# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S150
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

150 From the Grand Duchy of Baden.

will be chosen. But if this expectation is not met, then nowhere has sufficient provision been made to secure for the congregation its character as a holy congregation, nowhere to protect its government against worldly influence and against the domination of an unbelieving, indifferent, or hostile numerical majority; nowhere are the qualities specified, with evangelical definiteness, which the congregation has the right and the duty to require of those of its members to whom, after a proper call, holy rights and offices are to be entrusted.

Since we can therefore expect no salutary consequences from the introduction of a new church constitution — one by which the leadership of the Church is placed in the hands of a worldly prince and at the same time made dependent on a general vote, without offering such guarantees as the nature of the Church, the Word of God, and our confessions require — but must rather fear that conditions will thereby be brought about for which we do not wish to take responsibility upon ourselves, we therefore feel bound in conscience to decline participation in the coming election, and to protest against the introduction of the new church constitution insofar as it does not correspond to the principles of the Word of God and of our confessions.

We honor the evangelical Church, however, as our spiritual mother, and, so long as Jesus Christ is still acknowledged as her one Head, the Gospel is not suppressed, and the confession is not set aside, we will cleave to her as faithful members. For we trust that the evangelical Church rests on an eternal foundation, and we therefore hope that experience will bring the existing defects to light and, with the help of the Spirit promised to her, lead her back again to the Word of God and to the confessions that have arisen from it — on the faithful and conscientious observance of which not only the existence and preservation of our Church, but also the unity of the evangelical fellow-believers in our dear German fatherland, essentially depends.

Were this only a passing or partisan question, one might willingly leave its resolution to the well-known zeal of our clergy; but it concerns the welfare of the people, it concerns the good of all those who now or in future live under the constitution, and it concerns at the same time our own poor, reviled, persecuted Church in Germany — betrayed by her own watchmen, torn apart by great power and much cunning, and shut up within numerous territorial boundaries, yet ever blessed. Therefore we speak, and say once more: "The evangelical-Protestant Church desires and endures no human tutelage, for she is free; she is born of God; but neither does she endure any constitution by which her members would rule over her Head and her organs, for her Head is God, and his organs are of divine lineage."

Heidelberg, the 6th of January, 1862.