# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S254
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

254 Church-Historical Notices of the Day.

...the progress of the former [Pastor Eichhorn] now seems to have come to a standstill. In October of last year a large part of the congregation at Bretten and its vicinity separated from him again, after they had been with him scarcely four months. In Advent they came back again to Eichhorn, and after a few weeks they were once again far enough along that they recognized their great sin. On the 12th of March they were received back on their repentant confession, and on Palm Sunday Pastor Eichhorn held for them again the first communion service. This service was attended even by Pastor Haag's wife, with her daughters, for Pastor Haag, to the great scandal of all, no longer lives with wife and children, but at a farm three hours away, in the company of another woman. — The Söllingen people are not yet won back. They have turned to Pastor Ludwig, who has always been of wavering disposition, and who has now gone entirely back into the Union and accepted a preaching post within it. Over the possession of the church built at Söllingen for Lutheran worship, with much outside support (Bavaria 1,402 florins, Saxony 735 florins), a lawsuit has begun which is apparently not yet decided.

Thuringia. The "Pilger" reports: The Gotha diet has deliberated a law on the public-school system, and in doing so adopted the motion that the curriculum of the public schools, as well as the introduction or abolition of textbooks, should also be subject to its notice, respectively its approval. That is to say, in other words, that the diet should henceforth decide by which catechism instruction is to be given in the schools. That would have been a fine state of affairs. The ducal government has put the twenty-five gentlemen who make up the diet back within the bounds of their competence, and for the present the Gotha diet still has no catechism to abolish or introduce.

Discovery of Luther Manuscripts. In the joint archive, kept at Weimar, of the princes of the Ernestine line of the House of Saxony, a number of hitherto unknown letters of Luther's, and to Luther, have been found, which chiefly concern church matters and are to be published. (Pilger.)

The Grand Duchy of Hesse. In the Hessian diet a motion has been introduced by two deputies which demands of the government the introduction of a presbyterial and synodal constitution. A pre-synod is to reach a final decision on this constitution. The motion was carried almost unanimously; but 114 Evangelical Lutheran clergy have raised a legal protest against it, because at present they can see in the introduction of the named constitution only a danger to the church.

Frankfurt an der Oder. Here too the congregation served by Pastor Lohmann has broken away from the Breslau church government. Since Lohmann did not take part, Ehlers, following a call he had received, undertook to provide for those who had seceded, for the time being, with Word and Sacrament.

Lay Elders, or Ruling Elders. As it seems, the anti-Breslau party now finds the adoption of such elders dangerous, since their opponents could easily exploit them in favor of their theory of a divinely ordained church government apart from the preaching office. Ehlers writes in his "Kirchliches Zeitblatt" of the 15th of April: "That among the many — certainly many, in large congregations — elders of the first Christian era, some were equipped with less gift for public preaching, and that these drew back more from public preaching, is indeed understandable; but that there should have been elders who did not have the right to teach publicly, no scholarship will be able to prove; nor equally that when Paul says that the elders who labor in the Word are to be especially honored, he thereby means to say that there are to be two kinds of elders (ruling elders and teaching elders), or that such an arrangement existed in his time."

Conference at Angermünde. Concerning a curious resolution reported by the Evangelical Church Gazette as having been passed there, we too earlier (in the May number, p. 154)