# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S106
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

minded rationalist Jew, Muhammadan, or heathen can unhesitatingly sign along with it; but not, to be sure, a believing Jew or Muhammadan, and still much less a Christian who, even if only "credally believing," is yet still somewhat believing in the Bible. For to such a one the preacher must proclaim not merely, as is said sub Art. 3, moral teaching and natural theology, but also the doctrine of revelation and dogma; and whoever wishes "to let the Word stand," will indeed be able to sublimate original sin, the devil, and hell — the dualistic correlates to the personal God and to the kingdom of heaven — from a popularly coarse conception into a finer one, but will hardly be able to argue them away out of the Bible. But the Bible was, is, and remains for the Protestant Christian who is not merely called so, an unshakable authority. Trivial to the point of the ridiculous, then, is point no. 4 altogether. The "inclinations without which creation could not exist," that is, first of all the sexual drive, "do not belong in the domain of religion, but may only be regulated by ordinances of the civil power!" Others hold: it is precisely so that man may learn to grasp morality from a higher standpoint than that of the police, and at the same time so that the civil power, which cures only symptomatically, may in this respect have less to hinder and to punish, that the church authorities are entitled, by right of God and of law, to a supervision — admittedly no police supervision — over the moral life of the congregation, and in happier times of the German-Evangelical church its oversight was, as is well known, a very strict one.

So much for the editorial staff of the Allgemeine Zeitung, which, to be sure, in its "impartiality" also remarks in addition that it did not wish thereby to assert "that the means now proposed or renewed by the Superior Consistory are throughout the best and most expedient," without, however, doing the church — not to say the world — the loving service of pointing to better and more expedient ones, which is probably grounded just as little in envy as in modest reserve. In a footnote, however, it draws attention to the fact that the protestation of the "Fränkische Curier" received only few signatures, and that the city of Nuremberg was indignant that such "free-congregational" twaddle should run through the world as an expression of its religious disposition. This makes one all the more eager to learn what then indeed might count as the genuine "expression" of this "religious disposition" of the citizenry of Nuremberg, and it is very gratifying to find it right on the last page of the same issue of the Allgemeine Zeitung, in that here too "the petition signed by the most respected inhabitants of the said city (to His Majesty the King) concerning the preservation of their constitutional and church rights" is printed. This "religious expression" begins with an insinuation against the supreme church authority, in that of the relevant decrees of the same it is said, among other things: "Deeply intervening in the conditions of the inner as well as the outer church, these same have nevertheless gone out only as instructions to the clergy. It