# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S287
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Baiern. 287

some use of them indeed possible, but extremely questionable do we consider such a use to be in the case of a modern kind of devotional book: the religious novel. Their number, and the public's taste for them, is on the rise; but far from taking pleasure in this, we must rather recognize in it a disquieting sign of the prevailing temper of the religious world. Such books, serving as a surrogate for the majestically earnest, sound, and vigorous activity of the church, promote a Christianity of contrived feelings and phrases without power. Love stories and conversion stories do not belong together. Such a mixture yields no popular books that one can take pleasure in; they will drive their readers' taste for the earnest, dry catechism away all the more. If children are to learn religion in a playful way besides, when and where will they learn to distinguish earnestness from play? It is only with pain and displeasure that one can regard the mass of children's books, hymn collections, almanacs, and the like, in which farce and devotion are mixed together. What can come of such means of formation except a generation that takes its aesthetic playfulness for religion and, in the end, takes the fearful earnestness of religion itself for a plaything? The parlor and the church, or the tavern and the church, do not belong under one roof. Should the parlor and the tavern serve as a vestibule to the church, then let one see to what sort of church that will lead.

That through this whole hybrid literature Christian truths come again into circles otherwise closed to them is meant to serve as justification, or at least as an excuse, for the entire thing. It is the same slack morality which found it fine and good to smuggle Bibles into China together with chests of opium. Divine truth needs no such missions. On the lawful way alone, and clothed in the earnestness — at once plain and shattering — that is properly its own, will it, and does it mean to, find entrance.

(Saxon Church and School Gazette.)

Bavaria.

The Supreme Consistory in Munich has made a very noteworthy arrangement. "For some time now," it says in a decree of May 2 of this year, "and especially now, when all questions touching upon church life are gaining heightened importance, the royal Supreme Consistory has felt the need to enter into direct personal contact with the clergy subject to its oversight, in order thereby to secure a still more effective and influential outcome for its work of church governance. The verbal exchange of thoughts and views about what, for the outward and inward church-