# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S211
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Bunsen's Idea of Freedom of Conscience, of Religion, and of the Church. 211

...stands in the way. On both sides it is the dear "Christian state" that remains the helper in need. We did not expect to see a separation of state and church advocated by Stahl; Bunsen advocates it in this fashion: "The continental liberals too have gradually freed themselves from the folly of their predecessors, as though the encroachments and usurpations of the clergy could be successfully opposed by the despotic, police-driven, and fiscal system of Joseph II and Napoleon the Great. The good people had let old Lamennais and other Ultramontanes talk them into believing that the knot could be untied by the cheap magic word: separation of church from state. Yet not one of these wise men has so far successfully attempted to show how one might arrive at such a separation — which does indeed cut the knot — with respect to certain vital points (marriage; education; church property)." (I. 161.) And in another place: "Let us leave behind us everything political; let us not speak here of the separation of church from state as the supposed magic word which is to give us everything we demand! A good deal does indeed seem to be moving in that direction, and it will certainly come to that if present conditions do not satisfy mankind, if they lead, instead of to a gradual solution, to a stronger entanglement." (II. 32.) When, immediately after these declarations — not a little strange in the mouth of a man of toleration — he goes on: "But one thing is now needful, urgently needful: freedom of conscience! that is, the freedom of the divine in the individual and in the congregation"; — then nothing remains for restoring the connection of thought but the recollection of Brentano's butter of fate. Hitherto everyone who was in earnest about freedom of conscience and about the right of the Christian congregation has longed for the ceasing of the state's dominion over the church, because under that unhappy relation those precious goods have perished, without hope of ever being regained otherwise than by the loosing of the unhappy bond; — now all at once people are to be "talked into believing" that figs grow on thistles and grapes on thornbushes, that freedom of conscience and its child, "the right of the Christian congregation," grow on the tree of the state church! We conclude here as in all related cases: whoever does not want the tree does not want the fruit either — a conclusion which we find confirmed at every further step through the "Signs of the Times." Bunsen speaks of certain "vital points" that stand in the way of "the cheap magic word"; but they are vital points only for a state that means at any price to rule over the church; in North America, for example, they are not, and whoever reads the "Signs of the Times" attentively will easily convince himself that they need not be so elsewhere either, but have first been artificially made such — in part with the most violent distortion of the historical facts.*) Fortunately, however, among these "vital...

*) Thus, for example, there is the talk "of the error, in canon law and in history, of the Refor-