# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S231
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 231

Karlsruhe, April 3. The district government in Freiburg has, in one case, handed down a decision concerning the religious upbringing of children which is likely to be received with some astonishment. Two illegitimate children of a Catholic mother were, after they had already been attending school, subsequently legitimized by the marriage of their parents. The father is Evangelical; the mother is also going over to the Evangelical confession, and the parents now wished to raise the children as Evangelicals as well. The district government, however, does not permit this, and rules that the children must remain Catholic until the age at which they can decide for themselves by their own choice. This is supported by statutory provisions whose wording, in the opinion of the majority of the board, admits of this construction. The intent of the law had hitherto been held to be that the will of the parents decides the religious upbringing of children, and, should the parents not express themselves, that as a fundamental law of the state the children are to follow the religion of the father. In the above decree, the remarkable thing has now been accomplished that children can be raised in a religion other than that of their parents, and against their parents' will.

Unionist Faith. The new Prussian Minister of Worship, the famous Kirchentag president von Bethmann-Hollweg, declared, among other things, in a session of the House of Lords on April 9: "One of the noblest — I may indeed say, of the most naturally devout, most spirited, most profound philosophers of Germany, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, spoke the well-known word: 'My head is a heathen; my heart alone is a Christian.' According to his head, then, he had, no more than the heathen, a personal, living God; in his heart he had Him, and in faith in this God he passed over into eternity, and the honored speaker (he meant Stahl) will, like me, trouble himself as little about his own fate as, as M. Claudius says, about the fate of Socrates. I myself, gentlemen, have known more than one truly devout man who, whenever he began to philosophize, was a pantheist — that is, if you will, an atheist." This the Minister of Worship said in order to justify the granting of religious freedom to the so-called free congregations. One sees that the religion of the Unionists is nothing but a sum of pious feelings and works. Christ they have long since lost, and to take His reason captive under the obedience of Christ is, in their view, by no means necessary.

Mecklenburg-Schwerin, early April. With its accustomed rancor, the Darmstädter Allgemeine Kirchen-Zeitung accordingly reports: "A candidate of acknowledged competence has had access, already once granted him, to the examen pro ministerio closed to him again, and it was intimated to him upon further inquiry that he need not count on a position until he has publicly declared his assent to the well-known consistorial opinion. Another distinguished young theologian has been failed in his examination because he did not answer certain Old Testament questions in the sense of the Hengstenberg school of Christology. An outside candidate, who is serving as a private tutor in Mecklenburg, has, evidently because he was compelled by the Mecklenburg Church Gazette once to declare himself publicly for Baumgarten, been refused the licentia concionandi without further ado. A pastor known throughout the land as decidedly believing has, on account of a synodical paper in which he had called for recognition of the historical moment in the doctrine of inspiration, been called to account under the charge of heresy."

University Statistics of Prussia. The six full universities of Prussia (Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Greifswald, Halle-Wittenberg, Königsberg), according to the Central Gazette for Instruction, numbered in the past winter semester a total of 4,383 matriculated students (139 more than in the summer semester). In addition, 1,048 (184 more than in the summer semester) are entitled to attend lectures. Of the total number of matriculated students, 1,433 (90 more than in the summer semester) are native theologians, and 97 (1 fewer than in the summer semester) are foreign. The total number of students has, however, increased by only 47 compared with this semester, from which it may be concluded that young people have since turned less to university studies than before. The native theologians have, in the current semester, decreased compared with the previous one only at Greifswald, by 2 (from 30 to 28), and at Breslau, by 1 (from 280 to 279), while they have increased at Halle by 27 (to 429), at Königsberg by 18 (to 139), at Berlin by 23 (to 275), and at Bonn by 25 (to 283).

University of Erlangen. Enrollment in the winter semester of 1858–59: 561, among them 300 theologians, 100 jurists and cameralists, 85 medical students, 29 pharmacists, 47 philosophers, philologists, chemists, and so forth; foreigners, 168, namely 132 theologians, 5 jurists and cameralists, 9 medical students, 2 pharmacists, 1 chemist. Among the foreigners, 37 are from Prussia, 31 from Mecklenburg, 24 from Hanover.

The Papacy in Italy. To the Augsburg Postzeitung, as the "Wahrheitsfreund" reports, it is written from Rome amid the present turmoil of war: "Believe me, Germany is the hope of Catholic Italy and of the church and of its princes." The Pope has declared that this time it would not be the Jesuits who would be the first whom