# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S308
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

308 The Petition of the Consistories of the Evangelical Reformed Congregations at Leipzig, etc.

to refrain from it, but rather to bind such teachers merely under Form B of the ordinance of November 2, 1837."

But even this more limited motion of the deputation was narrowed still further by another motion, proposed by the deputy Hertel and adopted by a decided majority. It read: "The state government should, in appointing schoolteachers at higher educational institutions who are not required to give religious instruction, dispense members of the Evangelical Reformed body — wherever this appears admissible in the confessional sense — from performance of the religious oath." What chiefly gave rise to this motion, and secured its acceptance in the Chamber, appears to have been the consideration that, following the logic of the deputation's own motion, "members of the Catholic religion too could be appointed at our schools and educational institutions," which has not occurred in Saxony since the Reformation down to the present.

The debate offered some very interesting moments: alongside plainly sound views resting on legal ground, there was no lack of manifold utterances ranging from the standpoint of a hazy unionism all the way to that of the religionless state, up or down, whichever way one prefers to put it. From the side of the Ministry of Culture, however, the actual state of the matter was set forth so clearly and cogently that we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of communicating the essentials of the speeches in question, since they once again furnish a striking testimony to the clarity and firmness with which the churchly legal standpoint is maintained at the decisive place. The speech of the royal Commissioner Dr. Hübel we take the liberty of printing word for word, so as not to do injury, by any abridgment, to its rigorous consistency:

"The honorable deputation, upon examining the petition before it, became convinced that the religious oath of teachers, in the scope in which it is presently required, is fully grounded in the laws, and that it cannot be described as anything legally inadmissible. Yet it has nevertheless finally arrived at proposing the motion to be found at the close of the report. In support of this motion, the honorable deputation disputes, in the second part of its report — in contradiction to what it set forth in the first part of the same — the confessional character of our evangelical schools, and in particular denies that they are entitled

to maintain this character further. It concedes that in our evangelical schools religious instruction is given according to the Evangelical Lutheran confession, but it wishes to find a distinction between a confessional school and one in which religious instruction is merely given according to the doctrinal system of a particular confession. One might grant such a distinction, but in practice it certainly does not exist. For in all our schools not only is religious instruction given according to the doctrinal system of a confession, but all other instruction as well is given in the spirit of that same confession. So it is in our Catholic