# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S340
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

340 Church Conditions in the Coburg Region.

...equipped for various subjects with good methods. In their way they also love the children. But as far as instruction in Christianity is concerned, they can give their pupils only what they themselves have received, and that is not the pure Gospel but human cleverness. The catechism-exposition introduced into the schools of the land is a perversion of the catechism, the well-known one by Parisius, which is scarcely still in use anywhere else. In this book the doctrine of the triune God is touched upon only in passing, and the doctrines of the deity of Christ, of original sin, and of the new birth do not occur in it at all; justification by faith alone is mentioned only incidentally. Holy Baptism appears in it merely as a beautiful custom, Holy Communion as a mere memorial meal. — Two years ago, fourteen clergymen of the land exposed this book as it deserves and petitioned for its abolition. But they were given a refusal by the ducal government, which is at the same time our supreme ecclesiastical authority. Why? Because it emerged from the opinions demanded of all the clergy of the little land that the majority of them spoke in favor of Parisius's book. What a torment, under such circumstances, catechetical instruction for confirmation is for every clergyman who teaches the pure Gospel according to the Lutheran catechism, may well be imagined.*

Let us now step into the churches, and for the most part things look no better there. Only a few places in the land still have the old hymnal, which, among its 1,054 hymns, has a preponderant number of good, Scripture-conformable hymns, including the best of the old core hymns — though partly somewhat altered — and a number of excellent ones which are rarely found even in older hymnals. Otherwise, however, two hymnals are in use in the land which are so poor that the conscientious clergyman falls into the greatest distress when he must choose hymns from them for divine service. These are the new Gotha hymnal, prepared by Bretschneider, which upon its introduction into our land was furnished with a supplement, and the new Hildburghausen hymnal, in the formerly Hildburghausen portions of the land (the districts of Sonnefeld and Königsberg). In both, the good old core hymns are so altered that they are in part not at all, in part scarcely still, recognizable. In their form they have been made unintelligible to the people. Hence many a congregation still sings, on certain fixed occasions, such hymns in their old form (for example, at infant baptisms: "Now Thank We All Our God," etc., and at burials the verse: "Now, Redeemed One, Sleep in Peace," etc.). As for the content, unbelief and false doctrine have been carried into them, and every consciousness of churchly fellowship has been blurred. In this spirit, too, are the newer hymns taken up in them. In both there is a church-dedication hymn by Wagner, in which the joy of the parish fair is defended. In the new Coburg hymnal there is a hymn on immortality, which recites the rational arguments for continuance after...

* Why do they follow it? Acts 4:19. L. u. W.