# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S201
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The State's Decision in Churchly Matters. 201

body, is not recognized at all by our state laws.'" We believe, P. G.
continues, that we grasp the sense of this. For it is meant to say: the
doctrine and the confession of the incorporated church count for nothing
before the civil law. — If that is true, then it is public hypocrisy still to
speak of an incorporation of religious societies or churches . . . A State
which does such deeds commits against all confessional Christians the
horrifying and irresponsible fraud of speaking of the incorporation of
religious societies, where nevertheless their confession and doctrine are to
count for nothing before the law! Greater hypocrisy and untruth can exist
in no legislation on earth!'" (Oh, that the Buffalo Synod had not lived at
the time when the Inquisition flourished in Spain! There it would not have
found this "hypocrisy and untruth" of a State. There the State let the clergy
decide who was a faithful son of the Church and who a heretic — and promptly
it came after with gallows, sword, wheel, fire, etc., and gave support and
emphasis to what the "'Church'" said.) Further on the Senior exclaims: "Here
is truly fulfilled what a very famous historian now living judges concerning
North America, when he says: 'Free North America shows us in its
institutions the experiment of a modern barbarism.' And that
this is true, the following points will show still further." — Further on it
reads: "Accordingly we have seen that 1. the histories adduced by Mr. Hoyt do
not prove what they are supposed to prove, indeed that they prove the very
opposite. 2. That the court decisions adduced by him for the most part
contain absurd and despotic principles, and moreover find no application to
our case, especially not to the declaration of this church. 3. That his own
judgment" (although he is a judge!) "is no judicial verdict" (here the Senior
even turns Nullifier), "but a contradiction of the Act of 1813." — Finally
our theological jurisperitus expresses himself thus: "We now see in the year
1861, sooner than we expected, that we have already arrived at the point
where the confession of the Church (!) is confronted, out of suffering need,
not so much by a raw violence (as in 1836 in Prussia), but — what says far
more — by a juridical tradition full of injustice and despotism in the
higher courts of this land . . . But we bear grief over the land which
twenty-two years ago we chose in hope for our new homeland; which, however,
will now perhaps before long become manifest and stand exposed before the
eyes of all confessional Christians in its desolate materialistic church
despotism, far darker than the former Roman-juridical papacy, and flooded
with traditional despotic principles which grant to no religious and churchly
foundation any support, protection and peaceful security,