# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Ecclesiastical Conditions in the Kingdom of Saxony. 279

Rightly does a correspondent in the Church and School Gazette write concerning this declaration: "Many a one might perhaps have wished he had answered more valiantly; but against a bombardment of soap bubbles one may spare one's powder." — To the reproach that the oft-mentioned paper is a party paper, the correspondent already cited answers in a manner that we cannot refrain from communicating something of to our readers, since he expresses truths which we should like at the same time to set against similar reproaches that are made here as well against the "Lutheraner" and "Lehre und Wehre." The correspondent writes, among other things, the following: "Is the Church and School Gazette really a party paper? Not under all circumstances need one shun the name of a party, of a party paper, and so forth, for it does not always constitute a real reproach. There are times and circumstances, in the church as in the state, when the representatives of a right as clear as the sun are forcibly pressed into the position of a party. Even the confessors at Augsburg had to let themselves be reckoned as a party. But even in this respect, where the name party paper can itself be an honorable name, the Church and School Gazette cannot take it upon itself. In its previous close relations to the territorial church it has also set itself the task of being an organ of the same ... It has evidently done this at the cost of its reputation, in that it has thereby burdened itself with a quantity of ballast ... But indeed the Church and School Gazette has not been able to shift the foundation of the church; it has not treated the confession and the doctrine of the church as a mere opinion and let rationalism or any other system be regarded as having equal standing in the church; it has not been able to regard its columns as a neutral territory on which biblical and unbiblical, churchly and unchurchly views might have a free playground. It is strange that in the domain of the church one often demands things that would occur to no sensible person in related domains. Will one, for example, demand of a paper standing in the service of the government that it stand open to the theories of the Social Democrats and other destructive tendencies, that it admit attacks upon the constitution, upon the monarchy? And is a church paper, if it does not wish to be a party paper, supposed to be a paper where all sorts of people under heaven gather, and every foolish or clever notion has a right to a hearing? Is there, then, perhaps everywhere else, only not in the church, something fixed and settled that one has to guard? Is there in her no eternally valid truth, exalted above all currents of the times and changes of systems? Is the Palladium of our church, rescued under such hot struggles — her confession — to be called into question again and again and again? Does the work allotted to us consist in this, that we forever anew roll the foundation stone upward, only to let it roll back down again? Are we never to come to building upon the right foundation? Is the revolution, of which one has grown so heartily sick in the state, to