# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S182
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...maintain that private confession is impossible in any place at all, can maintain and prove anything; such a man simply "lays our general decrees calmly aside with his other papers and smokes his pipe of tobacco over the matter." And where such great and manifold misery is found among the pastoral estate that "several clergy from the Ries district," in the "Fränkischer Curier" (!), beg the church-mob no longer to fall upon them and scold them over the new state of things, since they are after all only organs of their ecclesiastical superiors and must carry out their ordinances even where they themselves did not approve of them; men who, by bitterly complaining over the increased strain on their lungs and the labor that the new order of worship has brought upon them, and by lamenting the loss occasioned by the redemption law as well, seek to arouse pity for themselves, and close with the plea that they be spared on that account and "not made scapegoats for their ecclesiastical superiors" — there, truly, there is no danger at all of a too-strict execution of the decrees or of holy discipline! Therefore I say once more: the whole uproar was unnecessary — would to God it were not so!

But I likewise repeat once more: it was futile — futile, that is, for the uproar-makers and their purpose. To the Church it was only wholesome; it did her no harm at all, and will do her no harm even should it grow tenfold and a hundredfold. For by it, above all, the great affliction of Joseph is laid bare before all eyes, and it is no longer possible to indulge in sweet self-deceptions about it, or to be lulled to rest, above and below, by talk of "gratifying observations of how the Christian and churchly spirit is ever more increasing in the congregations" and the like; the enormous majorities among the "protests" against even the slightest exercise of churchly spirit (in Augsburg, for example, through 2,200 signatures, despite two reassuring addresses!) show such observations to be sorrowful self-deceptions, whether culpable or not. But it is a great gain when a thorough recognition of the harm is at last reached, or has already been reached. For that drives one to an inquiry into the ground and cause of the harm, to a recognition of the guilt, to repentance. To some extent, indeed, the harm had already been recognized, and this recognition had awakened, in all sincere hearts, an earnest longing for the restoration of church discipline; for this much was understood: for the sake of the lack of discipline the harm must grow ever greater and the evil eat ever further around itself. But that discipline had utterly decayed came about through the fault of the Church, through the fault of her members and ministers as much as of her superiors. It is therefore so beautiful a thing that our superiors have again gone before us, freely and openly, with the confession of this guilt, in that in the general decree on the restoration of church discipline they declare: "Whatever, in church discipline in its true sense, has fallen into forgetfulness, has been forgotten through unfaithfulness." Only, that the harm was so great, that the contempt for the churchly confession...