# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S332
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

332 Rationalistic Attempts at Life in Saxony.

truth and knows how to accommodate itself to the language and expression of the Church. This it has done quite excellently in Saxony; and when Dr. Hase in Jena, in his polemical writings against Röhr, could with little trouble put the Rationalismus vulgaris under the ban and give currency instead to the Rationalismus sublimis or idealis, then precisely in Saxony, for the reason indicated, this had to find the greatest acceptance, inasmuch as a great number of clergy said to themselves with self-satisfaction: "No, you are not a vulgar rationalist; you belong to the ideal rationalism, which after all possesses the essence of Christianity and to which true Christianity does come back." — Saxon rationalism also has a language in the pulpit such that one often has to be a connoisseur to detect it there; and yet it remains rationalism, inasmuch as it uses the churchly expressions and forms in an entirely different sense than the Church does, and imperceptibly empties them out, so that they signify nothing further than concepts which reason could at a pinch invent for itself and which one's own moral will can put into effect, but by which incidentally the deeper content of revealed truth is set aside in words such as repentance, faith, justification, truth, life, salvation, blessedness. But by this artifice with forms and expressions rationalism has gained all the firmer a footing in Saxony among the educated middle class, which has decided hatred and abhorrence toward the deep earnestness of the Gospel of the Savior of sinners, and yet would gladly retain the semblance of Christianity and gladly contents itself with the form without possessing the substance. There has already been talk of this a year ago, in the report about the Reichenbach ghost and elsewhere. I return to it now only because this same active party of the "German-minded" is being used by certain rationalistic clergy to help rationalism back on its feet and even to procure churchly legitimacy for it. Things had already gone so far that in Saxony scarcely a clergyman would any longer be called a rationalist, and the banner of the confession was raised so high that one could hear the words "churchly," "faithful to the confession," and the like, spoken almost everywhere as praise. But then a band of tough, incorrigible old rationalists took heart, supported by younger forces; they reflected that rationalism had after all once held sway, that it was after all so natural to man and very convenient; they saw in the class of advocates, officials, and merchants — which chiefly, along with the owners of manorial estates, supplies the members for the second chamber — highly educated and suitable allies; they also found the organ of this faction, the Saxon Constitutionelle Zeitung, which is edited skillfully in their sense, very serviceable. Thus already at the last diet individual churchly-minded clergymen had to be put under indictment on account of their faithfulness to their office, after an attempt had already been made to put the minister of worship in a tight place and to make him pliable toward the persecution of the genuinely confession-faithful clergy; but it would not quite succeed, and then the diet was