# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S30
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

30 Ecclesiastical-Contemporary Chronicle.

Gotha, September 21. How peaceably the religious parties coexist here is shown by the circumstance that today, at the burial of a local Israelite, a Protestant clergyman delivered the funeral address. So reports the Allgemeine Zeitung. The Freimund adds: all respect to Gotha and its clergy. We add: even in Gotha it is still dark compared with our liberal America, where, as we have learned, Jews themselves have been elected as heads of Protestant congregations.

The Lutheran Church in France has 269 pastors, adjuncts, and vicars; 347 churches and 33 chapels; 576 schools, of which 507 are communal schools.

Bavaria. To judge from the reports we find in German newspapers concerning the time shortly before the holding of the general synod in Bavaria, matters cleared up more and more; the zeal of the opposition abated considerably; those of a better, though not strictly Lutheran, disposition, who had formerly gone along with the opponents of the president of the Oberconsistorium, abandoned their poor allies, and so on. Kirchenrath Fickenscher of Nürnberg, formerly the head of the opposition party, has been called by the Lord through sudden death in the vigor of manhood.

— In later papers we already find the report on the holding of the general synod at Ansbach. We read, among other things, as follows: "On October 18 the opening session took place, with an address by the royal commissioner von Lindenfels, head of the Ansbach Consistory, urging peaceful deliberation and the avoidance of the contentious questions of recent times deliberately excluded from the matters for discussion; to this was joined the address of the director of the synod, von Harleß, in which he, earnestly rejecting the journalistic and similar suspicions cast upon the intentions of the church government and upon his own person, and recalling the synod of 1853, expressed on the basis of the diocesan synods and their deliberations the confidence that in the present assembly the work begun four years ago would, undeterred by the events that had intervened, be carried further forward.

The following days were taken up with the work of the various committees. Not until Thursday, October 22, could the second session take place, in which various petitions and motions of individual synod members were discussed, of which only the motion of the Very Reverend Dean Bauer deserves to be singled out: "that general church visitations be undertaken by a clerical member of the Ober-Consistory, with the assistance of a clerical councillor of the respective consistory and of individual clergymen suited to the purpose, after the model of similar institutions existing elsewhere." This motion was adopted with all votes against two.

To lay the question of church discipline before this year's general synod, the church government had hesitated. This prompted the delegate Dr. Thomasius and several other members to bring the motion: "that the general synod record in its session minutes the declaration that it recognizes church discipline in itself as a right and duty of the Church, and that it therefore regards the question raised by the general synod of the year 1853 concerning its introduction not as set aside but only as postponed, and that it accordingly wishes the church government's right to be preserved to return to this question, with a statement of reasons, as soon as the necessary conditions appear to be given." The assembly declared its unanimous assent, and so in this resolution a formal point of connection is given for a later time.

From the discussion that followed in the same session on a proposed change to the mode of election for the lay members of the church council, it is noteworthy that, in addition to a Christian, honorable conduct and a demonstration, on the part of those elected, of a disposition corresponding to the confession of the evangelical-Lutheran Church through participation in public worship and the Lord's Supper, an obligation is henceforth to obtain that includes an explicit confession of the faith of the evangelical-Lutheran Church as it is set forth in Luther's Small Catechism. This resolution is of importance, both in itself and also because