# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S338
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

338   The Ecclesiastical Movements in Bavaria.

which it therefore also holds itself bound to bring to bear in the government of the church. All the individual points that have been especially attacked — such as the new hymnal, the order of service, the core of the agenda and the catechism, the order of confession, church discipline — are there discussed in so convincing a manner that all those who were genuinely concerned for a truly evangelical instruction, in case they had previously allowed themselves to be disquieted, would necessarily have had to be satisfied and set at rest. But unfortunately — and this is precisely what characterizes the whole movement — the fewest among the participants were concerned about real instruction. Rationalism is everywhere the same, in the south as in the north of Germany and outside of Germany: the theology of the natural man, of the narrowness of unenlightened reason, which rejects everything it does not comprehend. People of this tendency — and to it belong a great many, chiefly in the city congregations, who have never uttered or heard the word rationalism — not only have no desire for a thorough instruction in matters of faith drawn from God's Word and resting upon the confession of the church, but they are on principle or by instinct averse to it. To them the Address was too theological, too deep for them to make friends with it so easily; too long — twenty-two pages printed in large octavo — for one to have been able to expect from them even an attentive reading of it. It was therefore also, in proportion — if one held oneself entitled to draw from the large number of signers of the address a conclusion as to the heightened interest of the Protestants in the affairs of their church — but little bought, least of all read and laid to heart by those by whom it had been occasioned, and most, indeed almost exclusively, by those who needed no reassurance, because they had not been disquieted by the measures of the Upper Consistory. By this it is not meant to deny the Address its blessed effect in confirming and strengthening many well-meaning but still wavering and uncertain minds among clergy and laity. Certainly it has had this effect in many cases, and among us too the blessing could not fail to come which springs, for more earnest souls that are perhaps less firmly grounded in knowledge, from the all-round illumination and deeper establishment of the truth that is called forth by contradiction. This is indeed at bottom the only way in which a genuinely evangelical church government can make even the most wholesome ordinances become the property of the church. But upon the great multitude that had been set in motion the Address had no effect. It was therefore, rightly understood, not untrue, what was to be read in the public papers soon after the appearance of the Address, that by it minds had by no means been set at rest. To be sure, that reassurance which was demanded by rationalistic, "friends-of-light" Protestants could never be granted them by a church authority that did not wish to deny Christ and His Gospel. What was made a matter of reproach to the Upper Consistory