# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S180
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

180 The Uproar over the Newest Consistorial-General Decrees in Bavaria.

...subject to the discipline of the divine Word and accordingly also become ripe for a church discipline corresponding to this Word and fitted to the current stage of their understanding.

After these two preceding steps, the third would then meet with no great difficulties: to open a path for, and bring about, "in all patience and doctrine," also a sounder and more edifying form of worship and a congregational order corresponding to the sense of the Gospel, as well as a more active participation in the works of faith and the labor of love of the Church for its preservation and expansion.

Should the fellow ministers named, however, proceed to attempt this third step before the first two have taken place, and, as it were, begin from the back to reform their congregations churchly, then no prophetic gift at all is needed to foresee that they, after having for some years experimented in vain with churchliness through all sorts of unworkable synodical resolutions and having wearied themselves fruitlessly in the process, will at last become the prey of some ecclesiastical body that understands better how to manufacture, in the manner it prefers, Lutheran church-forms and form-churches.

(To be continued.)

(From the "Freimund.")

The Uproar over the Newest Consistorial-General Decrees in Bavaria.

(Conclusion.)

As natural as it is that my readers should have rejoiced from the heart over the address of our Upper Consistory, even though they came to know it only in the excerpt I gave; just as natural and understandable, on the contrary, is it that the "disquieted" were not thereby calmed. For their "disquiet" had its ground not in fear of the wrongful execution or possible abuse of a thing good in itself, but rather in a thoroughgoing aversion to the thing itself.

And precisely because what is chiefly at issue here is the discipline that God has commanded, the whole uproar is just as unnecessary as it is futile. Unnecessary, because such discipline was already practiced as far as possible by every pastor whose conscience was captive to God's Word, without and before those general decrees; and because whoever had not drawn from God's Word and grace the holy earnestness and courage for it did not obtain it, and could not have obtained it, through the consistorial-general decrees. Hence there was in truth as yet no danger at all to discipline; as matters presently stood (would that it were not so!) everything would have remained as before, and people have worked themselves up quite needlessly. But