# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S98
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

98 The Uproar over the Latest Consistory-General Decrees in Bavaria.

...force. "Public and impenitent sinners" (it is then further determined) "who, notwithstanding pastoral and confessional admonition, will not repent of their sins nor amend their lives, could receive the absolution and the sacrament of the altar only unto judgment, and are therefore, so long as they persist in their impenitence, to be warned away from and refused absolution and communion, in all Christian gentleness and love." This confessional warning and refusal, however, is, if acknowledged and accepted by those concerned, to remain a matter of the seal of confession; in every other case, on the other hand, the matter is to be brought before the higher ecclesiastical authorities for decision. In connection with this, the whole clergy are further admonished "as urgently as fatherly, that they should, on the one hand, recognize the seriousness and high significance of the confessional, and, on the other hand, also remain ever mindful how instruction of the congregations drawn from God's Word and faithful to the confessions must always first break a path for any further step; how everywhere the right understanding of confession and absolution, of their significance and power for comfort and for sanctification, must first be awakened, so that consciences become eager to seek them; and that any church discipline can be accompanied by wholesome results only when it proves itself to be an outflow of love and of care for the salvation of the sinner's soul, and is recognized as such, at least by the better part of the congregations." Finally, attention is also drawn to the fact that these provisions are not meant in such a way that they should now be put into effect at once and brought fully into practice at a single stroke, but rather that they are "to be regarded, in part, only as goals to be striven toward in the ordering of the confessional system," and that it should be well considered that such things cannot be commanded and enforced from without, but can be restored only by way of gradual mutual understanding and free agreement.

Another general decree, though of somewhat later date (July 9), but belonging here as a matter of substance, concerns "the personal registering of betrothed couples for the reading of the banns, and the task of the spiritual office in this respect." Here, at the outset, attention is drawn to "the distressing observation" of "how frivolously marriage is so often entered into, and, after a brief and pitiful continuance, an attempt made to dissolve it again"; from this the task of the spiritual office is then derived, above all "to set the significance and the blessing of Christian marriage once more in its right light through preaching and instruction." — "For just as," it is further said, "the simplicity of the Gospel of Christ is foolishness to worldly wisdom, so, for the unrestraint of the carnal mind in particular, the order of the Christian estate of marriage — established by God's Word and calling for self-denial — remains again and again an offense. To this reprehensible