# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1857_S349
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Ecclesiastical Movements in Bavaria.   349

expressed in its decrees, and later abandoned or denied it again — this no truth-loving judge will wish to maintain. May God give our congregations in rich measure the spirit of repentance, of faith, of sanctification, and of discipline, and then what is called church discipline will come of itself; so long as the congregations lack the consciousness that they are the holy people, the chosen generation, appointed and obliged to proclaim the virtues of Him who has called them from darkness to His marvelous light, so long will it hardly be possible to proceed to the establishment and execution of generally binding norms with respect to church discipline.

Mention must still be made of one point among the consequences of the movement, namely with regard to the hymnal. The new hymnal did not indeed form a proper point of complaint in the Nuremberg address; it was there mentioned only incidentally and with displeasure on account of its "antiquated language," and no formal motion was made concerning it. Nevertheless the church boards believed, in the first zeal of their activity and in the initial opinion of many of them that the resolutions they passed were laws, that they must turn their oppositional activity to this subject as well. The matter was brought up in the assemblies of the church boards and motions were made. But the resolutions turned out very various. In several parish districts of the city and the suburbs, indeed, the abolition of the new hymnal and the reintroduction of the old one were resolved outright. In others, on the contrary, people wished to content themselves with an appendix which was to contain chiefly more recent hymns. In yet another parish district they had toned down their claims still further and had, by a small majority, addressed to the Upper Consistory the request that it appoint a commission which should give its opinion on the misgivings that had been raised. The Upper Consistory, by a resolution of April 30 of this year, refused all these motions. The decision was of course communicated to the church boards and has thus far had no further steps on their part as its consequence. A similar fate befell the motion of the Nuremberg school commission, a local authority for the schools of the city and suburbs composed of members of the magistracy and of the clerical school inspectors. By it the selection, made by the Upper Consistory, of the hymnal hymns to be learned in the weekday schools had been objected to, and the wish had been expressed that in place of sixteen designated hymns others, mostly those of Gellert, should be substituted. This motion too received from the Upper Consistory a refusal, which goes into the matter instructively but is at the same time couched in very definite terms. Whether the school commission will rest content with this, or will perhaps make still further-reaching motions, cannot at present be said. But it has certainly been observed that since the arrival of these and of some other