# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S281
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Ecclesiastical News. 281

at least not in Saxony .. Another voice of warning from over in America has probably reached the ears of very few. It has been raised in the synodical report of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other States, for the year 1853, headed: "'Secret Societies.'" On account of its importance let it stand here." The paper then lets follow the warning published by our Synod from the report in question, to which is then appended a presentation of the tendencies of the Freemason order and a striking, thorough demonstration of the incompatibility of the evangelical office of the ministry with membership in that secret society.

The Lutheran Associations within the Prussian Union. In Wittenberg, on the 18th and 19th of April, the assembly of the Lutheran associations of the Prussian territory took place. Superintendent Otto, formerly at Naugard, now at Saal, was chosen chairman. Pastor Deutschmann of Bienowitz defined the task of the Lutheran associations as being to secure, in an honest and sincere way, the preservation of the standing of the Lutheran church and the full expression of the Lutheran confession in worship and church government, by a lawful, orderly path, through historical development, without revolutionary pressing. — Following a lecture by Professor Merkel on the position of the church government with respect to these confessional associations and their demands, treating and demonstrating how in the ecclesiastical conditions of Prussia everything had passed from the standpoint of objective right to that of subjectivity, from rights to tendencies, from legal obligation to personal choice, etc., the assembly resolved upon a petition to the ecclesiastical superiors, to the effect that the spiritual office be again set upon a lawful footing in accordance with the confessions, that worship be shaped according to the confession, that the old liturgical orders be released for use, and that the church government itself might again place itself upon churchly-legal ground. — Following a lecture by Pastor Schubring concerning the question of the universities, a petition to the Ministry of State was resolved upon, that at least one ordinary professor of theology for the cultivation of Lutheran dogmatics be appointed at the universities of Prussia that were originally founded by the Lutheran church. — The question of whether a member of the Lutheran associations should, on the occasion of the general visitations, participate in the Lord's Supper as distributed according to the united rite, was answered unanimously in the negative, though in such a way that abstention was recommended to the individual members of the association not as an absolutely binding duty, but only as counsel. At the close of the second day the assembled received the Holy Supper from the hand of Pastors Sander and Hoffmann in the old Luther Church.

The above-named Superintendent Otto has now been designated by the highly honored Count Heinrich von Schönburg, a man zealous in the faith and faithful to the confession, as superintendent in Glauchau, and may the Lord bless his entry into our native church and