# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S248
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

248   The Hymnbook Uproar in Hannover.

and would raise the banner of the King of Sweden into the air; in the Principality of Osnabrück the school hymnbook recently introduced by order of the consistory has produced a mighty outcry and has made manifest the thoughts of many hearts. On the former we shall report more fully before long; today only on the latter.

In the Principality of Osnabrück, one of the most lamentable hymnbooks that could possibly exist was introduced for church use toward the end of the last century. Not a single hymn of the Church has remained unfalsified and unmutilated, and things have found their way in that are pitiable. "A mighty fortress is our God, on Him rests our hope" is what Luther is made to sing (Luther, whose hymns, according to the preface, they "sought so far as possible to retain in their venerable originality"); and instead of the petition "Come, Holy Spirit, Lord our God, fill with the good things of Thy grace the heart, courage, and mind of Thy believers," and further, "O Lord, by Thy power make us ready, and strengthen the weakness of the flesh," it there reads: "Come, Holy Spirit, sent from God, make Thy power known to us also, lead heart and mind to truth, to begin the Christian virtue"; and in stanza 3: "This life lasts but a short time; make us ready for a blessed death." Even in J. Heermann's "O God, Thou faithful God" the sincere and surely quite unobjectionable close of stanza 7 — "Grant to my body a little room beside the graves of pious Christians, that it may have its rest at their side" — found no favor, and instead of it one is to read and sing: "Instructing, meanwhile, let my grave make the mortal, and dry the tear of him who weeps for me." A thick book could be written about the truly abominable maltreatments — mocking the doctrine of the Church, and all simplicity, poetry, and devotion besides — which the old hymns have had to put up with. What the new ones look like may be imagined. There is a hymn 29 stanzas long with the heading: "The dying righteous man at his parting from his own," in which stanza 15 reads: "Far, forever far from quarrel and strife be evermore; still here, still today embrace one another and look upon me! Never, never stain yourselves, dear souls, with the hellish joy of tormenting him who may yet die today. Dreadful thought! No, I know that you will be brothers." Whether a man who has truly become "righteous" could read out or recite this stanza to his family on his deathbed? — Then there is found in the appendix a hymn to the melody "Ah, about the temples of the righteous" — whether that melody occurs anywhere else in the world in a hymnbook? — and the first stanza runs: "Waiting is the school which here below begins with the first breath of life, and which does not itself end when in peace our spirit escapes the state of probation"; but in stanza 6 the following is to be found: "And He Himself, humanity's first crown, glowed himself out in a dark workshop; only through long nights did it go to the throne, and through suffering to the Father's house." Jacobi's well-known hymn for Ash Wednesday has also been taken up here in a dreadful trimming, and likewise another