# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S309
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Petition of the Consistories of the Evangelical Reformed Congregations at Leipzig, etc. 309

schools, and so it is in all the evangelical schools of the land. What would you say, gentlemen, what would the school congregations say, if the Ministry of Culture wished to send into our evangelical schools teachers who would present history instruction according to the Catholic view, particularly the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? What would you say if we appointed teachers of the German language in our evangelical schools who might set the pupils, for the composition of German essays, themes such as the German-Catholic preachers Scheller and Beyer treat in the church assemblies of their congregations? who occupied the pupils with developing principles of morality, virtue, and the worship of God such as are heard from German-Catholic pulpits? That, thank God, is not the case among us. The entire instruction is given, as not only the confessional school but every rationally ordered school requires, in such a way that all its parts stand in harmony, so that the teachers of other subjects do not again tear down what the religion teacher has built up. So in our land we have only confessional schools. The honorable deputation indeed says in its report, page 30: "this could be conceded in respect of the evangelical schools only if the Saxon schools were completely subordinated to the Evangelical Lutheran Church and governed solely by this Church; whereas in Saxony the school as a whole stands under the state and not under the Church." I cannot acknowledge these two propositions as correct. Our Evangelical Lutheran schools, and likewise the Catholic ones, all stand under the direction of the church authorities. The Catholic schools are supervised and directed by the clergy, the Catholic consistories, and the apostolic vicariate; our evangelical schools stand under the direction and oversight of the parish clergy, the superintendents, the Evangelical Lutheran intermediate church authorities, the Ministry of Culture as the Evangelical Lutheran church government, and finally also under the oversight of the state ministers charged with matters in evangelicis. To be sure, the state supervises the schools of the various confessions. But if the school law — which is an outflow of political legislation, and which regulates the rights of the state and its influence upon the system of public schools — expressly grants to all confessions the right to have confessional schools, then the state's relation to the school, as it constitutionally exists among us, cannot abolish the concept of the confessional school either; and if the honorable deputation assumes that it does, then it evidently takes the concept of the confessional school in a quite different and much narrower sense than our legislation does. The honorable deputation remarks in this connection that "the rigid insistence on the exclusive confessional character of the school has, in Austria, contributed more than anything else to calling forth the general and justified opposition to the Concordat." That is surely a wholly mistaken view. In Austria all