# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S156
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Contemporary History. 156

Geneva, Jan. 30. For some time now a paper has been appearing here, "The Rationalist," which has set itself the task of destroying the authority of biblical faith — not, indeed, through serious critical scholarship, but through rather flat and extremely frivolous parodies. The paper is sent free of charge to the teachers in the countryside, and is thus meant to cut off the religious education of the people at its very source. A local society has now called Pastor Puaux from southern France to illuminate Christianity, in a series of lectures, over against unbelief. At the close of the last conference, the "Huguenot" — as he called himself, a more polished speaker than a deep thinker — challenged the unbelievers of Geneva to a public disputation on the resurrection of Christ, and repeated this challenge in the newspapers. Two days later a certain Mr. Guignard, "economist and defender of Reason," invited, in pompous wall-posters, all friends of truth to attend the duel which he had accepted. An hour before the start the great hall was already packed to bursting — but seldom has a seriously begun undertaking found a more ridiculous end. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step, and this step was absinthe. The defender of Reason was thoroughly drunk, and after his first words was frightfully hissed by the audience. When at last he turned from a mere comedian into a genuine harlequin, an indescribable tumult arose; Pastor Puaux expressed his regret, repeated his challenge, but found no opponent, and so the whole attempt led to nothing further than the most varied interpretations and glosses, and, in any case, to renewed mockery. (A. Z.)

Prussian-Lutheran Church. The above-mentioned decree of the Prussian state government reads, as we learn from the Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung, as follows: "The disputes which have of late arisen among the Lutherans holding themselves separate from the territorial Church, and the separations in individual congregations of theirs connected therewith, have given the royal state government occasion to examine more closely the question whether, and how far, those congregations or congregation-members who have renounced the hitherto-existing congregational association and the board of the Old Lutherans — namely, the Upper Church Collegium in Breslau — and have united themselves, under the direction of clergy not confirmed, or even suspended, by that board, for common religious observance, can lay claim to the privileges of the General Concession of July 23, 1845. — The gentlemen Ministers of Ecclesiastical Affairs, of the Interior, and of Justice have answered this question in the negative, and in doing so have also declared irrelevant the Separatists' assertion that they intend to remain faithful to their former confessional standing, because the General Concession of July 23, 1845 was issued not in favor of every Lutheranism standing in opposition to the territorial Church, but in favor of the circle individually determined by well-known historical events, which circle has given itself, in the Upper Church Collegium, a state-recognized board, and, in that board, its distinguishing mark. From this it follows: 1) that the rights of the moral person (corporate rights), which the General Concession, in No. 3, grants to the church congregations of this circle, are lost to those persons who separate themselves from them, upon such separation, and in such a way that they could be regained, according to Article 13 of the Constitutional Charter, not by an administrative act, but only by a law. 2) That the clergy who are not confirmed, or are even suspended, by the Upper Church Collegium do not possess the authority to perform official acts with civil effect, or to keep the church registers. But the heavier these consequences are, the more it appears a duty of fairness to instruct those concerned of them officially before taking any further measures, and to allow them a period for settling their differences. In fixing this period at two months, we charge the royal district office to have a copy of this decree delivered to the duly installed clergyman of the Old Lutherans of the district in question, as well as to whichever clergyman the Separatists in question may have placed themselves under, and also to see to its suitable circulation in the individual congregations to which the