# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S346
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

346   The Ecclesiastical Movements in Bavaria.

numbers and in good time in the house of God, left the church at the beginning of the liturgy and re-entered the church only after its close. All deliberations and resolutions of the church boards aimed at the abolition of the liturgy — often the mere attempts and moves in that direction — were carefully registered in the daily papers, and thus the unrest and agitation in the congregations, whenever it seemed perhaps to have been quieted, was fanned into flame again and again. The reporter was assured from a trustworthy quarter that from the editorial office of a Nuremberg daily paper, which is widely read in the city and in the country, special letters had been circulated in the country congregations in order not to let the movement come to a standstill. The reporter has, however, not himself set eyes upon any such letter.

But if one compares the result and the success of these efforts with the pains expended upon them, it may rightly be maintained that not even in the field of the liturgical question has any victory worth mentioning been won by the unchurchly party. For what does it signify if, among the 850 Lutheran congregations of Bavaria on this side of the Rhine, in a few towns and villages the barely introduced liturgy has had to give way again? The reporter has, to be sure, no official statistical survey at his disposal on the basis of which he could furnish proof with figures. But he lives in the midst of the Protestant population of Bavaria and has followed the latest movement attentively, and he believes he may say, on the ground of the observations he has made, that the number of congregations in which a momentary victory fell to the opponents of the liturgy is a proportionately very small one. For the right appreciation of the state of affairs the following must not be forgotten. First, that in many congregations, especially country ones, the liturgy in its essential parts never went out of use at all, but has continually maintained itself on the basis of the Nuremberg-Brandenburg Church Order which is in force in the Nuremberg territory, in the Ansbach and the Bayreuth districts. Add to this that for several decades younger clergymen, who had already at the university come to know the right liturgical principles through the blessed activity of our excellent theological faculty, had — in their congregations, though without the sanction of the church government — helped the liturgy back to its rights: a proceeding which, however praiseworthy it was in the intention underlying it, nevertheless required regulation and ordering by the church government, and which was in fact chiefly what occasioned and called forth the liturgical proposals laid by the Upper Consistory before the General Synod in the year 1853. Finally, the liturgy, which was first issued in the year 1853 by the Upper Consistory for optional use, then adopted by the General Synod with quite unessential modifications and approved by the King, was from that time on