# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S376
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

376 Protestantism in Austria.

of loyalty was thoroughly brought to light. May He who gives strength to the weak, and enough might to the powerless, grant us grace to persevere in such loyalty!

The editor has in this critical time been refreshed and strengthened by many letters, from individuals and from whole fellowships. He is, alas, unable to answer all these letters, but may the Lord, who has spoken: "Whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water to drink in the name of a disciple: truly I say to you, he shall in no wise lose his reward," repay all who have shown such love and loyalty toward him! May he help us all out of these difficult days of the militant Church — days that, by human expectation, grow ever more difficult — into his heavenly kingdom, where the sun shall no more beat upon us, nor any heat. "I was glad when they said unto me, we will go into the house of the Lord. And that our feet shall stand within your gates, O Jerusalem."

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Protestantism in Austria.
(From the Allgemeine Zeitung.)

Just as the constitutional-legal position of the Evangelical Church in the German-Slavic crown lands is a most dismal picture, so too is its inner constitution. Confined within the narrow bounds of the Toleration Patent of Emperor Joseph II — of blessed memory — it has to this day not been able to develop into that form of life which is conditioned by the New Testament principle of the universal priesthood, and which expresses itself in presbyteries and synods. The patent of December 31, 1851 does indeed grant every religious community the right of independent order and administration of its own affairs; and yet we see at the head of the Evangelical Church in the crown lands named, just as before the year 1848, the Evangelical Consistories of the Augsburg and Helvetic Confessions in Vienna — established by the state without any ecclesiastical influence and dependent upon it — dominating the Church, exercising all the rights of a supremus episcopus, including that of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and making every free movement of the Church impossible; and yet even the superintendents do not proceed from the elections of the congregation, but from the will of the sovereign. Like these, the consistories likewise stand not within the Church but outside it, without any organic connection with it. And in addition there is the unheard-of anomaly that a Roman Catholic presidium stands at their head, which, by the very nature of the case, does not let free discussion arise, does violence to the energy of the voting members, and stifles even the most vigorous thought in its very inception. Now that the separation of Catholics from Protestants has once been brought about in the schools as well as in the cemeteries, then