§ 194.1. The Kingdom of Saxony.—The present kingdom of Saxony, formerly an electoral principality, has had Catholic princes since 1679 (§ [153, 1]), but the Catholic church could strike its roots again only in the immediate neighbourhood of the court. Indeed those belonging to it did not enjoy civil and religious equality until 1807, when this distinction was set aside. The erection of cloisters and the introduction of monkish orders, however, continued even then forbidden, and all official publications of the Catholic clergy required the placet of the government. The administration of the evangelical church, so long as the king is Catholic, lies, according to agreement, in the hands of the ministers commissioned in evangelicis. Although several of these have proved defenders of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, the rationalistic Illumination became almost universally prevalent not only among the clergy but also among the general populace. Meanwhile a pietistic reaction set in, especially powerful in Muldenthal, where Rudelbach’s labours impressed on it a Lutheran ecclesiastical character. The religious movement, on the other hand, directed by Martin Stephan, pastor of the Bohemian church in Dresden, came to a sad and shameful end. As representative and restorer of strict Lutheran views he had wrought successfully in Dresden from 1810, but, through the adulation of his followers, approaching even to worship, he fell more and more deeply into hierarchical assumption and neglect of self-vigilance. When the police in 1837 restricted his nightly assemblies, without, however, having discovered anything immoral, and suspended him from his official duties, he called upon his followers to emigrate to America. Many of them, lay and clerical, blindly obeyed, and founded in 1835, in Missouri, a Lutheran church communion (§ [208, 2]). Stephan’s despotic hierarchical assumptions here reached their fullest height; he also gave his lusts free scope. Women oppressed or actually abused by him at length openly proclaimed his shame in 1839, and the community excommunicated him. He died in A.D. 1846. Taught by such experiences, and purged of the Donatist-separatist element, a church reaction against advancing rationalism made considerable progress under a form of church that favoured it, and secured also influential representatives in members of the theological faculty of the university of Leipzig distinguished for their scientific attainments. After repeated debates in the chamber over a scheme of a new ecclesiastical and synodal order submitted by the ministry, the first evangelical Lutheran state synod met in Dresden, in May, 1871. On the motion of the government, the law of patronage was here modified so that the patron had to submit three candidates to the choice of the ecclesiastical board. It was also decided to form an upper or state consistory, to which all ecclesiastical matters hitherto administered by the minister of public worship should be given over; the control of education was to remain with the ministry, and the state consistory was to charge itself with the oversight only of religious instruction and ethico-religious training. The most lively debates were those excited by the proposal to abolish the obligation resting upon all church teachers to seem to adhere to the confession of the Lutheran church, led by Dr. Zarncke, the rector of the state university. The commission of inquiry sent down, under the presidency of Professor Luthardt, demanded the absolute withdrawal of this proposal, which aimed at perfect doctrinal freedom. On the other hand, Professor G. Baur made the mediate proposal to substitute for the declaration on oath, the promise to teach simply and purely to the best of his knowledge and according to conscience the gospel of Christ as it is contained in Scripture, and witnessed in the confessions of the Lutheran church. And as even now Luthardt, inspired by the wish not to rend the first State Synod at its final sitting by an incurable schism, agreed to this suggestion, it was carried by a large majority. In consequence of this decision, a number of “Lutherans faithful to the confession,” withdrew from the State church, and on the anniversary of the Reformation in 1871, constituted themselves into an Evangelical Lutheran Free Church, associated with the Missouri synod (§ [208, 2]), from which, on the suggestion of some of the members of the community who had returned from America, they chose for themselves a pastor called Ruhland. There were five such congregations in Saxony: at Dresden, Planitz, Chemnitz, Frankenberg, and Krimmitschau, to which some South German dissenters at Stenden, Wiesbaden, Frankfort, and Anspach attached themselves.
