# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S185
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The uproar over the latest Upper Consistory General Decrees in Bavaria. 185

the "Fränkischer Curier" —; people who believe not only in no devil, but also in no heaven and no hell, and who will not even permit such a faith to be taught to the young, like the Lindau "Protestants" — who can compel the church still to acknowledge such people as her members? Who must not rather concede to the church the duty of publicly declaring such people to belong to her no longer? But who, on the other hand, can compel them to believe what they simply do not believe, or to hold to a church which they abhor, and to undermine whose foundation is their openly professed confession? Let them therefore be granted the freedom of belief which they desire, but which they can claim and enjoy only outside, not within, the Christian church. Let the state have the necessary guarantees given it by them and let them constitute themselves in accordance with their conviction. That will be the only way to help the territorial church and to save her.*) That is also what Dr. Fabri intimates at the close of the essays praised above as the most salutary course. But it will not be entertained. People console themselves with the coming general synod. The great "Protestants" are already making every exertion to get their people into the church-council elections and thereby into the general synod as well, and in this they must succeed and have already partly succeeded — for they are, after all, the majority. They have, as one hears, elected in despisers of the church and of the Lord's Supper, in defiance of the electoral ordinance, and nobody hinders it. And who would? Once in a while during the year such a "Protestant" does after all come to church; now and then it does still occur to him occasionally, for his wife's sake or for the sake of custom and propriety, to go to the Lord's Supper; and the electoral ordinance does not prescribe diligent attendance at church and at the Lord's Supper as a requirement for passive eligibility, but only that a man show his churchly disposition by participation in divine service and the Lord's Supper. Besides, they have also known how to bring their own people in as assessors at the act of election, whose duty it would be to reject votes cast for unchurchly and Christianly immoral persons. The next motion of these newly elected church councils will aim at having equal numbers of lay and clerical members come to the general synod. It is to be hoped that they will strive for this in vain; but it is certain nonetheless that the next general synod will cut quite different capers than the last. We may expect it. May God awaken the hearts of all the members, that they may bring out the opinion of their hearts quite freely and without fear, and may He drive away all hypocrisy and men-pleasing, so that everyone may know where he stands. But may He, the faithful God, also strengthen the hearts of our church superiors, as well as of all upright servants of His Word and of all faithful Christian souls, to stand firm in the struggle and not to yield a foot's breadth from the recognized and saving truth

*) Who, especially in America, should not be moved to give and to attest his assent to these golden words! The recognition of such truth is certainly a precious fruit of the uproar. L. u. W.