# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S310
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

confessions demand their own confessional schools; the Catholics want to have their confessional schools, and likewise the evangelical religious communions. Neither of these parties demands a school union*). The opposition to the Concordat was, however, called forth by the fact that through the Concordat the state renounced its right to exercise any influence at all upon the school system. There the state renounced all its influence upon the public schools and left them entirely to the Church. Our Church by no means disputes the influence due to the state, and our evangelical Church has all the less reason to withdraw from it, since the Minister of Culture and Public Instruction must constitutionally belong to the evangelical confession and is counted among the state ministers charged with matters in evangelicis. But if all our schools are confessional schools, then they also have the full right to retain this character henceforth. The honorable deputation has itself, on page 30 of the report, stated this quite decisively when it says: "Were our Saxon schools completely subordinated to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, — then it would be an indispensable requirement that the whole of instruction have a purely confessional character, from which it would of course follow that it would be impossible to dispense even a single teacher from the religious oath." I believe that with this the honorable deputation has itself pronounced the untenability of its own motion; for that our schools are confessional schools is so incontestable a fact that it needs no further proof. It would indeed be a great encroachment upon the rights of the Evangelical Lutheran Church if one wished to compel it to abolish the religious oath, which it now requires of all its teachers, and to demand it only of the religion teachers. The institution of the religious oath, even though it was formerly arranged by the state in a far wider scope, is nevertheless, as it now stands, a purely churchly one. It now belongs solely to the church constitution, and this can be altered only by the church government. The state, on the contrary, has the obligation to protect the Church in the possession of its schools and their arrangements; it could not prescribe to the Church that it give up the religious oath. The church government, however, will not agree to any greater restriction of the oath, because the intimate connection which is meant to obtain among all the subjects of instruction in the school makes it necessary to hold fast to this in requiring the oath, and thereby to secure the confessional interest. The Ministry of Culture has already, in the negotiations over the church order in the First Chamber, expressed its willingness, in suitable cases where confessional scruples in particular do not stand in the way, to let dispensations take effect

*) With this word the tendency that has attached itself to this petition-matter is aptly characterized. A breaking up, or even a mere loosening, of the confessional bond of the schools — a school union — would soon bring a church union in its train.