# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The present state and prospects of the Evangelical Lutheran territorial churches in Germany. 187

these strivings there have arisen, on the unionist side, the Kirchentage, which have traveled through almost all Protestant lands, but which lately were on the point of foundering upon the confessional question itself — a reef which they always steer around with great anxiety and much labor; further, the division of the Prussian Supreme Church Council into unionist and so-called Lutheran personalities; the Berlin conferences and, at them, the drafting of the outlines for a Prussian territorial synod. Then a fruit of those strivings were the Eisenach conferences, of a confederated character, and finally the Dresden conferences, at which only deputies of Lutheran church governments came together to hold deliberations on the joint initiation of improvements in liturgy, church order, church discipline, etc. But for all these things, if they are really to be brought into their right course and swing, the church needs living unity within and free, unhindered movement without. Both are altogether lacking to the present territorial churches, to the non-unionist ones just as much as to the unionist; therefore all those assemblies and gatherings have remained fairly fruitless for the unification and strengthening of the church — indeed, the Dresden conferences have even, if one looks at and listens to our Bavarian church uproar only superficially, worked destructively. In the unionist territorial churches the inward disunity is, so to speak, privileged and openly avowed; the confessions are shoved somewhat aside as a secondary matter, and therefore one can never hold strictly to them; everyone also knows that in this church he has liberty to believe what seems good to him, and so it encloses Cherethites and Pelethites alike, without hesitation and without offense, in the wide bosom of its constitution. In a Lutheran territorial church, by contrast, only the Lutheran confession stands in force, and it is presupposed and assumed that all who stand within it are attached to no other confession and faith than the Lutheran. But now everyone knows that this is a fundamentally false assumption. For for pretty nearly a hundred years the confession of the Lutheran territorial churches stood only on paper, and remained in force only in the archives of the consistories and in the compendia of canon law; but from the pulpits little or nothing more was heard of it; in the catechisms and hymnals it had given way to an insipid doctrine of virtue; it had long since ceased to sit in the people's heart, and so it soon and easily vanished from their head and memory as well. But thirty years ago and since, God gave a gracious rain. The time of rationalism's dominion passed away, the hearts of the younger preachers were seized by the power of the Gospel, they testified loudly and forcefully against unbelief and for God's truth, and one may well say: God gave the word with great hosts of evangelists. Then rationalism was driven from the field — from the field, but not out of the world. From the upper strata it had sunk down into the lowlands of the people, especially in the cities; there it now lies as dregs in the