# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S30
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

30 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

should prove to be an obstacle to religious instruction, we hold it our duty
to attend to religious instruction first.

8. At the same time we must earnestly advise all members of our
congregations against making use of such English schools where the
children are in danger of either learning bad habits and being corrupted,
or being estranged from the pure Lutheran faith.

9. Since the American Sunday schools constantly seek to give the
children religious instruction, and the teachers are seldom or never
Lutherans, we would fall into contradiction with ourselves if we were to
send our children to these schools; and since in a large part of the
English district schools there is so little discipline that children are
easily corrupted there, we must earnestly ask our congregation members
to examine the condition of the schools carefully before sending their
children into them, and at the same time to do everything in their power
to bring these schools into such a condition that the children can safely
be sent into them and thus not be deprived of the important knowledge
they can gain there.

10. Where the English district schools are found to be in such a
condition, we will earnestly advise our congregations, and urgently
commend to them, to make diligent use of them.

We ask all the papers in which this matter has been debated to print
this declaration of ours, just as we, in reply to any articles that may in
future be written against us concerning this matter, will point to these
propositions.

Parish of Koskonong, July 2, 1859.

N. Brandt, P. M. Brodahl, C. F. Clausen, N. E. Jensen, V. Koren,
L. Larsen, C. F. Magelsen, J. A. Ottesen, A. C. Preus, H. A. Preus,
H. A. Stub.

Note of the Editors of L. u. W. It is certainly only to be approved
that our Norwegian brethren, foreseeing how soon, under the conditions
in which they find themselves here, the English language must come to
dominate among their countrymen, are taking measures so that this
process of transformation is not so much powerlessly resisted as rather
given a clear path — so that the danger to the faith rescued here from
the homeland may thereby be removed.

—.....—
Church and Contemporary Affairs.

I. America.

Atheists, so we read in a political paper, are henceforth permitted in Massachusetts,
by a resolution passed in the Senate there on November 22 of last year, to give testimony
in court. The next humane resolution will probably be that the insane, too, are capable
of it.

Purgatory. A few weeks ago, so an exchange paper from November of last year
writes, John Handley of Seneca Co., Ohio, died and bequeathed to the Catholic Church a
sum of money for the benefit of souls in purgatory. The heirs went to court to contest the
validity of this clause in his will. The court sided the