# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S140
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

140

(From the "Freimund.")
The Uproar over the Latest General Decrees of the Supreme Consistory
in Bavaria.
(Continued.)

When one strikes or whistles, opposite a bell, the tone that lies hidden within it, the bell echoes it back of itself, whereas otherwise, at all other tones, it remains silent and motionless. This law of nature proved true also when the Nuremberg Address sent its shrill whistle out into the world. From all sides it echoed back; everywhere the great multitude joined in agreement, everywhere similar addresses were prepared, or people simply attached themselves to the Nuremberg one; for the right tone had been loudly struck — the tone of unbelief; but the words in which this tone was clothed were the catchwords: freedom of belief and Protestantism. Therefore the rabble fell to the spokesmen and ran to them in crowds "like water" (Ps. 73:10), and although nowhere in their protests and declarations was there to be found even a trace of grounding upon, and reasoning from, God's Word, but on the contrary an equally thorough contempt for the Word of God and for the confession of the Church, together with a groundless and bottomless ignorance of both, looked out everywhere from their verbiage; yet it went, and still goes, just as it is written in that same 73rd Psalm: "What they say must be spoken down from heaven, and what they declare must hold good on earth" (v. 9); for: "They destroy everything and speak evil of it, they speak and blaspheme on high" (v. 8): and that is the right tone! Whether, then, more or less, whether wholly or not at all true, be what is told of the manner in which the signatures for these addresses were gathered — that, for instance, people were made to believe they would have to become Catholic if they did not sign; that schoolboys, apprentices, and railway workers were brought in for it; that many of the signers knew so little of what and how; that, where two opposing addresses lay out for signature, they voiced the opinion that it made no difference where one signed, since both documents surely meant the same thing anyway, and so one simply went to wherever the most had already signed — whether or not all this actually occurred, the tone that was struck — there shall be no church discipline, neither in regard to doctrine nor to life! — that indeed echoed again in all hearts, and that was what drew and drove them to sign. While, therefore, in a considerable number of towns — such as Regensburg, Schweinfurt, Neustadt, Nördlingen, Kempten, Lindau, Dinkelsbühl, etc. — addresses in the sense of the Nuremberg one were laid out and signed, yet only in three places, namely Nuremberg, Nördlingen, and Erlangen, did addresses in the exactly opposite sense come about, and these received comparatively few signatures. For this reason, too, the "Address" which the Supreme Consistory issued to the pastors...