# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S249
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Hymnbook Uproar in Hannover.   249

hymn by him: "Reunion! With quick beats the breast throbs warmly toward thee," to whose melody there is also to be sung: "Daughters of earth, sons of earth, be not proud of strength and beauty." With the exception of the Hesse-Darmstadt and the Oldenburg hymnbooks, we have — though we believe ourselves fairly well versed in the literature belonging here — never come across a worse hymnbook; and even those two do not stand below it, but beside it.

Already several years ago a congregation in the Principality of Osnabrück took thought of abolishing it. With the permission of the royal consistory at Osnabrück, the congregation of Hoyel-Riemsloh brought out a printing of 217 hymns for church use. Beyond that, to be sure, nothing further happened, and this will not surprise anyone who knows with how many difficulties the abolition of an old hymnbook and the introduction of a new one are bound up. The ecclesiastical authority, however, believed it could not answer for letting this abomination continue any longer in a holy place entirely unaltered, and therefore in November of last year issued, for use in the public schools, a little book of 20 numbers arranged according to the order of the Catechism, which on the whole we must describe as thoroughly excellent, in complete agreement with the doctrine of the Church, and very serviceable for edification. The 1st of January of this year was set as the date of its introduction. (Whether this interval was not set somewhat short, and whether it would not have been better to postpone the date of the compulsory introduction further, is a question that perhaps cannot be answered flatly in the negative.) Now the storm arose against the book, and unfortunately it was here, as usually elsewhere, the so-called more educated and wealthier stratum of the population that rebelled against the introduction. At first the matter of cost was put forward, and when the groundlessness of this pretext became too obvious, the contents of the book had to serve instead. All the liberal newspapers — which now, since agitation in the political field has been stopped for them, take their pleasure in the ecclesiastical field and make a regular hunt after news that suits their purposes — blew the horn and filled their columns with long lists of the dreadful solecisms and tastelessnesses with which the hymnbook supposedly swarmed; emissaries went through the country from house to house, instructed by certain so-called Protestants, and stirred up or fanned the resentment against the innovation, by which, they said, all religious progress was to be checked, priestly rule established, and the bridge to Catholicism built; assemblies were held under the chairmanship of all sorts of people who would far rather have had a place in some meeting of Uhlich's than in a Lutheran church, and in them petitions and deputations to Hannover, to the Ministry of Public Worship and to His Majesty the King, were resolved upon. Where such means were set in motion, and — must we say it! — precisely the more highly placed lent a hand to it, there was