# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S190
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

190    Church News of the Day.

toward such needy conditions, the church associations already formed on the other side of the ocean are by no means unfeeling, nor without the ardent wish to be able to help. They do as much as they can — establishing preachers' seminaries, forming congregations, sending out itinerant preachers; but how are they to meet the need, when the stream of immigrating German population in those northwestern districts of the United States alone brings in 50,000 immigrants annually?" — The latter figure has, admittedly, fallen off considerably since. The Freimund reports: "With every ship, numerous Germans return from New York to their homeland and describe conditions over there as unbearable."

Unionism. The Pilger reports the following: "Of the Prussian confessional mishmash called the Union, I recently read a little sample which, of everything I have learned about it, is nearly the most extraordinary. For it happened that last year an order from the ministry went out to the Provincial School Board at Münster, to the effect that in two Evangelical teacher-training seminaries of that district, while religious instruction should still, as before, be founded chiefly on Luther's Small Catechism, alongside it not only the wording and meaning of the Heidelberg Catechism (the well-known Reformed confessional writing) should be taught to the students, but that also, in the more detailed exposition of Luther's Catechism, the corresponding material of the Heidelberg Catechism should everywhere be drawn in for comparison and (!) explanation. — And this is by no means merely the private opinion of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, but a directive with which the Evangelical Supreme Church Council has agreed. — The poor seminarians, and the still poorer children, who are thus systematically confused about confessional matters!" —

Discipline in teaching seems to be practiced in Hanover in an exceedingly tender manner. So at least reports the Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung of March 12 concerning the shameless rationalist preacher Sulze: "Pastor Sulze of Osnabrück has passed his colloquy before the Consistory in Hanover. Dorner and Ehrenfeuchter were present from Göttingen to negotiate with Sulze. Dorner's calm and composed manner seems to have made a very favorable impression on Sulze; at any rate, in the sermon which he delivered a few hours after his return from Hanover, in the church festively illuminated and decked with garlands for the occasion, he declared that his days in Hanover had not been a time of judgment and distress, but that the conversation with the serious men of scholarship had refreshed, uplifted, and purified him."

The Evangelical Alliance. Leo, of Halle, describes the Evangelical Alliance as a society that makes it its business, on the sole basis of opposition to the Roman church, to stir together every possible sort of church rabble in Christian brotherhood into a mess of religious pseudo-culture. "By your propagandizing you produce only similarly indefinable beings, like the modern assimilated 'culture-Jew': the Lord will hold you responsible if you continue this propagandizing on scholarly pretenses; it is a greater sin than murder and theft — you murder the souls of nations and steal from heaven its population, by turning them into bats whose whirring about makes the courts of heaven uncanny."

Ehlers. We read the following in his paper's issue of April 1: Pastor Ehlers of Liegnitz has been placed under formal charges by the Supreme Church Collegium as pastor and superintendent, and, after he failed to appear in person for a preliminary inquiry to be conducted against him by the Supreme Church Collegium — because he did not deny the factual accuracy of many of the accusations brought against him (which he communicated to the Supreme Church Collegium), even though he could not accept the reproaches based on them — has been suspended from his office as superintendent of the Liegnitz diocese, and has been informed of the impending opening of formal proceedings against him.

Räthjen and Grabau. The former writes in his church paper of Feb. 3: "Pastor Grabau, too, comes forward to oppose us in his Informatorium No. 8 (Nov. 1861). He does indeed advocate a churchly authority as a power of command — only not that of the jurists, but that of the preachers. That is not Lutheran-evangelical. Even earlier there were