# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S103
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The uproar over the most recent Superior Consistory generalia in Bavaria. 103

into use; and what inequality before the law would there be, when civil courts impose penalties only through independent judges and jurors, after mature consideration of all attendant circumstances, and moreover only temporarily, while clergy impose penalty and disgrace for an entire lifetime. We call ourselves Christians. Let us follow our great Master's words: "Let him alone cast a stone at his neighbor who knows himself, in his whole life, to be wholly free from every misstep!" —

The reader will bear with me for having set down this nonsense of his at such length and breadth; but it belongs to the characterization of the movement. There steps forward an alleged friend of these zealous "Protestants," who have fallen into fright and rage over the "hierarchy of the Superior Consistory" and wish to fend it off with all their might; and this alleged friend now, in all earnestness, makes them the proposal that it would be better "to return to the Catholic church," because there the clergy — has far more power to exercise effective church discipline than the Protestant clergy does! Just as if one were to give a man fleeing the rain the good advice that he should rather stand under the eaves-drip! And if the advice should seem to someone worthy of all approval, what notion should we then have of his mental powers? — Well, the "Augsburg Daily" finds itself in just this case; for it took up the good advice with all joy and communicated it to its readers for their consideration, and to the Superior Consistory for horror and fright. And the communication had such a good effect that the cry of the zealous "Protestants" could be heard not only in Nuremberg and Augsburg, but also on the streets of the imitative towns lying in between and round about: There we would rather turn Catholic! Whoever, on the other hand, still kept some power of thought amid the general storm and whirl, noticed at once that behind the article there lurked a disguised Catholic who wished to use this opportunity to fish in troubled waters. But so that the comedy might reach its full measure, an ultramontane (that is, papist) paper in Munich also took the article at face value, triumphed that here a Protestant had come to a thorough recognition of the truth, and another already proclaimed as close at hand — a massive conversion of the Nuremberg Protestants to the Catholic church; until it turned out that both sides had been mystified, that is, in plain German: led around by the fool's rope.

It is a fatality to which the children of men frequently succumb, that under certain circumstances they very easily and quickly lose their sound understanding, but do not so easily and quickly come to their senses again once it has once slipped from them. Hence it was of no avail that a well-meaning man from Munich pointed out, on the 24th of October in the Allgemeine Zeitung, among other things, "that as regards private confession and church discipline in particular, the former, as lies in the nature of the