# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S286
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

286 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

-tines want to stage on ecclesiastical ground a tragedy similar to the one the Electoral Hessians staged on civil ground with their constitution.

Not content with this, however, the opposing assembly has for its part issued a declaration to which we know of nothing similar to set beside it. It has placed the entire clergy, together with the Consistory, under the ban. It has, namely, set forth the following five propositions as the content of its conviction: 1) "We recognize only the Union of the year 1818, according to the wording and principles as laid down in the Union document, as agreeing with our conviction and religious view. 2) We accordingly declare that we hold inviolably to the Union document according to its spirit and its principles, and that for its defense we will exhaust all lawful means and ways with all our strength. 3) We must therefore also, out of fullest conviction and for conscience's sake, confess the religious books deriving from the Union, and oppose in the most resolute manner the introduction of others which do not correspond to these principles. 4) All disparagement of the same, as has already long been practiced in manifold ways by some clergy, we duly reject, and we advise those who cannot go along with us to seek another fellowship for themselves. 5) We accordingly recognize as our fellow churchmen only those who teach, work, and act in accordance with these principles."

To this the source from which we draw — admittedly the report of a Union man of the purest water — remarks: "The Palatine church has now come apart entirely into an almost hostile opposition. In the one camp stands the great majority of the clergy, with a very small following in the congregations; on the other side, the congregations throughout — since even in most of those places where the new hymnal has been introduced by the presbyteries, great dissatisfaction over it prevails. The gulf between clergy and congregations is complete."

As for those five propositions of the Kaiserslautern assembly, it seems to us that their proponents really do stand on churchly ground, and that they really do have the Union document on their side. This, as is well known, is a genuine product of Rationalism, and since it still stands fully in force, it will probably be difficult for the Consistory to convict the proponents of the five propositions of an unchurchly disposition and tendency. The churchly disruption in the Palatinate is the fruit of the Union, and so long as she does not give this up, she cannot become whole. The present Consistory, however, has made the Union precisely its pet child: so let it now be quiet, if it now gets a slap in the face from this pious little daughter, or rather is put out the door.

Present State of the Concordat Question in Baden. Recently, the assembled chamber of estates has also been presented, by the new Minister Stabel, with the proposals for the legal regulation of the church affairs of the country. In accordance with the word given by our sovereign on April 7 of this year, the Roman Church is to be granted, by way of legislation, approximately the same rights contained in the unratified Concordat with the Pope, while at the same time the Evangelical Church is not to be forgotten. — Now the following has been legally established: "To the Evangelical and the Roman Catholic Church are guaranteed the rights of public corporations; the merely tolerated religious communities retain their previously granted concessions." — Among these merely tolerated communities none others are understood than the Mennonites (Anabaptists), the German Catholics, and — the Lutherans! So our territorial government still did not wish to remove from the land the disgrace that the old confessing Church — the Church to which the land owes its former prosperity and the fame of its princely house, the Church to which all our sovereigns down to the grandfather of our present prince belonged, the Church of the pure Word and Sacrament — is still regarded as only barely tolerated, and is placed in the ranks of the sects. For the sake of the good of the people and of the prince we would most earnestly have wished,