# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S200
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

200 The State's Decision in Churchly Matters.

State is concerned!) "should be abolished, or maltreated as though dead and
not present at all in the confessional members of the Church!" (Here one sees
what the Buffalo Synod had hoped and demanded of the State: the State was to
compel for it, by its bailiffs, the recognition and rights of confessional
character, even if in fact it forsook the doctrine of the Confession, as the
Buffalo Synod is doing.) It goes on: "The Lutheran church congregations at
least would then be placed here, after 22 years, once again under the
necessity of preferring the mass emigration of their confessors to
such tyrannical defenselessness, and of denouncing to the whole
civilized world this tyranny of the North American Free
States, so that other Christians too may not fall into the misfortune of
being buried sooner than they are dead."

(Remarkable, that Grabau here behaves as though a church, if certain of its
temporal property is not secured to it by the State under all circumstances,
were already buried alive! We of course have nothing against the Church
letting itself be secured in its temporal property, so far as possible, by
the civil authorities; but we cannot set great store by it, since the State
naturally cannot let itself in for sitting in judgment upon orthodoxy when
divisions arise and both parties claim to be confessional. In drawing up
paragraphs of a congregational constitution regarding property, this has
always been the chief thing for us, that thereby whoever, against right and
yet with the appearance of right, arrogates the property to himself under the
protection of the secular power, must at least do so with a bad conscience.")
In our little tract it further says: "Mr. Hoyt further reports to us that the
Appeal Court in Connecticut reached the conclusion 'that the legal (or civil)
character of the corporation is not at all affected by the existence or
non-existence of churchly connection, doctrine, usages and forms of church
government set up by the incorporators. Indeed, that the existence of the
latter, as of an organized

*) If we lived in the State of New York, we should be entirely satisfied that
the Constitution of this State says: "The free exercise and enjoyment of
religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall
forever be allowed to all mankind in this State." Oh, how fervently would the
Christians of the first centuries have thanked God on their knees if such a
statute had been in force in the Roman Empire! How far would they have been
from thinking, in spite of it, of a "mass emigration," on the ground, say,
that the Roman State had refused to investigate the doctrinal disputes of
Christians and then to award the exclusive right to church property to those
found orthodox or strictly confessional! — God have mercy, by the way, on all
the congregations of the Buffalo Synod, should the church property remain
theirs only in case they were found orthodox or "confessional"! Then they
would at once have to abandon all their churches, parsonages, schools, etc.;
for that in all these congregations doctrines are taught which run flatly
contrary to the churchly confession, which are un-Lutheran and indeed wholly
papistic, is now denied only by those who are themselves guilty of that same
open apostasy from the doctrine of the Church. Ed.