# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S255
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 255

is no longer content with the struggle against churchly life in the Anglican Church — it means to open a campaign against the churchly life in Germany long known to it and long hated, — the semi-popery of the Lutherans, as it has often enough been called in their English meetings! — The outcome will confirm the correctness of this assertion. Whoever is not so well acquainted with the English will be enabled to see into the purpose of the whole assembly by the German names that we shall find among the members of the assembly. We shall find people in the assembly who are very strange allies in an alliance to whose statutes belong faith in the Holy Scripture as the revealed Word of God and faith in the atonement through JEsus' blood and wounds, — people whose Protestantism consists in little more than opposition and thundering against Rome, — people who in the most favorable case hold some things in the Bible to be the divine Word, people who are on no good footing with the second article of the Apostles' Creed and whose faith in the real and immediate connection between the suffering of Christ and our reconciliation with God — which the Alliance in its statutes clearly and plainly requires — has been drowned in modern theology . . . It is a hard peculiarity to bear, precisely in the English, that they hold themselves called not only to give effect among themselves to what they have recognized as alone right, but also to force it upon foreign countries as the only thing wholesome for them, notwithstanding that of all nations they are the least able to understand and see through foreign conditions. Only a short time ago, in the Uncle Tom enthusiasm, they thought it their duty to help govern America in the matter of slavery, and got for it a thoroughgoing aversion and the pointed remark that they might first sweep before their own door and help their factory slaves, — that is how they proceed in politics, — and now the confederated sects mean to press their unchurchliness upon us and to recruit among us for their sectarianism, — it is then only self-defense if we strive with all our powers to keep this English influence away from us."

Grand Duchy of Hesse. From there a correspondent of the Ev. K. Z. writes: "We still have the same "'recommended'" bad Baden catechism, which has now been judged and cast out even in its own homeland; indeed, as report has it, its somewhat neglected use has here and there been enjoined afresh at the representation of a zealous patron. We have the same bad Hessian hymnbook; the ministry has for the present laid aside the draft of the new hymnbook, drawn up by a special commission and carefully examined by the Upper Consistory, altered but little and recommended for early introduction, because — the present moment does not seem to it suitable for its introduction and it fears excitement from it. So the churchly minded clergy and congregations of the land have the truly appalling prospect of perhaps having to use for a long time yet a hymnbook*) which, in respect of content and form, would find it hard to have the palm of the greatest wretchedness disputed with it among all those still in use in Germany. An interesting incident is the further circumstance that the Oldenburg church government has bestowed great applause on the new Hesse-Darmstadt draft, and that it may easily happen that the state church there will appropriate for itself the book that came into being with the expenditure of so much diligence and cost — for which it is only to be congratulated — while the Hessian church would remain forbidden to take up the child born of its own womb. — We have the same official disorder and arbitrariness in the use of liturgies. We have altogether still the same doctrinal arbitrariness, not to speak at all of any proper ordination obligation of the clergy. That the university (Giessen), and in particular the theological faculty, is or should be Lutheran by foundation, right, and confession — of that not a trace. If there exists in

*) We do not see wherein this necessity is supposed to lie. Was it not rather a necessary part of the confession of Christ not to use a false hymnbook, and rather to lay down the office than to lend oneself to summoning the congregation to sing false doctrine, and that addressed to the great God Himself? L. u. W.