# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S346
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

346 On Church Life in the Kingdom of Hanover.

first Reformed preacher in Emden at the head, and which has jurisdiction in
all ecclesiastical matters in which the state does not participate. In Aurich
a teachers' seminary was established a few years ago, whose instructors are
partly Lutheran and partly Reformed, serving both confessions —; by what
means this is made possible is unknown to the present writer. —

Given such unclear relations between the confessions with one another, and
such a strong preponderance of the Reformed element — although the children
of mixed marriages are for the most part, if only out of external
considerations, raised Lutheran — it is to be expected in advance that sectarianism
will not be lacking in East Frisia either. Indeed East Frisia is quite properly
the homeland of the Mennonite-Baptists, who besides, so far as I know, form
only one formal congregation in the Kingdom of Hanover, namely in the town
of Eimbeck. In Ihren, three hours from Emden, a Baptist church was
recently dedicated; in Leer one has existed for some time already, and we
heard from Emden a while ago that permission is being sought there to build
a Baptist church as well. In East Frisia one is accustomed to speaking even
of "evangelical-Mennonite" churches. — We are told regarding the East
Frisian Reformed that, when they become believing, they usually fall into
predestinarianism, and that in one particular place this is thoroughly and
completely dominant. — In Emden, Sunday schools are held by a circle of
Reformed people whose teachers are inclined toward the Puritan direction,
which observes only Sunday and would let all other feast days fall away as
merely human institutions. — Proper sectarians are to be found in the
Coccians of Emden. They hold to the same strict Dordrecht view that was
championed some twenty years ago chiefly by the preacher Hendrick de Cock
in and around Utrecht and that, after his removal from office, became the
basis of a separation still in existence. Whether the Coccians in Emden have
any further historical connection with the Dutch ones, beyond perhaps the
name attached to them in mockery and the similarity of direction, we have
not been able to learn. The East Frisian sect, however, owes its origin to the
preacher R. W. Duin, who has now already been dead for more than ten
years. The occasion for it was as follows. In the year 1838 a younger
clergyman declared himself in the "Coetus" against the strict doctrine of
original sin and predestination. Duin rose up against this with vigor, but
without finding any support; indeed he later went so far in his zeal that he
not only declared himself most emphatically against the use of Dinter's
schoolteacher's Bible, but also tore to pieces before the Coetus a catechism
introduced in the year 1825, which had had to give way to the Heidelberg
Catechism. In the end matters went so far that a kind of excommunication
was pronounced against Duin. His followers then divided into two groups;
the larger, comprising four to five thousand souls, still wished to hold to the
church, while the smaller separated itself