# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 01 07_S76
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

76

gregation might not be closed, Mr. Picker himself consented, as often as he delivered his lectures on the religion of light, to read beforehand certain portions from the Book of the Christians, here and there even to make mention of Christ in terms of praise, and to declare that this sage of Nazareth really agreed entirely with him, but on account of his unenlightened age had not ventured to speak out the truth so without all oriental imagery as he (Mr. Picker) does. However admirable the liberality of this man must appear to our readers even after this, it was yet not exhausted herewith. Since there are people in St. Louis whose religious feeling is so sick that they can positively revel even in the nauseatingly sugary Wit'schel morning and evening offerings, Mr. P. himself lent himself to this, for the satisfaction also of this want, regularly at the close of every address to recite the Witschel Lord's Prayer with elevated voice and in the suitable posture of his body, and thereby to prepare for the souls so designated at least a sweet dessert after their peculiar taste. All these certainly expedient measures, to be sure, did not fail of their purpose in any way; they brought Mr. P. something considerable. The restless man is said to have already attained so respectable a standing among the property-holders that he is now prepared for every case, and even if his faithful congregation should become so ungrateful as to wish to send its faithful shepherd into misery, would be able to bear his exile with stoic calm. The purpose of enlightenment has meanwhile receded more and more into the background, without the enlightened party of the congregation noticing it, until in recent times a certain enlightened peddler (he is said to call himself Clemen) came into our city. This man is said to have told the church council some rather serious truths about the stagnating condition of the congregation, thereupon to have held a strict church visitation, and to have taken from Mr. P. the vow henceforth to keep better pace with the ever faster advancing spirit of the age, and, without all self-interest, as he called it in a wounding allusion, to concern himself for the spread of the pure light. Mr. P., however, recognizing that it was now indeed time to leave those still weak to their fate, declared himself ready for everything.

One should now indeed suppose that our enlightened Germans would have fairly forgotten the past and shown themselves ready to support with new courage and zeal the work begun by Mr. P., if not quickly yet with great caution, and now more firmly established. But far from it! Alas! here again one has had to make the experience that in free states one commonly disposes of great men, sacrificing themselves for the common welfare, ungratefully, when they have just arrived at the summit of their endeavors, and throws them away like a worn-out tool. So there has formed in St. Louis a "new free congregation," which, despairing of a thorough reformation of the Picker religious society,(!) wishes to carry on the work of enlightenment in this dark Western land independently of the same. As we hear, the most influential and most liberal-minded Germans, even from the respectable mercantile class here, have taken part in it. The "Anzeiger des Westens" has already published statutes for the free congregation. We can hardly believe, however, that these are its real statutes, but almost fear that some Yankee has played himself the unpermitted, unseemly joke of representing us poor Germans before the natives, by this alleged Constitution, as the good old Michel. It says therein, namely, for example: "The Society has set itself the aim: 1. Education of the young by suitable instruction, from which all so-called religious instruction is excluded, in whose place appears instruction in pure morals or ethics; 2. the knowledge and worship of God, etc., etc. Hereby, according to the first clause, it is imputed to us Germans that we want a morality without religion, therefore a morality without knowledge of our obligation toward God, therefore a morality without morality; according to the second clause, however, we Germans are supposed to have already forgotten the first clause again, and after this to want once more knowledge and worship of God, therefore religion!

Further it says in the First Chapter of the alleged Constitution: "To investigate by one's own contemplation and thinking is the sacred task of each of us; for not by the imprinting of foreign insights does the truth come to us; not from without into man, but from within outward shines the light of truth." These words are now indeed very well put for a "free congregation," but what does the sly author of this so grand interpolation do?

Below, in the Third Chapter, he pretends as if he had quite forgotten the above-said, and imputes to such a free congregation the intention, contrary to its principles, nevertheless to appoint a "teacher" for young and old, and, like other unenlightened people, to go to school and on Sundays to church. People from whose inner being the light of truth shines forth so brightly that, if it were possible, they could easily illumine even the darkest primeval age, will thank you very kindly for sending their thoroughly illumined and illuminating j. offspring first with primer and Adam Riese's arithmetic book to a school, in order to have "foreign insights imprinted" upon them there, or even themselves to trudge to church in philistine fashion with a hymn-book under the arm, in order there to let a priest who would be more enlightened than his reason "shine the truth in from without!"

In like manner our framer of statutes proceeds in regard to the point of "public confessions of faith." Above, in the First Chapter, he says quite rightly that such a free congregation "may never set up a confession of faith for the purpose of fettering and binding the thinking of the individual; rather it regards every ordinance by which injury is done to the freedom of the thinking human spirit as the first and greatest of sins." But in the Third Chapter it says: "The Board has the control over the services of the teacher; it has to oversee both the instruction and the addresses before the congregation, that both may be in harmony with the principles pronounced." Hereby the author of the free congregation foists upon it that it counts it indeed the greatest of sins if others would bind it to their principles, but none of sins if, on the other hand, it would bind others to its own: that it itself would consist merely of perfectly free people, but its preacher should be its good-natured yes-man, yea, according to another point be excluded, as one uninitiated, from seat and voice in its enlightened assembly; and, what is the maddest, that even it, so free a congregation, should still be so immature as not to be able to conduct for itself the office of watchman over the prescribed conduct of the "doctrine" in church and school, that it should be willing to let its gentlemen of the Board "watch," in order meanwhile to sleep quite quietly and carelessly.—

However grossly now the author of the oft-named Constitution seems already hereby to wish to make fools of us poor Germans, all this is yet outdone by his wanting to make the world believe that the German "free congregation," to which the most respected and honorable of our fellow-countrymen belong, is supposed to have enacted, among other things, also the following: "The teacher receives no fixed salary, but is dependent on the school fees, which are fixed at 50 cents per month for each child. He has to collect the same himself and to keep books on the children who attend the school, as well as on the receipts of the school. If the teacher's income from the school fees does not amount to $300 (write: three hundred dollars) annually, the sum lacking is to be made up to him from the congregation's treasury." O you poor enlightened people, does not this mean making grievous sport of you? Is it not impertinent that one wants to credit you with esteeming enlightenment so poorly that you could offer a man who must spread it for you officially all seven days of the week a wage by which he can scarcely rescue himself from death by hunger, wherefore, as the sad examples lie open to the day, he must surely be intent upon a side income? Is it not impertinent that one wants to give you to understand, as through a peony-rose, that you might hope only for such candidates as, after all their speculations have miscarried, would now become apostles out of sheer despair.

But we break off here and close with the sincere wish that the Constitution may really be only feigned; for a congregation which should be founded upon it would deserve the name of a "free" one only because it would be free not only from Christianity,