# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S340
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

340   The Ecclesiastical Movements in Bavaria.

wish to force nothing upon them against the will of their lawful organs, but everywhere allow considerate regard to be shown to existing conditions.

Just as little, therefore, do we fear that the complainants will succeed in shaking or making unsteady the confidence of Your Royal Majesty in the men to whom Your Most High wisdom has been pleased to entrust the direction of the Protestant Church in Bavaria, by means of the insinuations brought forward against them.

Nevertheless, over against the complainants — and this quite especially because they venture to appear in the name of the whole Evangelical Lutheran population of Nuremberg, and so also in our name, without being in the least authorized to do so either by us or by the many who, being averse to every public demonstration, quietly leave the decision to the competent authorities — we must regard it as an urgent duty to declare our thoroughly divergent conviction before Your Royal Majesty most reverently and frankly, to this effect: that we not only hold the complaint that has been raised to be wholly unfounded, but that we owe Your Royal Majesty the warmest thanks for the wise care which the same Most High Majesty causes to be extended to the Protestant Church in Bavaria, and which is shown precisely also in the choice of the distinguished men who have been called by Your Royal Majesty into the Upper Consistory. Of this our highest church authority, however, which has already done so much for the welfare of our church, we cherish the confident hope that it will let the spirit of genuinely evangelical mildness, which appears in its ordinances alongside the indispensable earnestness, so prevail in the execution of them that no truly well-meaning member of our church will have just cause to complain of their application."

This counter-address, which was already sent off to its destination on the third day after the call to sign it, and in the signing of which all those arts by which so many signatures had been procured for the first address were deliberately and on principle avoided, could find an echo only among the decidedly church-minded. It went off with not quite three hundred signatures — a small number, to be sure, but not surprising to one who considers how in all ages the little band of faithful and courageous confessors of Christ has been and will be but small, and how at that time in Nuremberg it really required a manly resolution to set oneself against the stream that was carrying everything along with it. The Lord will, according to Matthew 10:32, reward these men, who are esteemed in civil respects as well, for having dared to confess Him before all the world and to set their names at the head of the counter-declaration.

Under the date of November 27 the eagerly awaited decision upon the address of complaint was issued by His Majesty the King and published a few days later. It corresponded to the sanguine hopes of the complainants