# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S184
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

184 The uproar over the latest Upper Consistory General Decrees in Bavaria.

remain lying, and precisely this uproar, in which the thoughts of hearts are so freely revealed, must contribute to this, that the necessity of a church discipline is recognized all the more clearly by everyone who is still willing to see, and that the obligation to it is felt all the more deeply by every honest Christian heart; so that many a one is awakened by it out of sleep, indeed that many a one otherwise indifferent is filled with holy indignation, and many a despondent one with holy courage. Therefore the question of church discipline will be "postponed" neither for a short time nor for long, even though the Neue Münchener Zeitung says so and wishes to read it out of the King's answer to the petition of the Nuremberg people etc., although no hint of the kind is to be found in it. It cannot be postponed, nor can it be adjourned, for it stands already clearly decided in God's Word and finds in every believing heart a decided Amen, and the crying misery of the church keeps calling it awake. Therefore the territorial church may well go to ruins over it, but the Lutheran church will remain and, even if in poor form, will come forth from it transfigured in the adornment of upright discipline.

To be sure, what the light-shunning belly-priests — the "most reverend" clergy of the Ries (I meant to say) — express in passing as their heart's wish, in the whimpering for grace and forbearance from the church rabble mentioned above, namely that the Old Lutheran party (to which the Upper Consistory is now also reckoned) should rather withdraw from the church and let other people live in peace: that will not happen for the present, for it is simply not the Lutherans' way to run away from the devil, but rather to face him down and with cheerful courage to fight and to stand to the last man. But that the mass of people, as it now stands, with this inward dividedness and with a split that goes down to the very bottom, cannot remain together; that the rupture must come sooner or later; and that it will become the more painful and bloody the more one tries to hold it back by outward means of compulsion — this is plain and certain. That it was a mistake in political respects, and a sin in churchly respects, to force and press the German Catholics and Free Congregationalists back into the confessional churches, is by now showing itself plainly enough. It is they, after all, and those of like mind with them, from whom this uproar proceeds. Had one let them exist and go their way, one would have had the whole crowd together and set apart, could have kept watch over them politically all the more easily, and would have rendered them fairly harmless in churchly respects. Instead, they were driven by force under cover and into hiding; there they have now burrowed busily and go on burrowing, and the fruit of it comes ever more clearly to light. But who now wishes, may, or can compel the church to keep as her members people who openly reject all the positive doctrines of Christianity, who want nothing preached but God, virtue, and immortality, and who from the outset decline as unwarranted every rebuke from God's Word on account of their walk in fleshly lusts — as the "Protestants" in