# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S105
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Union Conference in Saxony. 105

-spoke. So it came about that people resolved to destine me, at least by way of trial, for a career in trade. I was placed in a school which one might later have compared to the Realschulen. It was in the year 1800."

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Union Conference in Saxony.

Thus we read in Münkel's new Zeitblatt of January 18: To reach back a little further and begin with times past — there formerly existed a mission society in Leipzig which, carried and sustained by two faithful witnesses, the town councillor Volkmann and the pastor Haensel, sent its contributions to Basel, as was the usual practice at that time. But after Harleß had made his influence in Leipzig felt, the Lutheran consciousness grew so strong that people could no longer be content with the connection to Basel, and thought was given to dissolving the old relationship peaceably and putting a Lutheran society in the place of the united one. Haensel, for his part, could just as little accept this innovation, which struck him as "harshness." He had grown gray in the revival movement of that day and felt blessed in a fellowship undisturbed by any ecclesiastical boundaries. The most protracted negotiations were carried on, the upshot of which was that, alongside the newly founded Lutheran Mission Society, growing with every year, the old evangelical [i.e. United] society was preserved. Yet its vital forces were and remained withdrawn from it. Its whole activity consisted in collecting contributions and celebrating its annual festival in the University Church, through which alone its existence, to everyone's great astonishment, became known from year to year. For no one could explain at all what this society was supposed to be doing alongside the great Lutheran one, which had its own extraordinarily well-attended monthly mission-hours and its great annual festivals, while the evangelical society had to fetch its festival preachers from abroad for its meager annual festivals, because no one at home would offer himself for it. Under these circumstances people expected, every year, the death notice of the evangelical society. Then a couple of physicians turned up who undertook to add a few more years of life to the dying patient. The professors Liebner and Brückner took the matter in hand and drew into the society's board everything at the university that was half-hearted and undecided. The intention was to raise a dam — of loose rubble bound together with drifting sand — against the ever more powerfully swelling tide of the Lutheran mission cause. For that purpose it was resolved to send out a circular letter to all the superintendents of Saxony, inviting their participation and cooperation. The circular was already finished, and the Lutheran society expected, from day to day, the opening of the fierce contest. Then some unfavorable wind caught up the circular on its wings and carried it off, no one knows where.