# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S336
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

336 From the Principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen.

and simply be done away with, if one were willing to be truly sincere, to give the truth its honor, and in obedience toward the Lord Jesus and in His name to make earnest of it, and to say confidently:

The cause and honor, Lord Jesus Christ,
Are not ours but Thine indeed;
Therefore do Thou stand by those
Who freely rely upon Thee.

Go, you pastors and church authorities of the territorial churches, and do likewise, as the venerable church ministerium at Greiz has done in the fear of God, that the Lord may further strengthen and preserve you in the right and united faith. Amen.

(From the "Freimund.")

From the Principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen.

It will hardly have remained unknown to most readers of the Freimund that the Lutheran territorial church among us had fallen into unbelief and deep darkness just as much as in the other Thuringian states, and that, being regarded by the just judgment of God as an integral part of the state, it had to go through thick and thin with the state at every principal change in the constitution. Thus things came to such a pass among us that, when on January 1, 1842, a new fundamental law of the land took effect, the church had according to § 98 to content itself with the modest title of an evangelical Christian church, though it still remained in the rights of a territorial church; indeed, that when in the years 1848 and 49 the wagon of state went completely off the track and drove across country over fields, meadows, ditches, thorns, and hedges, the territorial church was thrown overboard as useless ballast, so that the new land law of December 12, 1849, § 20, expressly states: there shall henceforth be no state church. This overhasty deed was indeed very soon withdrawn again and this provision struck out again by an amendment of March 28, 1854; yet the relation of the church to the state was not put in order again, so that one did not know: was the church really to remain free and independent, or was it to be yoked together with the state anew? From the church itself no voice could then be heard that asked about this or gave any thought to the question at all; and so it remained stuck between door and hinge, until recently it has been restored to honor by a new fundamental law of the land of July 8, 1857. For there it says of it, in § 4: The evangelical Lutheran Church is the territorial church; the evangelical Lutheran prince exercises the episcopal rights in it. And now we who mean faithfully and honestly by the Lutheran Church cannot refrain from expressing our joy over this openly and without concealment, and to the