# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S140
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

140 The Distress of the Evangelical Church in the Grand Duchy of Hesse.

still continually carries such articles, in which idle chatter is made about alleged Romanizing tendencies, sanctimoniousness, and the superstition of past centuries, etc. Through such widely read papers, agitation and bitterness are then stirred up among the public, which cannot judge the actual state of affairs and forms its opinion from just this. Taking advantage of these circumstances, the very same people who some time ago sent out the address of unbelief to Pastor Ewald have now circulated a petition to the Grand Duke, in which it is requested that the wishes of the clergy not be granted, but that the Union be carried through on every side instead. Besides this petition, moreover, as we hear, one from 9 Lutheran clergy — who believed themselves unable, for formal reasons, to take part in that memorial — has also been submitted to His Royal Highness. Even the believing United clergy, who did not sign our petition because they still suppose that they can remedy the sad condition of the Evangelical Church without taking their stand on historical, confessional ground, may perhaps now see themselves compelled to do something, and at least to show that their Union ideal is something altogether different from what the great mass of Union enthusiasts actually want. In a gratifying way, however — and this is probably also what has so greatly enraged our enemies — it has now become clear that the church party in our land is not as small as some supposed. If one adds to this those who, partly out of faintheartedness, partly for personal reasons for which they must answer before the LORD, have not yet joined our common step, despite their inward agreement, toward the honor of our oppressed Church, then a good fourth part of the clergy are indeed substantially agreed. The majority, to be sure, is, as still almost everywhere, dead and incapable of grasping what is at issue. They still sit in their old, benumbing rationalism, upon which they have only laboriously laid a few patches of borrowed positivism to cover the shame of their nakedness; some, indeed, come out openly with their true colors, leaning on the men of the Protestant church papers. But remarkably, even all the rationalists concede that the constitution of our Church ought to be more independent, less dependent on the state — even though some of them see salvation chiefly in a presbyterial and synodal constitution. And who would deny that this is at least preferable to a bureaucratic one? But should there really be attempted — which the LORD will surely in His grace prevent — a forcible carrying-through of the Union even in the Lutheran portions of the land (more than half), it might perhaps turn out that among the people, too, the Lutheran consciousness — in part still present by tradition, in part newly strengthened in the awakened congregations — resists it; and numerous withdrawals from the territorial church would follow.