# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1856_S220
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Correspondence from Germany. 220

—were unconditionally right as against their opponents, yet on the points named showed palpable weaknesses? Certainly such wounds do not heal in a day, and, as so often, need and the enemy's pressure have no doubt driven us, for the time being, to think of means and ways toward a reconciliation. Bunsen's Zeichen der Zeit [Signs of the Times], which unsparingly exposed the undeniable defects "of the Lutherans," for which perhaps the reproach of odium generis humani may yet be brought upon them, have probably had this advantage for us: that they pointed the separated Lutherans to the necessity of unity on those points. Civil wars are, to be sure, far more dangerous than foreign ones, especially when the two coincide.

Now a few particulars from our own Saxony. The office of chief court preacher is now filled; Liebner has exchanged the professor's chair for the bishop's seat. It remains to be seen whether this man will grace the interrupted, excellent line of our famous chief court preachers. On the part of the confessional party his call has been received in silence, and while one does not exactly fear anything from him, neither does one exactly hope for much from him. How, indeed, should a single man be able to move an entire church, still resting on the Concordia, off its course! Matters would stand differently if those petitions for the removal of the confessions, which went out in the time before and shortly after 1848, had succeeded, or if the change to the oath-formula presented to our state ministers charged with evangelicis matters upon their entering office — as was made in 1849 — were to draw real consequences after it; but people no longer sleep in the church now, they watch, and so it will be hard for the enemy to sow tares, and in any case voices will in due time arise again which, as at the last Landtag, will maintain the good historical right of our church, and will not let Leipzig become a Wittenberg or Dresden a Berlin. Alongside Liebner, Gilbert, formerly church councillor at Bautzen, has been called as Privy Church Councillor into the Ministry of Worship. The first sign of life which this newly reorganized Ministry has given is a decree, recently issued, according to which a visitation of our churches and schools is to be held in the next three years. The individual superintendents [Ephoren] have been appointed as visitors, though each is to be given a capable clergyman of the land as an assistant. Thus the rationalist Superintendent Beier of Plauen will visit, alongside Alfeld of Leipzig, in the Ephorate of Plauen. The visitation will extend above all to the doctrine and life of the clergy and teachers, as well as to the condition of the congregations, but will also take into account the externa of the church. The revival of Christian life in the congregations, the examination of the teaching estate, the strengthening of the position which the superintendents hold in our church — who had sunk into being almost mere bureaucratic officials — and other, more secondary matters besides, are the declared purposes of this measure. A visitation like that of 1529 we do not expect, but neither do we expect mere show-pieces such as the last vi—