# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S317
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

317

Miscellaneous Church News.

From the Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau-Cöthen. After a long series of years — in the Dessau lands for 40 years — in which no subscription of the pastors to the Symbols had taken place, one is now beginning, as we learn from the Evangelical Church Gazette, on the part of the church government here, to recognize that this cannot go on if the church is not to dissolve entirely and heathenism, instead of the Gospel, be preached to the poor people. On February 8 of this year a ducal decree accordingly appeared, imposing on every evangelical pastor, before his ordination, the taking of the following oath: "I vow, as upon oath, that I will teach the Word of God of the Old and New Testament, without human additions, purely and unfalsified, and will faithfully conform myself herein to the three ecumenical Symbols, as well as to the evangelical confessional writings that have come to legal standing in Anhalt, namely the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, and will introduce or defend no old or new doctrinal opinion that is contrary to the same, but rather, where necessary, will reject it and warn against it." Also at the ordination itself, the ordaining minister is expressly to point to this obligation to the above-named ecclesiastical confession, both in the exhortation to be given to the ordinand and especially in the question to be put to him for solemn assent; this obligation is further to be included in the certificate of call and likewise to be pronounced at the installation. Should a call to a preaching office in a Lutheran congregation occur, then, besides the named confessional writings, the Smalcald Articles and both of Luther's Catechisms are also expressly to be named.*) The schoolteachers, too, are to be given to understand "that the confessional writings that have come to legal standing in the evangelical territorial church of Anhalt are to be authoritative for their religious instruction." The same has been held up to those pastors who had hitherto received ordination in the Anhalt lands without an express obligation.

The "United Brethren in Christ" have as their organ the "Fröhlicher Botschafter" (Joyful Messenger), published at Dayton. In that paper an agent of the same remarks: "Our German Pennsylvanians are not so reading a people as the European Germans. In the last three years, our institution sent more books to Oregon Territory than into this Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. The state of Iowa now already takes more copies of the religious Telescope" (likewise an organ of the said body) "than the state of Pennsylvania."

The Methodists, as is well known, have the arrangement that the congregations must not only change their pastor every year, or at least every second year, but that these pastors are also sent to them by the "Conference." This piece of harsh hierarchy, by which the congregations are deprived of one of their dearest rights, the right of call and election, bears its bitter fruits as well. In the "Apologist" of September 4 of this year, a Methodist woman correspondent writes, among other things, as follows: "Oh, how often has my heart been grieved when, at the close of each year, I heard the fathers and mothers in Israel, as well as the younger members, asking God to send them a shepherd with a holy heart, and afterward would not believe that God had sent him. Let me ask, did you believe, while you wrestled with God, that God would hear your prayers? Did you believe it when the appointments were made and your pastor came to labor among you; did you feel that your prayer had been heard? Did you receive your pastor with open arms and warm hearts? Or did you turn from him with cold indifference and say, "We did not want Brother — to come—

*) Unfortunately, namely, in the Anhalt-Lutheran church the Formula of Concord has never been officially recognized as an ecclesiastical Symbol, although here too, as nowhere in the truly Lutheran church, its doctrine has ever been rejected.