# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S311
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Grand Duchy of Baden. 311

now, nor at any time in the future, allow my conscience, bound to the Augsburg Confession and the Lutheran catechisms, to be bound to any church order other than one agreeing with these.

I have accordingly indeed overstepped the church order favored by the General Synod of 1832, and by formal right have deserved the disciplinary penalty imposed upon me, the more so as I am charged with having also incited the congregation entrusted to me to rebellion against the existing church order, by drawing up a petition in which it approached the supreme bishop of the land for the free use of the Lutheran books of faith in church and school. —

This is my disobedience! And for this, the penalty of dismissal from office! But whether the obedience of a churchman to the Augsburg Confession and the symbolical catechisms, in doctrine and in worship — whether, that is, holding fast to the genuine ecclesiastical constitution of Germany — is to be impugned and condemned as rebellion against church order, we know, even in suffering for the sake of the Protestant conscience, that we nevertheless stand on the true conservative ground and soil of the German Church. We repeat here what we already wrote on this matter in the year 1851: ""The books which have hitherto held validity in the territorial church are the creatures of a revolutionary age, and were meant to become bridges to a rationalistic-naturalistic church constitution; these books — catechism, agenda, and hymnal — are not themselves, in any case, the church constitution, but are meant everywhere to be children, voices, tokens of the genuine constitution; if these children do not descend from the true father, if they do not have the blood of the mother, then they are bastards and no children; if they do not sound in tune with the fundamental tone of the true Protestant Church, but instead squeal into the harmony with false notes, then they are false voices; if they wished to plant foreign colors in, or beside, the imperial banner, then we know that they are not content with the venerable, three-hundred-year-old house colors of the Lutheran Church. Now whoever protests against changeling children, against discords, and against foreign colors that do not belong in the house of God, and who, on the other hand, brings the rightful children to honor and makes the ancient, venerable banner-adornment of God's house dear and precious to the people — may he be reviled and cast out by the Church as a revolutionary?""

But what is one to call the endeavor of those who have built such bridges, over which the revolution has come into the Church, and who now, as a consequence of it, still uphold liberalistic and libertine principles as the ruling and guiding principle of church government? I take it that my dismissal from office is a blow struck against the conservative principle! May this blow have good consequences for the true Church!

Georg Friedrich Haag."