# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S247
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Hymnbook Uproar in Hannover.   247

anything said about the constitution and governance of the Church. Just as, in general, the whole doctrine of the three estates — which was plainly invented only to justify historically developed circumstances and abuses — is, in our firm conviction, entirely without scriptural ground and belongs to the weaker parts of our old dogmaticians, a thing one cannot refrain from saying even with the humblest gratitude and reverence toward those dear men.*) ... The Church of God, which has received the holy treasures of the pure doctrine and the pure Sacraments, possesses in these themselves — eternal praise and thanks be to the LORD — such a mighty, irresistible power that, where the pastors and congregations are rightly faithful, she can overcome the world with them. She does not first need" (as Grabau had lamentably asserted) "to seek from the civil authority emphasis and protection for the Word of the almighty God; she will not need it until the end of days." Pastor Löhe rightly points out in a note the contradiction that Pastor Grabau proposes a permanent ecclesiastical court, on the ground that a general synod does not suffice because of the change of persons, and yet raises the general synod to the final court of appeal! When Pastor Grabau writes: "If this (the decision of the general synod) should remain fruitless, the party suffering the wrong would have to invoke the authority of the territorial government on the basis of the ecclesiastical court's decision," Pastor Löhe adds: "So in the end the secular arm after all!" The correspondent, however, closes this section with the words: "Through all the proceedings the doctrine of the three estates and of the services of the territorial government runs like a red thread." One sees that even by those who in Germany stand nearer to Pastor Grabau than we do, the ecclesiastical court in the form proposed by him is rejected as something to be erected on false foundations and as promising nothing of the help it is supposed to bring.

The Hymnbook Uproar in Hannover.

Our land is at this moment agitated by strife at two points lying almost directly opposite one another. In the northern part, the Duchy of Bremen, a storm has arisen on the occasion of a declaration directed against the Gustav-Adolph Society and of the counter-founding of a "Luther Society" — a storm which has dragged Luther into the dust

*) It is not to be forgotten, as we have remarked before, that Pastor Grabau not only understands the three estates quite differently, but also places them quite differently and exploits them for quite different ends than our old theologians, whose doctrine in this respect too is entirely correct — though we do not wish to deny that among them as well some, particularly as regards the estate of the civil authority, do not hold faithfully to Luther's doctrine.