# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S159
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 159

measures, silence has been imposed, so that not even the public communication of the experiences and results of the confessional struggle is any longer allowed unhindered. Recently the conferences, too, have been forbidden to submit the measures of the church authorities to their criticism (assessment). Thus even this already so meager possibility of giving one's misgivings any effect is henceforth to have no place. So the only way still left is the free press. Or will this, too, in the end be restricted?"

Then follow in the preface all sorts of complaints about the Reformed "head of state," who merely "fills the high church offices according to his own judgment, their holders likewise not being bound to church-symbolical doctrine, but determined only by the personal judgment of the head of state." Of the Union authorities it is said: "they draw over the whole church a net of other persons entrusted with the government (superintendents), and likewise choose the individuals, without obligation to the confession, according to their best (that is, unionist) judgment."—The author wishes to remedy all this by means of a constitution, which is naturally to set firm limits to the government. Finally the closing complaint runs: "It is our settled conviction that a carrying-through of the Union which hinders the Confession in its full development will end in a complete dissolution not merely of the Union but of the evangelical territorial church itself." (Because the two are indeed one. How long shall a fully carried-through Union and a fully developed confession be baked together by the Ottos?)—"The Lutheran separation is to this day the open sore from which the territorial church loses its noblest sap, as the withdrawal of Zöller, Feldner, and Lössel has shown again quite recently." . . . The above-mentioned decree of the Stettin consistory, directed against the deliberations of the "Lutheran associations," says, after a great commendation of the blessing of free conferences, the following: "but it is plain that the church government, which is charged with upholding the constitution and the ordinances of the evangelical territorial church, cannot permit clergy of this church, unmindful of the obligations of their office, which binds them to the territorial church and its institutions, to allow themselves, in their deliberations and resolutions, to set themselves in opposition to its ordinances (the chief ordinance being, of course, the Union), to make the church-governmental decrees issued by the competent authorities the object of their criticism (assessment), and to unite in resolutions and declarations by which the simple compliance with these decrees is worked against and the authority (standing) of the ordained powers is opposed (!).——Should excesses of the kind previously described not be avoided, we should, in keeping with our official duty, be unable to refrain from immediately taking such measures as are necessary to uphold church order and church-governmental authority."

Saxony. The united Pomeranian "Monatsschrift" (so the Village Church Gazette reports) has the following written to it from Saxony: "Above all else, I pray daily and heartily for you. I should have to forget myself and a good part of my life if I were to forget you (the Ottos). If it were of any use to you, I would gladly sweat once more in the heat of the Union.—Here (in Saxony) the land is supposed to be Lutheran, and our liturgy is more unionist than the Court-and-Cathedral Liturgy of 1822—that I will prove to anyone. Likewise the church government insists no less rigidly on the literal handling of this liturgy than the Prussian government does on its own. Here the land is supposed to be Lutheran, and all the local papers are full of praise for the liberal church Union and indulge in abusive language against "hyper-Lutheran" ways. Prof. Brückner in Leipzig has set up a heathen mission society cut to a unionist pattern. A man (Prof. Dr. Lechler) is being called to the Leipzig superintendency who at the last Stuttgart Kirchentag spoke out in the harshest terms against the rigid doctrinalism (the pursuit of doctrine) of the Lutheran church.—Ever since the Protestant Church Gazette has known how to cover blasphemous rationalism with the Union's flag, everything here that rages for Belial is especially