# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S237
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Unionism in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. 237

brought about a mingling of the divine and the human, which forces divine revelation to doff its hat before human wisdom and let itself be instructed by the latter as to how far it may, with propriety and without being laughed at, make itself heard among educated people. "This confusion and intermixture is the real evil of our time, the sickness under which we lie today in the broadest sense, our true spiritual skin-and-head disease — but one which precisely refuses to be recognized as such."

Out of this murky mixture, Unionism has risen up like a vapor and filled the entire atmosphere, so that no soul that breathes escapes it without at least a mild fever and a rash. For what is Unionism? It is, to be sure, a very fine thing where love is concerned, and it would be glorious if we could all be one, one flock under one shepherd. But that is a wholly secondary matter as far as Unionism is concerned. Even if some throw themselves into the Union out of love and good intention, they nevertheless vanish as an extremely small fraction amid the mass of those who make public noise and pose as the trumpets and trailblazers of the spirit of the age, but who have entirely different thoughts in mind with Unionism. If the good souls who devote themselves to the Union with the best of intentions would only once see whom, and to what end, they must serve as tools, they would recognize that just now the time is ill-chosen for the Union. All that is wanted is simply to set everything in flux — both the dividing distinctions between church and world, and those between Christian doctrine and modern culture, between faith and unbelief. All of this is thrown into the melting-pot of Science, which must make one out of two, and this manufactured product is then stamped with the seal of Union.

So it has been done everywhere, and so it has been done in the Grand Duchy of Hesse as well. To be sure, the government proceeded very cautiously with the first introduction of the Union. No compulsion whatsoever was to be applied; the churches were not to be mixed together or deprived of their confession, and the court itself remained Lutheran in the very midst of the united capital. Hence it is that two-thirds of the evangelical population have remained Lutheran, without any longing for the Union. Nevertheless, all congregations were later united under a single church government or supreme consistory, and that always gives the Union some assistance, especially when it is already in the air.

In 1856 the "evangelical" Conference at Friedberg was formed, with the express intention of championing the Union against the confessionalism that had arisen. This Conference consisted, at its core, of the "liberal but believing middle party," as it called itself, and therefore did not attract the confessional party, but rather those who had settled themselves a good stretch beyond the comfortable middle, out toward the border, where the sun less often licks away the snow. How this lukewarm middle party then carried on its mediating business among the border-dwellers,