# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S355
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Evangelical Conduct of a Christian-minded Parish Schoolteacher, Etc. 355

namely, the monasteries, in which the missionaries of our fathers and
their helpers also taught and raised up growing young people for the
service of the church. Later, after more and more towns had arisen here
and there, schools were here too called into being through the service
of the church, especially since it was precisely here that, through the
negligence, incompetence, and manifold hindrance of the fathers,
domestic instruction fell more into decay than in the country. Under the
papacy, however, it was for the most part in a very sorry state with
these schools, since the teaching and discipline of the children lay for
the greater part in the hands of ignorant monks, equally unfit for
teaching and for education. Only after the dawn of the blessed
Reformation, and especially through Luther's reforming pressure in this
matter too, did the school system receive a new impetus and a different
and better form. For Luther's writings brought it about that the
evangelical princes and the authorities of the free imperial cities set up
higher and lower schools, called godly and skilled teachers, and paid
them out of the income of the confiscated monastic estates — in which,
until then, a crowd of lazy monks had been fattened — so that in this
way these gifts and endowments of pious Christians of an earlier age
were again administered and applied, in keeping with the founders'
intent, to the care and maintenance of churches and schools. Now,
although the princes and town councillors were the supreme guardians
and overseers of these schools, they were so, nevertheless, not as a
secular authority, as was the case among the heathen — nor as it later
became, in the time of the prevailing unbelief of rationalism, when the
state tore these institutions away from the maternal oversight and care
of the church and placed them under its own faith-hostile, humanistic
dominion. Rather, the territorial lords and civic authorities exercised this
care of the schools only as evangelical Christians and sons of the
church, under the supreme rule of Holy Scripture. Indeed, viewed in the
light of the gospel, they acted, in the establishment and maintenance of
lower and higher Christian schools, only as representatives of the
Christian congregations of their district, which at that time were partly
unskilled for such work and partly ignorant of their evangelical rights,
and there could be no talk, at that time, of any formal transfer of any
part of these rights to princes and town councillors. Just as little,
however, did these men, as secular power-holders, violently seize for
themselves such rights of the congregations to establish their own
schools; rather, in this too, they acted first out of the calling of love for
the common good and out of the pressure of need.
How Christian and churchly, however, their disposition was in the
establishment and oversight of higher and lower schools is also evident
from the fact that a share in the oversight was granted preferentially to
the ministers of the church, and that they also gave instruction in God's
Word in these schools.
The parish schools in the countryside, too, were essentially born from
the bosom of the church, and were accordingly also cared for upon that
same bosom, so that the local pastors naturally had oversight over
them, and