§ 194.2. The Saxon Duchies.—The Stephan emigration had also decoyed a number of inhabitants from Saxe-Altenburg. In a rescript to the Ephorus Ronneburg, in 1838, the consistory traced back this separatist movement to the fact that the religious needs of the congregations found no satisfaction in the rationalistic preaching, and urged a more earnest presentation from the pulpit of the fundamental and central doctrines of evangelical Christianity. This rescript was the subject of violent denunciation. The government took the opinion of four theological faculties on the procedure of the consistory and its opponents, who published it simply with the praise and blame contained therein, and thus prevented any investigation. Also in Weimar and Gotha the rationalism of Röhr and Bretschneider, which had dominated almost all pulpits down to the middle of the century, began gradually to disappear, and the more recent parties of Confessional, Mediation, and Free Protestant theology to take its place. The last named party found vigorous support in the university of Jena. A petition addressed to it in 1882 from the Thuringian Church Conference of Eisenach, to call to Jena also a representative of the positive Lutheran theology, was decidedly refused, and, in a controversial pamphlet by Superintendent Braasch, condemned as “the Eisenach outrage” (Attentat). In Meiningen the Vorsynode convened there in 1870 sanctioned the sketch of a moderately liberal synodal constitution submitted to it, which placed the confession indeed beyond the reach of legislative interference, but also secured its rights to free inquiry. The first State Synod, however, did not meet before 1878. In Weimar the first synod was held in 1873, the second in 1879.
§ 194.3. The Kingdom of Hanover.—Although the union found no acceptance in Hanover, after the overthrow of the rationalism of the ancien régime, the union theology became dominant in the university. The clergy, however, were in great part carried along by the confessional Lutheran current of the age. The Preachers’ Conference at Stade in 1854 took occasion to call the attention of the government to the “manifest divergence” between the union theology of the university and the legal and actual Lutheran confession of the state church, and urged the appointment of Lutheran teachers. The faculty, on the other hand, issued a memorial in favour of liberty of public teaching, and the curators filled the vacancies again with union theologians. When in April, 1862, it was proposed to displace the state catechism introduced in 1790, which neither theologically nor catechetically satisfied the needs of the church, by a carefully sifted revision of the Walther catechism in use before 1790, approved of by the Göttingen faculty, the agitation of the liberal party called forth an opposition, especially in city populations, which expressed itself in insults to members of consistories and pastors, and in almost daily repeated bloody street fights with the military, and obliged the government at last to give way.—The negotiations about a concordat with Rome reached up further in 1824 than obtaining the circumscription bull Impensa Romanorum, by which the Catholic church obtained two bishoprics, those of Hildesheim and Osnabrück.—In 1886, Hanover was incorporated with the kingdom of Prussia (§ [193, 8]).
§ 194.4. Hesse.—Landgrave Maurice, 1592-1627, had forced upon his territories a modified Melanchthonian Calvinism (§ [154, 1]), but a Lutheran basis with Lutheran modes of viewing things and Lutheran institutions still remained, and the Lutheran reaction had never been completely overcome, not even in Lower Hesse, although there the name of the Reformed Church with Reformed modes of worship had been gradually introduced in most of the congregations. The communities of Upper Hesse and Schmalcald, however, by continuous opposition saved for the most part their Lutheranism, which in 1648 was guaranteed to them anew by the Darmstadt Recess, and secured an independent form of church government in the Definitorium at Marburg. The union movement, which issued from Prussia in 1817, met with favour also in Hesse, but only in the province of Hanau in 1818 got the length of a formal constituting of a church on the basis of the union. In 1821, however, the elector issued the so-called Reorganization edict, by which the entire evangelical church of the electorate, without any reference to the confession status, but simply in accordance with the political divisions of the state, was put under the newly instituted consistories of Cassel, Marburg, and Hanau, in the formation of which the confession of the inhabitants had not been considered. The Marburg Definitorium indeed protested, but in vain, against this despotic act, which was felt a grievance, less on account of the wiping out of the confession than on account of the loss of independent church government which it occasioned. The government appointed pastors, teachers and professors without enquiring much about their confession. In 1838 the hitherto required subscription of the clergy to the confessional writings, the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, was modified into a formula declaring conscientious regard for them. But in this Bickell, professor of law at Marburg, saw a loss to the church in legal status, an endangering of the evangelical church; the theological professor, Hupfeld, also in the further course of the controversy took his side, while the advocate, Henkel, in Cassel, as a