# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S312
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

petition to blur or conceal it." — "If one considers the whole motion closely, one indeed arrives at the extraordinarily questionable result which the deputy Reichen-Eisenstuck already mentioned, that one is, so to speak, incidentally really trying to turn our Evangelical Lutheran Church and school into an everybody's-church and an everybody's-school. For it could actually come about that, if this motion of the honorable deputation should be adopted and carried into effect — whereby the Ministry would be empowered to let all possible confessional parties be represented in the schools, and, as it is expressly stated here, to bind such teachers merely under Form D of the ordinance of December 2, 1837 — that we would henceforth have schools in which, as the case may be, apart from the actual religion teacher there would be no Evangelical Lutheran teacher at all, but rather Reformed, Catholic, German-Catholic, and so forth, appointed. The Ministry would then be able to appeal to this motion and say: "'The Ministry is empowered to do this.'" I can scarcely believe that in an evangelical land — and that is certainly what we are in Saxony — such a possibility ought to be permitted. One is certainly quite right when one speaks everywhere of tolerance, but I repeat what I also mentioned in this hall as a remark of the late Großmann: "'Let us beware of such a mingling of faiths, which never leads to anything good.'" The various confessions may well esteem one another and live together in peace and harmony, which, thank God, is the case among us in Saxony; but we cannot possibly concede that other confessions should prescribe to us, who belong to the Evangelical Lutheran confession, how they wish us to bind our teachers at our own schools. What would the Reformed and the Catholics say, conversely, if we for our part proposed: you must henceforth bind your teachers in such and such a way? I can scarcely believe that any other confession would put up with that, and the Reformed, if they had schools of their own among us, least of all. And we are here in exactly the same case and the same position; I am far from saying that cases could not occur in which it would not be possible, without detriment to the school and to instruction, for a non-Lutheran too to be appointed; but to make such a declaration with respect to all the teachers, as they are described in the report, that I would, under all circumstances, regard as questionable in the very highest degree, from every side, even for the teacher who might be appointed in this way, because he would often feel constrained and bound in his conscience — but far more so for the school."

In the negotiation of the matter in the First Chamber (on the 9th of July) it was further pointed out by the deputation that a case such as the Dr. Hertel motion presupposes has not yet, up to now, occurred