# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S128
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

128    Church News of the Day.

and did the same also with all natives and foreigners who, on account of doctrine or conduct, had renounced their regular pastor after a fruitless application of the gradus admonitionis, there followed first his suspension, then his removal from office. The pastorate at Clodra has since been handed over to a neighboring clergyman for vicarial administration. Vollert still occupies the parsonage, though he has promised to hold no religious assemblies in it; and, as we hear, the Grand Duke is said to have promised him, at a requested and granted audience, a renewed opening of the investigation — although, as matters now stand, it is not to be believed that a return of the case to orderly paths will be the happy outcome of this sad conflict."

Silesia. Concerning this the Ev. Kz. (in the number of December 11) reports the following from a so-called Lutheran within the territorial church: "At the present moment a certain frame of mind is claiming attention to a very predominant degree — one that must be traced and probed to the bottom all the more earnestly the faster it spreads and the more alarmingly it threatens to dissolve into utter looseness. I search in vain for a pithy name for it. I would call it a sullen moral weariness which, after faithful — though in many respects unfortunately fruitless — struggle, begins to let its hands fall, and this the more disquietingly since this listlessness is found in no lesser degree precisely where little has so far been accomplished, so that there can be no talk of mere exhaustion. Even love for missions is slackening here and there, and mission festivals and mission hours are declining in many places. Even in the field that has hitherto distinguished itself by the greatest freshness — I mean the sphere of our churchly society life — traces of that morose temper are already showing themselves, a temper far more dangerous to us and to the whole church than the most open hostility. But one is grieved to the very depths of the soul when, among like-minded people within and outside our societies, one hears here and there the talk: 'It is now over with the Lutheran society — it has fulfilled its task; one can see from its poorly attended conferences that its vital powers are failing; in the course of time's development new needs have arisen which it is demonstrably and actually unable to satisfy; it will therefore do well to give up its sham existence and dissolve itself into a free pastoral conference.' This kind of talk finds much resonance at present among the Evangelical clergy."

Rhenish Bavaria. Concerning the sorrowful state of the ecclesiastical conditions of this land, the Ev. Kz. reports in No. 7 of this year's volume: Rhenish Bavaria is now, next to Baden, the most endangered part of the Evangelical Church. In the hymnal controversy the government has surrendered the right of the church entirely to the masses led astray by agitation. Now the demagoguery, which is not appeased by any concession but only further incited, and which can never rest until it has attained its final goal — the abolition of altar and throne, and even then would not be quiet but would rage against its own vitals, as surely as it is the daughter of the murderer of men from the beginning — sets about the removal of the faithful pastors as its purpose, and the bringing about of a complete dependence of the clergy upon the congregations. We are written to from there: "In Iggelheim the Royal Consistory has ordered the suspension of the new hymnal. The opponents were probably far from repenting of their excesses, since they could believe they had thereby achieved their goal. But the pastor is no less unpopular than the hymnal; moreover, on the 'Feast of the Reintroduction,' when the streets were decked with flags and garlands and the pretzels were to be distributed, he held no divine service; he refuses to abolish the singing of the apostolic blessing; and, what is the main thing, he preaches with earnestness and faithfulness the word of Christ the Crucified. To such a pastor the church is not to stand open, and proof is to be furnished of how displeased people are with him — wherefore, on the night before the Reformation festival, the lock of the church door was plugged up with driven-in lead."