popular agitator opposed him and demanded a State Synod for the formal abolishing of all symbolical books. The government ignored both demands, and the vehement conflict was quieted by degrees. With 1850 a new era began in the keen controversy over the question, which confession, whether Lutheran or Reformed, was legally and actually that of the state. The ministry of Hassenpflug from 1850, which suppressed the revolution, considered it as legally the Lutheran, and determined the ecclesiastical arrangements in this sense, and in this course Dr. Vilmar, member of the Consistory, was the minister’s right hand. But the elector was from the beginning personally opposed to this procedure, and on the overthrow of the ministry in 1855, Vilmar (died 1868) was also transferred to a theological professorship at Marburg. This, however, only gave a new impulse to the confessional Lutheran movement in the state, for the spirit and tendency of the highly revered theological teacher powerfully influenced the younger generation of the Hessian clergy. In consequence of the German war, Hesse was annexed to Prussia in 1866 (§ [193, 9]).—On the Catholic church in this state, compare § [196, 1].
§ 194.5. Brunswick, Oldenburg, Anhalt, and Lippe-Detmold.—Much ado was made also in Brunswick over the introduction of a new constitution for the Lutheran state church in 1869, and at last in 1871 a synodal ordinance was passed by which the State Synod, consisting of fourteen clerical and eighteen lay members, was to meet every four years, so as not to be a too offensive factor in the ecclesiastical administration and legislation, which therefore has left untouched the content of the confession. The first synod of 1872 began by rejecting the injunction to open the sessions with prayer and reading of scripture. Oldenburg, which in 1849, by a synod whose membership had been chosen by the original electorate, had been favoured with a democratic church constitution wholly separate from the state, accepted in 1854 without opposition a new constitution which restored the headship of the church to the territorial lords, the administration of the church to a Supreme Church Council and ecclesiastical legislation to a State Synod consisting of clerical and lay members.—The prince in the exercise of his sovereign rights gave a charter in 1878 to the evangelical church of the Duchy of Anhalt to a synodal ordinance which, though approved by the Vorsynode of 1876, had been rejected by parliament, and afterwards it gained the assent of the national representatives.—In the Reformed Lippe-Detmold there were in 1844 still five preachers who, wearied of the illuminationist catechism of the state church, had gone back to the Heidelberg catechism and protested against the abolition of acceptance on oath of the symbols, as destructive of the peace of the church. The democratic church constitution of 1851, however, was abrogated in 1854, and instead of it, the old Reformed church order of 1684 was again made law. At the same time, religious pardon and equality were guaranteed to Catholics and Lutherans. The first Reformed State Synod was constituted in 1878.
§ 194.6. Mecklenburg.—Mecklenburg-Schwerin from 1848 was in possession of a strictly Lutheran church government under the direction of Kliefoth, and its university at Rostock had decidedly Lutheran theologians. When the chamberlain Von Kettenburg, on going over to the Catholic church, appointed a Catholic priest on his estate, the government in 1852, on the ground that the laws of the state did not allow Catholic services which extended beyond simple family worship, held that he had overstepped the limits. A complaint, in reference thereto, presented to the parliament and then to the German Bund, was in both cases thrown out. Even in 1863 the Rostock magistrates refused to allow tower and bells in the building of a Catholic church.—An extraordinary excitement was caused by the removal from office in January, 1858, of Professor M. Baumgarten of Rostock. An examination paper set by him on 2 Kings xi. by which the endeavour was made to win scripture sanction for a violent revolution, obliged the government even in 1856 to remove him from the theological examination board. At the same time his polemic addressed to a pastoral conference at Parchim, against the doctrine of the Mecklenburg state catechism on the ceremonial law, especially in reference to the sanctification of the Sabbath, increased the distrust which the clergy of the state, on account of his writings, had entertained against his theological position as one which, from a fanatical basis, diverged on all sides into fundamental antagonism to the confession and the ordinances of the Lutheran state church. The government finally deposed him in 1858 (leaving him, however, in possession of his whole salary, also of the right of public teaching), on the ground and after the publication of a judgment of the consistory which found him guilty of heretical alteration of all the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith and the Lutheran confession, and sought to prove this verdict from his writings. As might have been foreseen, this step was followed by a loud outcry by all journals; but even Lutherans, like Von Hofmann, Von Scheurl [Scheuerl], and Luthardt, objected to the proceedings of the government as exceeding the law laid down by the ecclesiastical ordinance and the opinion of the consistory as resting upon misunderstanding, arbitrary supposition and inconsequent conclusion.
