# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

10                    Prophecy from History.

the Virgin, give salvation. Peace and sonship with God — the true civilization of the kingdom of God — is obtained only through fellowship with the cross of Jesus Christ in faith, which brought Him to Joseph's tomb, not through that tomb itself. But at the very time when carnalized Christendom began to make Mary a mediatrix in Jesus' stead, it also believed it could find peace in the Holy Sepulchre, and in the high Middle Ages the ardent longing to possess the Holy Sepulchre reached, together with the cult of Mary, its high point. With the cross of Christ borne on their backs, the sword in their fist, "the eldest son of the church" at their head, and spurred on unceasingly by the pope — to whom the recognition of his own dominion over the whole earth mattered more than Christ's tomb — the peoples of the West stormed toward the Orient to cleanse the Holy Sepulchre of unbelievers — while, at the same time, incidentally conquering fair provinces. But what was the result? "He who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword." The Orient swallowed up the flower of the population of the Occident — some seven million are reckoned — and gave back vice and increased superstition in return. Jerusalem, moreover, remained not merely in the possession of the unbelievers, but a reversal even followed: the unbelievers finally took New Rome as well, the ancient capitol of the Christian empire. Since then the "Eastern Question" has lain dormant — like a fire under the ashes, awaiting fresh fuel to blaze up again more fiercely. If it now emerges again at the same time as the Marian question, should not the two also again stand in some deep connection with one another? And should not the new crusades likewise take a course similar to the earlier ones? One need only observe that in this Eastern Question, too, matters have essentially moved forward. It is no longer so much a matter of devotion at the peaceful Holy Sepulchre — though this, admittedly, gave the first occasion and pretext for the new struggle (much as the merit of Christ did for the Immaculate Conception of Mary) — but, more simply, a matter of possessing dominion in the Orient. One no longer cries, as then, "God wills it!" but rather: "the general voice of the people wills it!" One no longer fastens the cross upon one's shoulder as a sign that one is a Christian and stands under the power of the cross. The cross, or whatever takes its place, has meanwhile become a symbol of the particular rung of one's own merit in civilization, climbed upon the shoulders of Christianity, and one is just as glad to take it up against the Turks. The pope no longer stands at the head of the enterprise; he is confined to nourishing, in the background, the zeal of the worldly powers, and to sounding the trumpet of war only publicly through the Jesuit papers. Nor are the unbelievers and barbarians any longer the Turks — the hypocrisy of the age forces the irony that the Turks must now precisely be preserved, in order to set the present unbelievers and barbarians at each other's throats. This present unbelief, which must now be broken, exists, however, after the age-worn