# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S337
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Ecclesiastical Movements in Bavaria.   337

to thank the Lord of the Church that He has now again made her honorable before the world. *)

It will indeed be objected to us that nothing is yet gained by the mere name, and that so long as the Lutheran church has not been reinstated among us in all her rights, orders, and confessions, she cannot in reality be a Lutheran one; yet this much we do see, that a church which for years has been led and has gone through all the swamps and puddles of unbelief cannot be reinstated in her rights, orders, and confessions hastily and at one stroke, but only then, when she has recognized them as the right expression of her faith and Christian life; and that nothing is more suited than precisely the name Lutheran to bring her to this recognition and then to advance her in it. We also trust the wisdom of our new minister, Privy Councillor von Elsner, to whose heart the Lutheran church has grown dear, as well as the pastoral prudence of our Church Council, which has lately been rejuvenated by two believing members, that the suitable means will be taken up in order to support the church in the course of her rebirth. But for this we need the earnest intercession of all Lutheran brethren, and it is precisely to request this that these few lines are written. To that end may the Lord have mercy upon us in grace.

The Ecclesiastical Movements in Bavaria.
Their Immediate Effects and Consequences from the Nuremberg Address Onward.

After the address to His Majesty the King had gone off, the promoters and signers gave themselves up to the hope that there would at once follow a withdrawal of the Upper Consistory's decrees and an abolition of the alterations introduced in recent times in the liturgical field. But before a decision of any sort whatever had issued from the Highest Quarter, the Upper Consistory published, under date of November 8, an "Address to the Whole Clergy of the Evangelical Lutheran Confession in Bavaria," which arrived in Nuremberg on November 18 and was at once to be had from the printer Sebald. It expounded in a dignified but thoroughly mild manner the position of church government in general — of any government that lays claim to the name of evangelical — and then that of the Bavarian in particular, and its relation to the measures already taken or in preparation. With great clarity the genuinely evangelical principles are developed therein which the Upper Consistory regards as binding upon itself and

*) It is a doubtful business; only do not rejoice too soon, dear people!

Freimund.

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