# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S220
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

220 Church and Contemporary History.

...whose gold the storms of nearly three centuries, neither Pietism nor rationalism, have rusted. It has the common Lutheran constitution, a relatively independent consistory, and a (General) Superintendent (at present in the excellent Brömel). It has, thanks in part to the ""smallness"" of all the country's circumstances, overcome rationalism as victoriously as no other territorial church." And what is now afoot? The Danish ministry has laid before the king, and the latter has accepted, the proposal to appoint a commission which, besides the hymnal, the catechism, and the liturgy, is to take into consideration the alleged lack of an organ "which on the one hand would stand at the side of the state government as an advisory authority in important ecclesiastical questions, and at the same time on the other hand would be fitted, should occasion arise, to represent the interests of the church over against the state (?)" (that is plainly the bacon in the mousetrap), "and in general to exercise a promoting and determining influence upon the manifold stirrings of the church life of the present." The constituting of such an organ would of course deprive the ecclesiastical authorities that legally exist, that is, the consistory and the Superintendent of Lauenburg, of the position proper to them as advisory authority alongside, and as representative of the interests of the church over against, the power of the state. — The commission is further to submit "proposals for undertaking reforms in the constitution of the territorial church in both parts of the country," Holstein and Lauenburg, and the ministry considers it desirable that these "works of reform" for Holstein and Lauenburg "be carried out jointly." The Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung remarks with regard to this coupling of Lauenburg with Holstein: "Apart from the difference in confessional standing, the notorious factual dissolution of all ecclesiastical order in Holstein, the lack of any discipline of doctrine, the sinking into subjectivism, give occasion for serious fears of the infection of the healthy part by the sick (or rather already putrefying) one." We see that Satan sniffs out every corner where he has not yet gained full dominion, in order to complete his victory over the German church. Woe to Denmark that it strives to stop up this channel of divine blessing for the whole realm as well. Our source closes the report as follows: "Who could fail to recognize in this Holstein-Lauenburg commission a sign of the times, a new one added to the many — a symptom of that cancer which a single cutting was unable to remove, a beginning of the decay of the institutions and holdings in which the spiritual welfare of our people has found life and prosperity? To whom would such a slipping away from the ground of historical right not seem grave and alarming, and a road into the yawning abyss of revolution? Over the carcass the eagles will gather. Let it be an admonition, as to watching and prayer generally, so also to sympathy and intercession for this hard-pressed little church, which hitherto has wonderfully preserved through all storms not only its good right but also, in the time of sleep, has kept it in exercise more than elsewhere (under its Superintendent Catenhusen) and has restored it to exercise sooner than elsewhere."

Grand Duchy of Hesse. Here the vicar Dieffenbach and Pastor Henrici in Götzenhain near Darmstadt have gone over to the Roman church. That Dieffenbach (not to be confused with the well-known author of the Hausagende) was induced by Henrici to go over with him. Henrici's own conversion took place last September in Mainz, and he thereupon entered the episcopal seminary. Shortly before and immediately after laying down his office, Henrici had received shattering letters of admonition and warning from his Lutheran-minded colleagues. In answer to these and in his own justification Henrici has issued a brochure: "Open Letter to his Protestant Friends, by Siegmund Henrici. Mainz, at Kirchheim, 67 pp." Of this the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung says: "The letter proves clearly enough that it was not so much distress of conscience as vexation at the admittedly so defective constitutional conditions of the individual evangelical territorial churches, and of the Hessian in particular, that drove the author to Rome. The spirit at work in him