# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S317
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History.   317

...that church nevertheless gained a confessional foundation, and truly no bad one, but rather at bottom a Lutheran one. The stricter Lutherans withdrew and entered the Lutheran church of Bavaria on the other side of the Rhine; the rest submitted, hoping indeed that in a few years one would again be permitted to teach Lutheran doctrine as before; for the demands of life, which after all requires plain speech and answer to the question of the How, are mightier than the prescriptions of a doctrinaire church authority. But now this authority has got into conflict with its real opponents, for whose sake Ebrard was actually sent to Speyer. For it was against the rationalists that a man of learning had been meant to be set. That he first began a struggle with the Lutherans was in Munich no doubt as unexpected as it was unwelcome. The present quarrel with the rationalists has for its object the hymnal. The consistory has drawn up the plan of a new one, which is to be laid before the synod for its opinion. Meanwhile Crethi and Plethi of the Protestant citizenry and so forth have seized upon this matter, in order to defend their Protestant liberty and Rhenish-Palatine enlightenment and so forth, and to keep away from their land of light the danger of stupefaction by the formulas of a superseded faith of the 16th or 17th century — that is, of the Middle Ages, in the language of these "Protestants." What an admirable opus of taste — to be silent about everything else — this hymnal is, for which those "Protestants" stand up, may be shown by the following verse from No. 449, to be sung at the dedication of a new organ:

Who gave the art and science
That devised such a work?
Who laid so much creative power
Into a human hand?
Who taught him thus to draw song
Out of the rise and fall of the air?
Who gave to the silent metal
The lofty melodies?
Thou Eternal One, be highly praised,
Thou sharpenest the mind of men
And guidest wisely his spirit
Toward the invention of art.

For such poetry, then, "Protestant men from 25 congregations" of the district around Landau and so forth have come forward as champions. And a layman in the Protestant church paper has discovered that the intention is "to set in the place of the Rhenish-Palatine Protestant the rigid Lutheran of the 16th century, but without freedom of religious inquiry, and instead with a quasi-papal compulsion in doctrine and worship" — and however else this well-known phraseology runs. A certain Pastor Schmidt has already been suspended on account of his joining these men of protest, and it is to be expected that the consistory will not let itself be intimidated. In the end, however, it will after all purchase dear peace by a few concessions to the "taste and culture of the 19th century."

Oldenburg. "The high church council at Oldenburg, the highest ecclesiastical authority of the land — which, with the help of our new democratic church constitution, to which it owes its existence, and in the service of an ecclesiastical tendency indicated from an influential quarter, asserts its will fairly decidedly — has lately charged the district synods to deliberate upon the reintroduction of the 'house visitation,' which has long since fallen into disuse and which, according to a 'church order' of 1722 established by the sovereign, consisted 'in a careful inquiry and investigation concerning the condition of every member of the household,' being 'appointed in all and every house to this end, that a pastor may learn to know his hearers inwardly and outwardly, and may know how far each one has come in his Christianity, both in the knowledge of the most necessary articles of faith and in the exercise of true godliness, etc.' No one, be he young or old, of high or of low estate, shall have power to withdraw himself from this house visitation. — The preacher who performs the house visitation must always have at hand: the register of communicants, in order to inquire who does or does not present himself at the table of the Lord; a black register, in which the offensive sinners are recorded according to the order of the holy Ten Commandments, so that he may urge them to amendment. . . . . The examination itself at the visitation is so conducted by the preacher that he inquires how far they have come in the knowledge of the necessary arti-