public Worship, must consider it our duty to proceed. It must for its part hold to the Scripture and to the confession. That is the foundation of our church, that is what precisely demands the unity of our church, and of which we, I might say, can indeed be proud in Saxony, that Saxony has thus far held fast to it in just this way and, God willing, will continue to hold fast to it further." Whoever has known Saxony in earlier times must be moved to the very depths on hearing such a voice from the mouth of the president of the Ministry of Public Worship there.