# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Roman Church.                                    23

...brought to Abel's regime! It still owes its enemy thanks today. For he compelled it to rouse itself, to gather its strength, to become conscious of itself, to react against the pressure, and so forth. Protestantism in Austria needs this far more still. For, indeed, things often look sad enough for it. It is an impertinence when, at a gymnasium in Vienna, the evangelical pupils are advised, by order of the rector, to attend Catholic religious instruction, and their progress in school is thereafter partly determined by this. But it can at least serve as a spur to see to it that the grounds given for that demand — that the evangelical pupils showed themselves so ignorant in religion that it could only benefit them to learn something, even from a Catholic religion teacher — become henceforth impossible. It is an impertinence when the Catholic press lumps Protestants and Jews together, as against the Catholics. But how often those themselves place themselves, in their own consciousness, together with the Jews, as equally oppressed and equally liberal-minded! If one is annoyed at this juxtaposition, then let one make it impossible by a stronger emphasis on the positive Christian confession. That here too the outward position of power of the Roman church is not the true expression of a fully corresponding inner influence is recognizable from many signs. The prevailing spirit of Vienna, for example, is indeed not, as in North German Protestant cities, rationalism, but rather materialism. I would not know that the latter is so much better than the former. And that the former, too, is not lacking is certain. Some ten years ago a connoisseur of Viennese conditions confessed to me that the scholarly youth of Vienna belonged, as to half of it, to the school of Strauss and Feuerbach — despite censorship and the ban on books. This judgment received its factual confirmation in the "Wiener Aula" at the time of the revolution that soon followed. Scarcely has any far-reaching inner conversion taken place since then. But the significant and noble reaction of Günther's philosophy has been managed, through Jesuit influence, to be placed on the Index and brought into disrepute. In a surprising way, the conversions of Roman clergy and monks to Protestantism have increased of late. And they are not the least noble among the Austrian clergy who have given up their office, or endured monastic confinement, and ventured on flight. Among the 800 converts who annually go over to the evangelical church in Silesia, not a few are from Austria. —