# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S106
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

106 Union Conference in Saxony.

At the same time Liebner was called to the post of Chief Court Preacher in Dresden, in order to help strengthen the weakness of the ministry. He now wished to render this same service, from his elevated standpoint, to his own weak charge, the United Mission Society in Leipzig — so little did he grasp what his official relation to the Lutheran territorial church entailed. Only through a special official prompting from the old, now departed, Privy Church Councillor Meißner was he induced to withdraw from the board of the United society, since it was not fitting for him, as Chief Court Preacher, to take up such a partisan position. The good Minister of Culture von Falkenstein, who cared no less for public opinion than for his own ministerial chair, may well have learned what a storm would break out if the cause of the United mission were in any way brought into connection with the government of the church.

Liebner therefore had to take leave of this field of his activity, where he could sow seed for the sheaves of the Union; but the new field, too, proved very unrewarding. In Dresden he held a post as high as his influence was small, and in fact people troubled themselves little about him. He damaged his own standing from the very outset, in that for his inaugural sermon in Dresden he took a sermon he had preached in Leipzig, and for that reason set aside the text expressly prescribed for that day, a day of repentance. Nor did he later keep to the prescribed texts. Pastor Fröhlich, a faithful worker at the deaconess institution in Dresden — which liberalism has singled out as its target — was sharply reprimanded by the Ministry of Culture for having preached a few times on the old Gospel lessons; but Liebner, the Chief Court Preacher, the minister's chief counselor, went right on preaching on free texts as he pleased, as though the church order existed only for people of subordinate standing. If he now pursued his own path without the church, then the church found its own path without him. Church life and church consciousness grew ever more, quietly, in the meantime, while Liebner remained standing where he stood, and afterward, too, proved unable to do what had earlier been too hard for him. This state of affairs weighed on both Liebner and the Minister of Culture; schemes had to be devised for setting Liebner once more upon the candlestick of the territorial church. Unfortunately, however, the wrong stops were pulled again, which threw the whole harmony out of tune.

In Dresden a preachers' conference had attached itself to the annual Bible and Mission festival held in August, at which the church's own forces would gather. Now, in order to gain the desired influence, the resolution was passed to found, alongside the Dresden conference, a conference of the golden mean and of scholarliness at Meißen. If one had set the golden mean above the parties and had thereby reduced the Lutheran church in the land itself to the status of a party, then one hoped, from this newly won height, to be able to command the whole field with the trained cannon of scholarship. In order to proceed quite securely