# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S333
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Rationalistic Attempts at Life in Saxony. 333

closed full of hope with the general motion for the submission of a draft of a new church constitution suited to the times (that is, one that would place at the free disposal of the rationalistic Herren omnes the confession, preaching, liturgy, catechism, hymnal, and thus the whole Church).

Now that the diet is drawing near again, something had once more to be done in order to make the church government pliable to the intentions of the anti-churchly party. What does one do? — One posts lurkers who in and around Dresden eavesdrop on the clergy who are firm in the faith, especially the younger ones, in their sermons, and one puts their addresses — naturally with subtle, distorting, harsh-sounding turns of phrase, under the sharpest criticism — into the Constitutionelle Zeitung, so that the unprejudiced reader, even with the best will, is placed in embarrassment and thinks: "Well, if he said that, then he spoke ambiguously, or even wrongly." Thus the church government itself has let itself be compelled to examine the clergymen in question, or respectively to call them to account; and even though they fully vindicated themselves, they had still had the trouble of answering for themselves. It is indeed now expected that the government will formally and publicly punish those newspaper gossip pieces and put an end to them; but the party still has the satisfaction of holding the government in check.

Thus the church government has also let itself be compelled to lodge an objection against attendance at the Bible-society hours which the secretary of the Bible society holds in his house, on the part of those who do not belong to the house — a thing that otherwise would have been held to be entirely unobjectionable.

Likewise a young pastor S. at Th. recently had to let himself be sued injuriarum by a person who was strongly suspected of plying a trade in fornication, and whom in his pastoral zeal he called by the German name of her trade; the local magistrate readily accepted the complaint and sentenced the pastor to 14 days in prison. He at first wanted to refuse the penalty, because he was confident he could plead the exceptio veritatis, and because in his pastoral care he ought not to allow the right to speak the truth to be taken from him. But he found no help. To be sure, he had to concede that the jurist is entitled to insist on the letter of the law in favor of innocence; that the clergyman too, even in the most zealous pastoral care, must observe the form of what is right; that offenses of this kind can serve as a warning, inasmuch as even the most faithful clergyman stands in danger of confusing or mingling fleshly zeal and contentiousness or domineering with true pastoral care — a lesson which everyone can turn to his own profit. He therefore resolved to let go the thought of resistance, not to wait for a forcible distraint, as he had indeed held it his duty to do, but to submit to the penalty and in future to attend to the form. — But one sees roughly which way the wind is blowing; one sees that rationalism is beginning its harassments, that it is deciding again, as of old, rather to let immorality go unchecked