# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S97
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume III.   April 1857.   No. 4.

Communications from German Periodicals.*)
(From the "Freimund.")
The Uproar over the Latest Consistory-General Decrees in Bavaria.**)

Our Bavarian Supreme Consistory has, under date of July 2, issued several general decrees (i.e., general ordinances) which all, in accordance with the petitions of the last General Synod, have as their aim the initiation and restoration of better ecclesiastical order. One of these concerns the ordering of the confessional. It ordains therein that, where private confession still exists, it is to be carefully upheld; where and so long as it does not yet exist, at least the personal registering for confession is to be maintained as a requirement of ecclesiastical order; and where it has been lost altogether, it is to be gradually brought back into force again, through public instruction and pastoral teaching, in cooperation with the church councils. At the registering, the pastor is then to inquire into and counsel each individual's state of soul, so far as he judges necessary. But so that the time needed for this may be more easily found, confession is to be separated from the Lord's Supper and arranged more frequently (in proportion to the number of souls), so that there may not be too many penitents at once. Likewise the absolution of individuals is, according to circumstances, either to be maintained or brought back into

*) If we, setting other material aside, fill the present issue almost exclusively with excerpts from German periodicals, we hope in this to have the consent of our esteemed readers. The papers that have lately reached us from the old fatherland contain reports on events there which afford us a clear insight, seldom offered us, into the true state of affairs within our church there. To help provide such an insight we regard, for the present, as the nearest task of our "Lehre und Wehre." The Editors.

**) Only with the present issue do we give notice of the movements that have arisen over the introduction of measures of church discipline in Germany, since we did not wish to draw from such murky sources as other periodicals here — even so-called Lutheran ones — which have retold the most worthless slanders and distortions, drawn partly from correspondents incapable of judgment and partly from German papers hostile to Christianity.
L. and W.