# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S209
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Bunsen's Idea of Freedom of Conscience, of Religion, and of the Church. 209

...in the "period of confidence"; but since 1848 mistrust prevails against all schemes of blessedness imported from beyond the moat. Nobody now lets himself be outwitted and talked over so easily; at the first step toward the introduction of that "confession-union" the watchword would ring out loudly enough: Here the Christian, there the Mameluke! Bunsen too appears to have renounced from the outset any amicable execution of his plans; the "Signs of the Times" knows only of violent means. It laments the "tutelage of the people in the name of the state, extending to the smallest details, which recognizes absolutely no independent sphere alongside itself and in particular excludes all congregational independence." "Such a bureaucracy," it says, "is nowhere more unsuitable and more dangerous than in ecclesiastical relations and in all dealings with the clergy. As soon as a religious-churchly spirit stirs, the government comes off worse. What once seemed, or even really was, a protective tutelage is now felt as an oppressive fiscalism. The bureaucracy of the princes was meant, in the despotic state, to replace the congregation and to exercise its rights 'in the name of the state'; that was the expedient of the previous century — good, if necessary, as a dictatorship; ruinous, burdened with real injustice and thus with the germ of death, when conceived and treated as a permanent right. And now — in our own age! in the present state of things in Europe!" (I, 158ff.) They complain of it because this system, as soon as religious matters are concerned, "weakens rather than strengthens the power of the state." In order to give the power of the state the strength required for sweeping religious measures, the "Signs of the Times" demands an organized congregation upon which the odium of any persecutions of faith could be laid. Only with the help of such a congregation does Bunsen trust himself to overwhelm the opponents of the Union, especially the so bitterly hated Lutherans, from whom he may well fear, not without reason, a line drawn through his whole reckoning, and whom he therefore certainly does not intend to treat exactly gently, or altogether according to the principles of Luther-Barclay toleration. The violent execution of his union plans, above all by the extermination of the Lutherans, is the sum of the "Signs of the Times," as we have already heard above from Stahl's own mouth; — whoever does not believe this, let him only listen for himself to the spirits hidden behind Bunsen's lines — he will hear them singing everywhere and in every key: Ha! shame and disgrace, Germany, upon you and your nerveless repose! The Union sinks into ruins, and idly yawning you look on. The holy spirit of the double faith has become the Lutherans' mockery; yet you, a soft Judas, betray your God out of tolerance. My song is: curse and downfall to the Wittenberg nightingale! Before all thrones I sing it, until it finds an echo; through Germany's regions it shall go, through her peoples, early and late, and recruit for the holy war as once the monk of Amiens did. It shall awaken from the grave the age...

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