# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S250
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

250   The Hymnbook Uproar in Hannover.

in the end an easy matter to take in tow and drag along the common people, who in our region in particular cling with great tenacity even to what is old and bad. Thus the newspapers were soon able to report a great sympathy which the machinations against the hymnbook had found; and even though they exaggerated the affair thoroughly, there unfortunately still remained enough truth in it. For even if the 30,000 signatures which were supposedly attached to those petitions shrink, when examined in the light of day, to 6700, and even if from a number of congregations not a single signature is to be found, and from others only a few, brought about by emissaries — still it cannot be denied that in some places the obstinacy has reached a high degree and vents itself in all sorts of ways against unpopular pastors. At present this recalcitrance has found a welcome aid in Zittel's Sonntagsblatt, which has devoted one of its numbers to a discussion of this subject and naturally finds the procedure of the consistory just as reprehensible as the character of the hymnbook. The former is through and through un-Protestant, the latter full of views that run contrary to purified taste and to the religious consciousness illuminated by scientific research. As we hear, the number of that paper in question is to be assiduously circulated in the Osnabrück region.

Why, then, will they not have the hymnbook? The question scarcely needs an answer. Because they will not have the faith which the Church confesses and extols in her hymns, which are found here faithfully and unfalsified. For — to set aside those speeches about solecisms and tastelessnesses, which sound foolish and ridiculous enough in the mouths of people who show plainly enough in their own articles that in matters of language they are utter ignoramuses, and who in matters of taste display a philistinism scarcely to be expected and scarcely to be believed — the banal phrases about religious enlightenment, intellectual progress, and so forth come down to this, that they want to be rid of the confession. Many a one does not perceive — of this we are convinced — that here lies the cardinal point; but there are also enough who know it very well, and because they are shrewd enough to recognize that a direct attack upon the confession, which the ecclesiastical authority at Osnabrück has now again set on the lampstand, would help nothing and might even become dangerous, they try it here instead; and one must admit that they have chosen their terrain well.

Given the irreconcilable contradiction in which the old hymnbook stands to believing, confessionally faithful preaching, and given the almost absolute authority which hymnbooks have among the people in our land, damage can most easily be done here. To this there is perhaps added the hope that the consistory, if the introduction of the hymnbook is thwarted,