# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S239
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Unionism in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. 239

truth, because it has for the time being gone into bankruptcy. Should anyone, shaking his head, ask where then the purity of doctrine, and with it the unity of the church, would remain, Thudichum answers that it is "the science belonging to the whole world which conveys to the Evangelicals the purity of doctrine and the consciousness of their belonging together, for all time." These, then, are your gods, O Israel, that brought you out of Egypt — the golden calf of Science, with as many heads as there are scholars, all of them with their heads turned against one another. Whoever places the church under the protection of this calf must either wish to have a joke at the expense of good-natured simpletons, or must have a superstition large enough to supply the whole of heathendom. What, meanwhile, is left? Unionism sees that it brews heaven and earth and all the elements together in confusion, and has no spirit that, hovering over the deep, can bring shape, order, and unity into the chaos. So it comforts all the anxious with a Majesty that has performed wonders in other fields; that is now supposed to help here, although here it itself stands in need of help.

In general, this Unionism is unconcerned about discipline, because it lives from hand to mouth. Its only care, as the author says, is "to make general the religious and ecclesiastical bankruptcy at which one has happily arrived on the heights of 'Science' and of 'the culture of the age.'" Properly speaking, exalted Science itself ought to see to that, but since it does not do so, or does not do so quickly enough, one helps oneself as best one can. "One has thrown oneself upon the church constitution. For it is agreed: 'with the introduction of such a constitution there would result, of itself, both the completion of ecclesiastical union and the longed-for settlement of the other questions now burning.'" First, then, the Union must be completed, in order to sweep out the dogmatic and ecclesiastical rubbish of old times. For this nothing serves better than a synodical constitution without confessions, resting on universal suffrage, so as to outvote the voice of God and of the church every time. Then there are still other burning questions — the liturgy, the catechism, and, not least, not to be forgotten, the independence and self-sufficiency of the church — for which, again, the synodical constitution serves excellently.

According to the draft constitution of these Unionists, the synod is "the supreme authority of oversight, of calling, and of legislation," which thus intends to make the Grand Duke into a mere grand pensioner, and clothes itself with the highest dignity, so as to be, before men's eyes and in the church, the very thing that Science is supposed to be in men's heads. Although subject to no law but its own, it nevertheless condescends to a small courtesy toward the Bible, in that it calls this law an "evangelical law." What sort of law this may be that is at the same time Gospel, we are not told; perhaps Science will ascertain it. This law is, at any rate, evangelical to this extent: that no synod may impose anything upon a congregation in matters of doctrine and worship. And so, for the time being, one seems content,