# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S221
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Lutheran Church in Russia. 221

footing in the congregations. Do the believing members of the United
[Church] have it? Yes, they have it, so long and so far as they meet the
great mass halfway and hang out the sign of liberal-mindedness. But as
soon as they wish to champion the cause of the Lord and of his Church,
they are like a watchman's hut in a cucumber field. The Bavarian regime,
in its far more far-reaching undertaking, did not stand so forsaken and
alone as the Baden one does with its modest demands. (N. Zeitblatt.)

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From the Lutheran Church in Russia.
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.... To be sure, our Emperor Alexander II — may the LORD God
bless him! — has "opened up trade," trade with our dear German
motherland, which was formerly made extremely difficult, but not the
"press," as one probably understands this in your country, for there still
prevails in every respect a very strict censorship over everything that is
to be printed here, as well as over everything that comes from you to us.
It is true that the circumstances and interests of the people, as for
instance the emancipation of the Russian serfs, may be publicly discussed
in printed writings, but it is still far from the case that embezzlement and
fraud in the administration of state offices may be dragged into the light
and censured, let alone that confessional questions between the Lutheran
and the Greek-Catholic Church may be brought up for discussion. Still
much less, however, has "religion been set free," as is reported. For the
Russian law of the state still stands, now as before, that no member of
the Greek [Church] may go over to another church, nor may a clergyman
of another church perform any spiritual act whatsoever upon a member
of the Greek-Catholic [Church], without exposing himself to being sent
away to Siberia. Indeed, there also continues undisturbed the practice
that has come into use for decades, which has managed to acquire the
force of a law of the state without in fact resting on any such law: that
every child of a mixed marriage, whether it be the father or the mother —
it weighs exactly the same — who belongs to the Greek confession, falls
to that latter [confession]. — Unite, Lutheran brethren, your prayers with
ours, that this ban of Jezebel may be taken from us, with which the
LORD has punished us for our unbelief and our unfaithfulness toward
his holy Word. Praised be God! already among us too thousands of
knees are bent and hands lifted up to the LORD of Hosts, that he may
redeem the captives of Zion, and set up his kingdom among us in the
power and demonstration of his Holy Spirit. —

In the Lutheran Church of our land the circulation of the Bible has,
for at least a quarter century, again been permitted, after it had been
forbidden for only a short time. In the Greek Church, as in the Roman,
no circulation of the Bible takes place to this day; hence there are also no
Bible societies there, and one can thus, from an imperial