# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S238
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

238    Unionism in the Grand Duchy of Hesse.

has already been told. They broke away with a great clatter, unwilling to be condemned to half-measures and to carry the train of the middle party.

They thenceforth stood on their own feet, and had brought nothing away from the Friedberg Conference except what they had brought to it — a deed-thirsty enthusiasm for the Union. In 1860 a fellow-preacher from Darmstadt let loose a little pamphlet which forcefully preached the Union to the non-united clergy and made them the impudent demand that they lay down their office if they were unwilling to join the Union, on the ground that all Hessian clergy had been so commanded. This mendacious pretext was all the more impertinent in that the fellow-preacher immediately added what he and others of his kind preached, and thus understood by their "Union." To preach evangelically, he said, does not mean "to offer an interpretation that was timely long ago, but rather, according to duty and conscience, to interpret the propositions of our Lord in such a way that they conscientiously agree with our conscience and with the demands of modern culture." And such a man wishes to have the right to occupy a Christian pastoral office, conscientiously to consume its income, and to thrust others out — although, for all his talk of conscience, he cannot arrive at Christianity at all. Soon afterward a conference was formed in the capital "for carrying through the Union and striving toward a church constitution," on behalf of which, toward the end of 1861, an address to all the congregations of the Grand Duchy was circulated. One knows enough about this address once one learns that it was composed by Pastor Ewald of Darmstadt, for whom the distinctively Christian doctrines count, without further ado, as superstition.

But the author from between the Main and the Rhine names as the guiding spirit a senior councillor of education and gymnasium director at Büdingen, Dr. Thudichum. What this rather more reserved man, of Schleiermacher's school, teaches and wills can be put in a couple of sentences. If Holy Scripture, when interpreted according to knowledge, reason, and faith, can be understood in different ways, then "it is not for any man to set up one of the various interpretations as the rule." If, for example, some in the church dispute over the Lord's Supper, original sin, the deity of Christ, and the like, then there is on that subject no certain binding doctrine. Everyone may teach what he holds to be right, and that as a matter of right. The Union began with the doctrine of the Holy Supper. It was to be left open, because it was disputed. But why that alone? Can one not, and may one not, do exactly the same with all the other doctrines as well? Yet Thudichum did explain that a pastor should be "entitled" to teach his confessional conviction, only he may not dispute the contrary one as erroneous, heretical, or unbelieving. But it is precisely the essence of being confessional that truth must exclude error. How can the confessional man still be confessional if he must declare truth and error to have equal rights? Then, as our author rightly says, there is neither error nor truth, but only different "conceptions" and "explanations," which amicably divide between themselves the domain of