# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S210
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...full of God's deeds, when, inflamed by the Union, every bosom swelled high; when men thought no more of the Reformation, of the holy Scripture, and gladly offered up Christ as a sacrifice to unity of faith; and so forth, and so forth. The new crusade is fortunately only a paper one; but otherwise everything proceeds in it just as it did in the old ones. As in those days the rage of persecution was first practiced upon the Jews, so that it might afterward be exercised all the more vigorously upon the Saracens, so here too religious hatred is first stirred up against the Papists (I, 1-318), so that it may afterward fall with full weight upon the unhappy Lutherans. This latter task — that is, the main part of the whole expedition — is the business of the second volume. We turn over its first three leaves, and behold: immediately behind title and dedication — like Judah's pillar of cloud the cross goes on high before the warriors! — not, of course, the cross from Mount Golgotha, recognizable by the simple I.N.R.I., but rather, as the ostentatious heading, superscription, and subscription inform us, the cross from the "standpoint of unconditional freedom of conscience," the symbol of "eternal peace" upon the shoulder-strap of all the mailed heroes of that classical toleration which, with carefully concealed gnashing of teeth, mutters into its beard: O that all the Lutherans had but one neck! "In hoc signo non vinces." As enlistment money for the old crusades men dealt out indulgences with full hands, which cost the giver nothing and helped the receiver nothing; the appetite for the present crusade is awakened by up-to-date indulgences, by promises of freedom, which have exactly the value of those old ones. The first of them, "freedom of conscience," we know already to more than surfeiting sufficiency; the others, of a political nature, we do not care to examine; they too will probably be nothing but apples of Sodom and empty nuts, pasted over with tinsel. "Whoever now proclaims freedom," says Stahl, p. 38, "let him take good care that he proclaims it within bondage, otherwise he falls into the service of the powers of the abyss. How entirely written for our own age are the words of the apostle: for they speak great swelling words of vanity, and promise liberty, while they themselves are the servants of corruption." — There would thus remain only the last of the crusaders' freedoms: "the right of the Christian congregation"; — this third letter of indulgence we will now examine more closely.

What has just been developed we kept firmly in view also as we read the Signs of the Times, everywhere searching out exactly where the author's meaning finally tends. If we are to set forth briefly the kernel of his view of congregational right, lying as it does beneath many veils, then everything that he claims by way of rights for the Christian congregation could be most tersely summed up thus: she is steered by the state on a wire. Clearly enough Stahl already alluded above to Bunsen's territorialism; the "Signs of the Times" in truth preaches nothing else than the sorry Cujus regio, ejus religio. They do indeed come out with all decisiveness against Stahl's "Christian state"; but only because it is to their own "Christian state"...