# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S219
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence from Germany. 219

...the light of the Union, that he cannot understand even the simplest thing. Those royal Prussian Union cabinet-orders hold together this much-splintered Union-realm, at whose head, alongside the summus episcopus, stands a united-Lutheran-Reformed supreme church council. One governs according to the Corpus Reformatorum, ed. Bretschneider, that is, according to Melanchthon's epistolae, consilia, vota, etc., just as in France Louis Napoleon governs according to the papers left behind by his uncle. The word "Union," so much squeezed and stretched, is of course gradually falling into disrepute. Recently a United clergyman wrote in the Protestant Kirchenzeitung from Pomerania: "Yes, it is the Union — this noble king's daughter, who was born in splendor and abundance in a royal palace and raised under royal care, in her youth perhaps also somewhat spoiled — it was not sung to her at the cradle that she would one day have to wander through the land so poor and forsaken, and eke out a wretched living, and be scolded and cursed at like Cinderella — and must, in the end, still be content that she is not simply locked up as a vagrant or transported across the border. Yet perhaps she too, like Cinderella, will come again to honor and dignity; she is indeed worthy enough of it." So then, a church born and raised in the palace of the Rex Borussorum in Berlin — that is the Union-church, a kingdom of this world, whose immediate lord is not He who was crucified on Golgotha, He of the crown of thorns, but a Friedrich Wilhelm; it is a church that does not, like Moses, choose rather to suffer reproach with the people of God.

But now, if we Lutherans, who dwell as though on islands lying about the Union-continent, were permitted to boast! Now, I do not mean to utterly destroy all our boasting, for who would deny that the Lord is also at work with His Spirit and gifts in the Lutheran territorial churches, so much reviled as they are — or who could hinder Him, should He once wish to turn the lowest to the highest, and make the last first and the first last, as it pleases Him to do. Among the bona omina I place, above all, something that touches you directly as well. In April of this year a gathering of Lutheran theologians took place in the little town of Reichenbach in the Vogtland (present were: Kliefoth and Philippi of Mecklenburg; Harleß, Delitzsch, Schmidt, Hofmann, and Harnack of Erlangen; Nagel and Huschke of Breslau; Besser and Kahnis of Leipzig), at which they discussed the twofold question of church and office [the ministry], and, as one hears, reached agreement on the main points. No particulars have yet become known about it, but the results are said to be appearing in print. Should a real, thorough agreement have been reached among these men on these disputed questions, that would without doubt have to be called an event for our church. For who does not see that this rift within our own camp has made us a mockery to our enemies, and that the lack of success of the efforts of some of our brothers, in Hanover as well as in Hesse, had its cause chiefly in the fact that they, who on those questions