# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S105
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The uproar over the most recent Superior Consistory generalia in Bavaria. 105

remain without effect, entail the authority of absolution!" There the presumption of his ignorance now indeed rises to the point of the ridiculous. He thinks that a Lutheran pastor receives the authority for private absolution only from the approval of the congregation. Wherever did he learn that?

While now the skirmishing of the various papers and little papers against the generalia of the Superior Consistory went on in the manner described and increased more and more, the "Fränkische Curier" came forward with a "Protestation," which I had best characterize through the much-praised Allgemeine Zeitung (certainly an impartial witness!!). "Hear this!" it exclaims in its issue no. 313 of Nov. 7. Well, we are listening, and it continues:

After a phrase-laden introduction, which seems patched together, mosaic-like, out of all sorts of books — the passage about the Thirty Years' War is copied from Wolfgang Menzel's German history — it says verbatim: "We hold fast to the principles which Protestantism called forth, and which the noblest friends of mankind, the greatest thinkers of recent centuries, have brought to prevail, namely: 1) that faith be wholly free, that is, that everyone is bound to hold for true only that which, after receiving instruction and by his own insight, he can hold for true; 2) that no coercive power may exist in matters of faith, that is, that no one is entitled to force his opinions upon another as the only correct ones; 3) that our clergy are charged with nothing but the preaching office — the proclamation of the greatness of creation, of the teachings of wisdom and virtue, of love and justice toward all men, teachings which strengthen the force of the laws, which guide actions that escape the eye of the lawgiver and the arm of the judge, and which give comfort amid the hardships of life — but that they are entitled in no way to arrogate to themselves divine, judicial, or punitive powers; 4) that the inclinations which the Creator has placed in men, as in all creatures of the earth, and without which creation could not exist, may indeed be regulated by ordinances of the civil power, but do not belong in the domain of religion, and still less under the dominion of the clergy; 5) that the doctrine of the devil, of evil spirits, of a wrathful deity demanding humiliation, vengeance, and death, and of a human nature thoroughly corrupted, fits our time as little as do so many thought-poor, one-sided hymns and sayings of past centuries, given in barbaric wording; 6) that every belief in authority is to be rejected, since there is no man who is entitled to stamp his seal upon a century, still less upon centuries to come, since other times bring other customs and insights, and since what is decisive for us cannot be what this man or that thought, but rather what we, in accordance with our present experiences and knowledge, are able to think." — Now truly! this is an article of faith to whose signing baptismal water would appear positively superfluous, for every halfway well-