# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S381
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 381

-mandments, to be removed from instruction. It has come to a bare-
faced mockery of Holy Scripture, in which a Hildesheim congregation,
Holle, has particularly distinguished itself, one that had already been
especially zealous in 1848 and afterward in the Gustavus Adolphus
Society. This congregation says, in its much-recommended and widely
circulated petition: "The Catechism teaches heaven and hell. We
would gladly (?) believe that, but we simply cannot. When the Bible
was written, people were simple enough to hold the earth to be a
round disk. So they then imagined above it the hall of heaven, where
the angels played and God sat on a throne, and below it hell. But
astronomy has long since shown that it is not so. The Catechism
teaches that, because of Adam's fall, God's wrath struck the world. We
cannot believe that either, not with the best will. It is impossible that
God, just because Adam once bit into an apple, could have become
so angry." The Ten Commandments, too, have often been an object of
hostility; one cannot understand why, nor does one learn it from the
petitions either. But it becomes clear when one hears a learned Doctor
of Philosophy, at a Hildesheim assembly, expound the words "I am the
Lord thy God" thus: "That reminds one," he says, "of a servant's
relationship, and so the child ought not to imagine his relation to the
Supreme Being in that way." Free Protestant men are a law unto
themselves, and the moral commandments hold good not by virtue of
divine authority, but because and insofar as the sovereign people has
acknowledged them and raised them to the status of law. One would
therefore be very much mistaken to believe that this movement
proceeded from within the Lutheran church. Those who took the lead
in the assemblies and drew up the petitions were not merely
Lutherans; there were Jews, Catholics, and German Catholics among
them as well. Every church-hostile force of unbelief, and every
political agitator, had been brought forward, in order to drive the
church from the field and break the power of the authorities. All this
found its expressive melody in rattling window-panes and in mob
street-noise, so that not the slightest doubt can remain about the true
nature of the struggle.

To such a movement the government, without serious resistance, has
in the shortest possible time sacrificed a catechism which, like few
others, contains the Lutheran confession faithfully and purely. Not one
disapproving word is said about the revolutionary agitation, or about
the crass unbelief and the errors of the petitions. After the ordinance,
the matter appears as though only distress of conscience had called
forth the movement, or, to speak with the "Zeitung für Norddeutsch-
land," as though it were regrettable, yet very pardonable and worthy
of consideration. At the very least, the catechism-stormers will
understand it in this way and will be of the opinion that they have
been vindicated and have done right in all their mischief, even though
the government neither shares this view nor meant to put it into the
ordinance. The fact of the matter, then, is that one may trample Holy
Scripture and the Lutheran catechism underfoot and still be an
influential member of the Lutheran state church. But the state church
has, in one of its most important and most sacred concerns, been
handed over to the arbitrary will of the apostate mob.

This is the beginning of religious freedom, not only in the state, but
within the state church itself; and now that the authority of the church
government has suffered a defeat, the victory will be pursued until the
state church is shattered.

But our situation is not quite so bad as it appears to many who have
suddenly been awakened from the dreams of imagined hopes. It is to
be feared that the political situation will be far more harshly affected
by this than the ecclesiastical one. Let us consider what, then, we
have actually lost. First of all, the supreme episcopal authority has
been broken. That is a loss for the church as a state church, one that,
especially given the present state of the times, will be hard to make
good again. Where the scepter of authority falls, there the great mass
or the majority picks it up again. But the majority in the state
churches is every bit as much the authority of enmity to the church.
The confusion, then, is not ended with the ordinance of August 19, but
is only just beginning. Nevertheless it will be said: You meant it for
evil against me, but God meant it for good. Perhaps a turn is now
being prepared that will lead the church only to a clearer awareness