§ 195. Bavaria.
Catholic Bavaria, originally an electorate, but raised in 1806, by Napoleon’s favour, into a royal sovereignty, to which had been adjudged by the Vienna Congress considerable territories in Franconia and the Palatine of the Rhine with a mainly Protestant population, attempted under Maximilian Joseph (IV.) I., after the manner of Napoleon, despotically to pass a liberal system of church polity, but found itself obliged again to yield, and under Louis I. became again the chief retreat of Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism of the most pronounced ultramontane pattern. It was under the noble and upright king, Maximilian II., that the evangelical church of the two divisions of the kingdom, numbering two-thirds of the population, first succeeded in securing the unrestricted use of their rights. Nevertheless, Catholic Bavaria remained, or became, the unhappy scene of the wildest demagogic agitation of the Catholic clergy and of the Bavarian “Patriots” who played their game, whose patriotism consisted only in mad hatred of Prussia and fanatical ultramontanism. Yet King Louis II., after the brilliant successes of the Franco-German war, could not object to the proposal of November 30th, 1870, to found a new German empire under a Prussian and therefore a Protestant head.
§ 195.1. The Bavarian Ecclesiastical Polity under Maximilian I., 1799-1825.—Bavaria boasted with the most unfeigned delight after the uprooting of Protestantism in its borders as then defined (§ [151, 1]), that it was the most Catholic, i.e. the most ultramontane and most bigoted, of German-speaking lands, and, after a short break in this tradition by Maximilian Joseph III. (§ [165, 10]), went forth again with full sail, under Charles Theodore, 1777-1779, on the old course. But the thoroughly new aspect which this state assumed on the overthrow of the old German empire, demanded an adapting territorially of the civil and ecclesiastical life in accordance with the relations which it owed to its present political position. The new elector Maximilian Joseph IV., who as king styled himself Maximilian I., transferred the execution of this task to his liberal, energetic, and thoroughly fearless minister, Count Montgelas, 1799-1817. In January, 1802, it was enacted that all cloisters should be suppressed, and that all cathedral foundations should be secularized; and these enactments were immediately carried out in an uncompromising manner. Even in 1801 the qualification of Protestants to exercise the rights of Bavarian citizens was admitted, and a religious edict of 1803 guaranteed to all Christian confessions full equality of civil and political privileges. To the clergy was given the control of education, and to the gymnasia and universities a considerable number of foreigners and Protestants received appointments. In all respects the sovereignty of the state over the church and the clergy was very decidedly expressed, the episcopate at all points restricted in its jurisdiction, the training of the clergy regulated and supervised on behalf of the state, the patronage of all pastorates and benefices usurped by the government, even public worship subjected to state control by the prohibition of superstitious practices, etc. But amid many other infelicities of this autocratic procedure was specially the gradual dying out of the old race of bishops, which obliged the government to seek again an understanding with Rome; and so it actually happened in June, 1817, after Montgelas’ dismissal, that a concordat was drawn up. By this the Roman Catholic apostolic religion secured throughout the whole kingdom those rights and prerogatives which were due to it according to divine appointment and canonical ordinances, which, strictly taken, meant supremacy throughout the land. In addition, two archbishoprics and seven bishoprics were instituted, the restoration of several cloisters was agreed to, and the unlimited administration of theological seminaries, the censorship of books, the superintendance of public schools and free correspondence with the holy see were allowed to the bishops. On the other hand, the king was given the choice of bishops (to be confirmed by the pope), the nomination of a great part of the priests and canons, and the placet for all hierarchical publications. After many vain endeavours