# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S246
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

246 An Evangelical Church Constitution for Austria.

which was therefore regarded not only as the strongest but also as the last citadel of
Catholicism — this Austria has broken with its whole past,
for there is no Catholic state church; there is no state church
of any kind left in the land. The citadel is now dismantled, the emperor
himself has signed the order and now leaves it to the Catholic
church to shield itself in its own citadels, and with spiritual weapons
to defend or to reconquer what it can. The emperor will have submitted
to the bitter necessity only with the utmost reluctance;
and what must his feelings have been when arch-Catholic Tyrol
made representations to him as one man against the equality of rights of the
Protestants, on the ground that it would infallibly be a nail in the coffin of Tyrolese
loyalty and devotion toward the imperial house! Yet it has
happened; there is no state church any more. If the emperor wishes to still the storm
of revolution before it is too late, if he wishes to protect the concordat from
kicks, pillory and gallows and to put an end to the outcry
that it was concluded for the suppression of the Protestants and of freedom of faith,
then there may be no state church any longer. The old
Austria is gone; Franz Joseph may lay the old Roman
imperial crown in its coffin with it. For what that crown was meant to be and signified,
and what still always belonged to the wishes and tasks of the imperial house — the patronage
of the Roman church and the reunion of the peoples with
Rome and of the Germans with the emperor — he has now annihilated, or surrendered, with a single stroke
of the pen. The shade of the old Austria
may flee over the Alps to Rome, to join itself with the shade of the papal
states and to be sent out by the bowed pope
to disquiet Victor Emmanuel and Louis Napoleon in the night and to visit them with
heavy apparitions.

If we turn to the evangelical church constitution itself, then according to
§ 1 of the patent "the Evangelicals of the Augsburg and of the Helvetic
confession are entitled independently to order, administer and direct their churchly affairs."
It lies in the nature of the case
that this independence could be realized only through presbyteries and synods, if the imperial government
was willing to renounce interference in the church government. Presbyteries, or church
boards, already existed beforehand in the individual congregations; it was therefore
only necessary to build smaller and larger synods upon them, in order to
gather the whole body of the church into a unity for its own self-government.
As a result, this part of the constitution has turned out thoroughly democratic,
and there is electing to the point of weariness, without the electors needing to be very
anxious in their choice. All officers of the church are
freely elected — the pastors too, the seniors (superintendents), and the superintendents
(general superintendents), the first and the last of these for life.
Legislation rests in the hands of the general synod, only that the laws
must be laid before the government for confirmation and may not