# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S249
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

249
Hanover.

Our Hanover, essentially Lutheran, has, through the addition of several Reformed portions of the country — namely East Frisia and the county of Bentheim, as well as the Lower-Hessian enclave of Bovenden near Göttingen — nonetheless had individual beginnings toward a union in church government, and would, should a regent fond of union ever come to the throne, be in danger of also acquiring a union that blends the confessions together. Hitherto it was only the Lutherans who were seriously averse to such a thing and who felt the awkwardness of the existing arrangement quite bitterly. When, for example, the purely Lutheran consistory at Osnabrück must examine and ordain the Reformed pastors for Lingen, and so bind them to the Reformed confession; when it occurs in several congregations that a — thus united — preacher administers the sacraments to his mixed congregation; or when a Lutheran and a Reformed pastor stand alternately at one and the same altar, then this must of course offend anyone who still knows that the two churches differ not merely in their doctrine of the Lord's Supper, but diverge in their whole view of the divine acts of salvation. The Reformed, however, had not hitherto felt this so keenly, inclined as they always are more readily toward union. In the past year, however, there appeared a very important "Memorandum for Orientation concerning the Condition, Hopes, and Needs of the Reformed Church in Hanover," in which the undersigned clergy, in the name of the 113 Reformed congregations in the kingdom, declare that they too no longer wish to think of a union, that they gladly wish to be rid of the mishmash, and therefore make proposals to the royal Ministry of Worship as to what should be done to bind together inwardly the locally scattered members of their church. We grant it to the Reformed that their petitions may be granted in the highest quarters. After the memorandum has given a very appealing overview of the history of the six Reformed church districts, there follows the proposal, which runs thus: that the 113 congregations should be gathered together into a Reformed territorial church, which is to have a common church government, a uniform doctrinal standard, and a uniform constitution — namely the classical, or presbyterial and synodical, constitution. East Frisia, with its 79 Reformed congregations, would of course have precedence in this. What difficulties stand in the way of carrying out such proposals the memorandum does not conceal; it must indeed, in the case of individual parcels — especially in the case of the Lower-Hessian, and so actually Lutheran, or at least Lutheranizing, Bovenden — take great pains to establish the genuinely-Reformed type. Still greater difficulties will the settling of accounts with the Lutheran church present, where there were simultaneum churches [shared by both confessions].

But even should the well-meant and praiseworthy movement of the Reformed be crowned with no success, we nevertheless rejoice that among them too the thought is awakening: let us be faithful with the gift that we