to obtain amendments, the king at last, on October 17th, ratified this concordat; but, to mollify his highly incensed Protestant subjects, he delayed the publication of it till the proclamation of the new civil constitution on May 18th following. The concordat was then adopted, as an appendage to an edict setting forth the ecclesiastical supremacy of the state, securing perfect freedom of conscience to all subjects, as well as equal civil rights to members of the three Christian confessions, and demanding from them equal mutual respect. The irreconcilableness of this edict with the concordat was evident, and the newly appointed bishops as well as the clerical parliamentary deputies, declared by papal instruction that they could not take the oath to the constitution without reservation, until the royal statement of Tegernsee, September 21st, that the oath taken by Catholic subjects simply referred to civil relations, and that the concordat had also the validity of a law of the state, induced the curia to agree to it. But the government nevertheless continued to insist as before upon the supremacy of the state over the church, enlarged the claims of the royal placet, put the free intercourse with Rome again under state control, arbitrarily disposed of church property and supervised the theological examinations of the seminarists, made the appointment of all clergy dependent on its approbation, and refused to be misled in anything by the complaints and objections of the bishops.
§ 195.2. The Bavarian Ecclesiastical Polity under Louis I., 1825-1848.—Zealous Catholic as the new king was, he still held with unabated tenacity to the sovereign rights of the crown, and the extreme ultramontane ministry of Von Abel from 1837 was the first to wring from him any relaxations, e.g. the reintroduction of free intercourse between the bishops and the holy see without any state control. But it could not obtain the abolition of the placet, and just as little the eagerly sought permission of the return of the Jesuits. On the other hand the allied order of Redemptorists was allowed, whose missions among the Bavarian people, however, the king soon made dependent on a permission to be from time to time renewed. His tolerant disposition toward the Protestants was shown in 1830, by his refusing the demand of the Catholic clergy for a Reverse in mixed marriages, and recognising Protestant sponsors at Catholic baptisms. But yet his honourable desire to be just even to the Protestants of his realm was often paralysed, partly by his own ultramontane sympathies, partly and mainly by the immense influence of the Abel ministry, and the religious freedom guaranteed them by law in 1818 was reduced and restricted. Among other things the Protestant press was on all sides gagged by the minister, while the Catholic press and preaching enjoyed unbridled liberty. Great as the need was in southern Bavaria the government had strictly forbidden the taking of any aid from the Gustavus Adolphus Verein. Louis saw even in the name of this society a slight thrown on the German name, and was specially offended at its vague, nearly negative attitude towards the confession. Yet he had no hesitation in affording an asylum in Catholic Bavaria to the Lutheran confessor Scheibel (§ [177, 2]) whom Prussian diplomacy had driven out of Lutheran Saxony, and did not prevent the university of Erlangen, after its dead orthodoxy had been reawakened by the able Reformed preacher Krafft (died 1845), becoming the centre of a strict Lutheran church consciousness in life as well as science for all Germany. The adoration order of 1838, which required even the Protestant soldiers to kneel before the host as a military salute, occasioned great discontent among the Protestant population, and many controversial pamphlets appeared on both sides. When finally the parliament in 1845 took up the complaint of the Protestants, a royal proclamation followed by which the usually purely military salute formerly in use was restored. In 1847 the ultramontane party, with Abel at its head, fell into disfavour with the king, on account of its honourable attitude in the scandal which the notorious Lola Montez caused in the circle of the Bavarian nobility; but in 1848 Louis was obliged, through the revolutionary storm that burst over Bavaria, to resign the crown.