# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S148
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

148 Bavaria.

whether it should refuse an Old Lutheran pastor admission? That, to be sure, it did not wish to do, but it put off those inquiring by saying that a pamphlet against this sect would soon appear, etc. — which, to be sure, is still awaited even now. When, further, this society celebrated its anniversary festival, the question arose whether the Old Lutheran pastor should also be invited, to which one member replied: The man is too decided for us! — How readily, indeed, the Word of God becomes a hard saying — who can bear to hear it! — Yet let a Baptist preacher come to Frankfurt, or let the Methodist missionary living there hold forth in his hall, or let traveling Moravians appear, and everyone runs there. And how, given such a lack of ground in doctrine, Christianity may in fact be constituted, lies not far to seek for one who knows and believes what is written: "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."

If one hears, from the Lutheran Church in almost every land, how — here earlier, there later — a new life has already for years arisen and a stirring toward a return, it is sad to be unable as yet to report anything of the kind from here, and to see how this city turns its back so contemptuously on the dear mother church; the harm is great, yet God's mercy is greater. Ah, that one would seek it, so that from here too it might be reported how spring has come and the tender little flowers spring forth. For this, help, reader, to pray in faith to him who makes the dead alive and enlightens those who sleep, that they may awake.

Bavaria.

At the society conference at Gunzenhausen on September 16, 1856, Pastor Löhe delivered an address which is printed in the "Correspondence Sheet of the Society for Home Missions in the Sense of the Lutheran Church," published by Bauer and Stirner, in the October and November number of last year. The subject of this address is: "The Relation of the Society for Home Missions, etc., to the Central Mission Society in Bavaria." From this address we share with our readers the following remarkable passages, which in our conviction contain much worth taking to heart: "But this, at any rate, one could not deny — that it was precisely the Reformed churches that here and there withstood the encroaching corruption vigorously, and that from them many a seed of new life was preserved for propagation into the most recent times. But if this was so, then one must indeed also seek to answer the question of how it became possible. To this question it is perhaps an unavoidable answer that the constitution of the Reformed congregations, although quite different from that of the earliest times as regards the office of chief pastor, was nevertheless, in respect of congregational governance, in many a respect more correct than ours, and therefore contributed to a beneficial preservation. A man who is compelled by necessity to leave the management of his