# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S111
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The uproar over the most recent Superior Consistory generalia in Bavaria. 111

for the most part banned under the influence and power of the clergy, without a prior securing of a defined sphere of action (for the pastors are, properly speaking, supposed to have no influence at all on church affairs — see the model of the truly "protestant" Frankfurt church order in the previous number!) — the royal Superior Consistory has issued ordinances which make it the duty of the clergy, proceeding slowly and as cautiously as possible, to put inquisition and punishment in the place of the instruction and reconciliation alone prescribed in our church (?!). (That needs no further comment.) Holding fast to the thoroughness (??) of our Evangelical Lutheran church, we recognize that it is the right and duty of the clergy, by doctrine and by grounds of persuasion, to win over others who think differently, to their own view and that of the church. (The church has no "view," but rather a fixed faith and a definite confession, and whoever's "views" thereby stand in conflict with it simply does not belong to it, and if he is honest, he confesses that himself.) It is, however, compulsion of conscience when one threatens with penalties (the first would be true if the second were not a lie) the man who is unable to agree with these views, and compels him, by withholding the church's means of grace, to leave it (which should read: declares him one who has withdrawn, one who has fallen away from it), or, what is still more pernicious, makes him a hypocrite. (Every characterless man who denies his own conviction makes himself a hypocrite.) The church has, like every society, the right to regulate its fellowship through ordinances. (Indeed!) It may have been compelled, in times when the secular authority gave it insufficient protection (was that perhaps in the times when it introduced the Reformation in its territories, and the church orders together with that strict church police?!), to resort to more far-reaching means. But that now, after the protection of the church and its clergy has been guaranteed by the state, the church power makes itself lord of consciences (that is to say, that it no longer wishes to tolerate that what is written in Psalm 80:14 should continue to happen to the "vineyard of the Lord"), that it threatens to intrude into the most sacred bonds of family life (which should mean, that it wishes, through instruction and friendly counsel, to try to prevent unhappy marriages from becoming still more numerous), that it proceeds to external penalties, which infringe on honor and respect (namely, of blasphemers, despisers, and mockers of the church!) and the freedom of the person (namely, the freedom to slander and despise undisturbed), and, because they can never be applied against all, and never uniformly against all, remain always a misfortune — that we must deeply lament. (To be sure! it is also deeply to be lamented that the secular authority cannot punish all scoundrels and swindlers, and not all of them uniformly, and separate them from civil society, and that in any case it will always remain true: "The Nurembergers hang no one — unless they have first caught him." But no one has yet hit upon the idea, on that account, of petitioning the King in an address to abolish the administration of justice as harmful and unjust