# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S383
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 383

Hound me, poor sow of sin,
With your grace-hounds!
Comb with your grace-comb
The sin-lice off me!
Draw your grace-jerkin onto me,
That I may die in blessedness."'

A sample among many of how shamelessly people lie. It is not even
true that the Consistory in Hanover has issued a hymnbook. If the
Zeitblatt wished only to take notice of the chief lies and slanders of the
newspapers, it would have to run, alongside the section ''From the
Church,'' a second section, ''From Hell.'' But there is already too much
of the stench." The Catholic Wahrheitsfreund claims to have found the
above "blasphemous scraps" also in the Lutheran Herald of New York.

From Silesia, in August. We take the following from the Allgemeine
Kirchenzeitung: Sad signs of the times are not lacking among us either.
One of the most pitiable, in the field of ecclesiastical indifferentism,
which goes hand in hand with materialism, is the falling away from the
church carried out, in a contemptible manner, by about 60 landowners
from four localities of the Neumarkt district — and why? They do not
want to bear any costs toward the building of a church. Years ago the
most faithful care of the church authorities gathered the Evangelicals
living there, at a distance from the nearest church, into a flock of their
own under a special pastor, founded a new parish system out of the
funds of the collections for cases of need, and set up and maintained a
vicariate from the same funds; now, when it comes to building a
church, those same people refuse all contributions, preferring to
renounce the faith of their fathers rather than let themselves be
compelled to a gift for the edification of themselves and their children
and for the honor of their God and Savior. Whether the zeal of the
young clergyman was at fault in some respects, there are indeed
rumors, but we have no reliable ground for trusting them. In vain have
the state and church authorities employed every possible means to
restrain the deluded and defiant from their ruinous step. The
withdrawal from the church has been carried out in full legal form
before the court. — In the vicinity of Liegnitz the faithless peasants of
the Neumarkt district have already found worthy successors, who, for
the sake of a schoolhouse, have given up the confession of their
church, all faith, and the living God himself, since they are going over
to the Free Congregationalists.

New Universities. On the occasion of the public general assembly
of the Catholic associations held in Aachen in September, the founding
of a purely Catholic university was resolved upon. Already at the third
session, 11,183 thalers had been subscribed for it. When, at the same
time, the notorious Johannes Ronge, presently living in Wiesbaden,
received a hundred gulden for free disposal from "some friends of
religious progress," he immediately declared to the donors in writing
that he believed the sum could be most fittingly used if he entered it
"as the first contribution toward the founding of a free German
university at Frankfurt am Main, namely, in the first instance, for the
free-religious faculty." He further remarks: "The delegates of the
reform associations, at their second assembly at Frankfurt am Main on
July 20 (at the Schützenfest), resolved to promote or initiate the
realization of the idea of a free German university through
subscriptions of contributions, the spread of the reform associations,
and through lectures in the coming winter semester." Finally, Mr.
Ronge recalls the Catholics' project of founding a university solely in
their own interest, and attaches to this an encouragement to the men of
progress to compete. Who, indeed, will carry out his plan first? The
men of progress, or the men of regress? Judging by experience here,
according to which the gentlemen of the free-religious persuasion have
scarcely been able to get even one elementary school going, the
outcome should hardly be in doubt.

The Gustavus Adolphus Society, at its meeting in August at
Nuremberg, also debated whether it should extend its activity to
America as well