# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

impudence is forbidden even toward foreign church societies! They insinuate that this is a shaking of the "cornerstones of Protestantism," what the Evangelical Lutheran church has always and ever recognized as its right and its duty, and what is secured both by its symbolic writings and by the constitutional charter; they thereby show plainly enough that they know only a Protestantism which imagines it has the right to protest against everything that displeases the subjective opinions and appetites of the individual, and all this within the Evangelical Lutheran church, in open defiance of its confessions. They give themselves the appearance of abhorring the principles which the "Fränkische Curier" expressed in its protestation, and yet, through their own protestation, defend them one and all, at bottom setting up the very same demands, only given more subtly or (perhaps better said) less openly and honestly. They lay claim to a Protestantism which, to be sure, is hastening with rapid steps toward "its own self-dissolution," but which, thank God, neither is nor ever was the principle of the Evangelical Lutheran church, and of which, as of a pernicious outgrowth, it is high time for the church to rid itself, as this very movement clearly shows. And all this they presume to do in the name of, and on behalf of, this Evangelical Lutheran church. Whether this is now sheer lack of understanding, or willful distortion and deception, or in the end both, that I leave to the reader's own judgment, and hasten, for his better examination, to communicate to him the remaining wording of the address, allowing myself only to insert a few remarks which I cannot well suppress. Our "Protestants" continue thus:

Our church superiors, rising up against an indifferentism also deplored by us (??), have seized upon means which are directly contrary to the principles of Protestantism (namely, of their Protestantism!). Hymns with antiquated forms and images (are they therefore contrary to the principle of Protestantism ?!), a liturgy, an order of worship, which call to mind sentences and customs much contested (namely, contested by rationalism), running contrary to the original simplicity and purity of our church (and yet it is taken word for word from the earliest and most eminent Lutheran church orders!), and, the main point, curtail the sermon (where is the proof of that ?) — these were the forerunners of ordinances which, confusing essence and form, subject every independently thinking man to a spiritual censorship (!! there's the rub) whose exercise is regulated by no laws (though indeed by definite provisions — see the generalia!). Grounded on petitions of the General Synod, which proceeded from a momentarily victorious party, but which are not approved by the majority of church members (for the zealous "Protestants" at that time, in thorough contempt of church matters, concerned themselves neither with the election nor with the synod), referring to an understanding with church councils which, without prior securing of an es-