this spirit he also campaigned for Prussian neutrality in the Crimean War in 1854, as Bunsen and other partisans of England urged Frederick William IV to intervene. The king had promised in 1840: "I will keep peace in my time" and kept this now. Prussia had deliberately remained neutral, and Stahl justified this in a speech before the first chamber as "the conclusion of a policy based on a higher principle". In 1854 Stahl also became Prussian Crown Counsel and a member of the State Council. In the ecclesiastical field, too, Stahl used his position as a member of the old Prussian Evangelical Higher Church Council (1852–1858) to loosen the union, to strengthen Lutheran confessionalism (New Lutheranism) and to renew the rule of the clergy over the lay world. He was a member of the Prussian General Synod in 1846 and (alongside August von Bethmann-Hollweg ) Vice-President of the German Evangelical Church Congress from 1848 to 1861 and a member of the Central Committee for the Inner Mission in Prussia. It may be due to the influence of Catholicism during his time in Würzburg, when he was fascinated by the authoritarian elements of the hierarchical church constitution, that Stahl demanded that the validity of the Lutheran confession as the supreme norm of all church life be ensured with the help of a largely independent Episcopalian church organization. The office of bishop was finally introduced in the EKD after 1945. The political upheaval as a result of the king's illness and the rebellion of Prince Regent Wilhelm and the fall of the Manteuffel ministry also ended Stahl's work in the Oberkirchenrat and led to his resignation from the authority in 1858. However, he continued the political struggle against the Ministry of the Liberal Era in the Herrenhaus, but did not live to see its political turnaround. State doctrine At the end of the 1820s, Stahl was in a difficult, crisis-ridden situation in Munich: not only materially - he had to earn a living for himself and his siblings - he was also in distress mentally, as he explained in December 1829 in the preface to the writes the first edition of the Philosophy of Law, which is so important to him that he adopts it in its entirety in later editions. Dissatisfied with Hegel's teaching, he felt the misery of philosophy in being unable to provide an ethical basis for the