# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S240
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

240    Unionism in the Grand Duchy of Hesse.

once one has taken from the Grand Duke as much of the church government as possible, and has so stirred up the congregation that of its confession only a few disconnected, floating globules of fat can still be detected on the surface.

"What will the congregations, what will the Christian life, profit from all this?" asks the author. For we are, after all, ceaselessly promised that life will come into the church, that everything will get better, if only the Presbyterial and Synodal Constitution promised since the days of March would at last come into effect. Just as Cato of Utica once closed every one of his speeches in the Roman Senate with the words, "For the rest, I declare that Carthage must be destroyed," so the speech of the modern Catos of the liberal stripe, as often as they come to this chapter, regularly runs out — only more veiled — into the pronouncement that the church must be cast into the maelstrom of the Presbyterial and Synodal constitution. To be sure, this will produce movement, but the life that comes of it — what sort of life is that? "The whole activity newly to be introduced into the congregations by the new constitution," says the author, "amounts, for its members, before and above all else, to voting — in which, as is well known, things proceed in a very human fashion, and no one has yet, in all earnest, been so mad as to ascribe to it any uplifting effect upon the inner religious life, or even merely upon outward church life." Only for the synod delegates can somewhat more fall by the way — travel and per-diem money, purposeful banqueting on roast meat and wine, depending on whether some coup has succeeded, fine liberal speeches and motions that run through the newspapers, and, for the celebrated hero of the day, perhaps a festive reception upon his homecoming, perhaps even a goblet. And if it has furthermore come to pass that people have clashed violently at the synod, and the firebrand has been cast into the very midst of the congregation, then indeed one cannot say that life is still lacking. Baden and the Palatinate have plenty to show for that.

"We Lutherans," says the author, "have other things on our hearts than such matters as revolve around voting, debating, governing, and church-making over wine and roast meat, and over 'per diems and travel expenses.' We would like, above all, to be faithful stewards of God's mysteries in our congregations, and therefore to keep for our Lutheran congregations Lutheran doctrine, the pure Word and Sacrament, secure, free, and self-sustaining. That is now our greatest general concern in Hesse; and because we see this most excellent and supreme possession of Christians in the church on earth threatened, among other things, by Unionism and its cravings and machinations; because we wish to remain orthodox in order to be rightly believing; and finally because we would wish to make ourselves, and all the members of our congregations, true priests of God in the sense of Scripture and not of popular sovereignty — therefore we are zealous, therefore we separate and part ourselves from those who sow weeds in the field of our congregation, therefore we are, when it is necessary, harsh." God grant the stone from the sling find its mark! Where the trumpet gives a clear