# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S55
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected with It, etc. 55

but the creaturely will was of such a constitution that room remained for it to determine itself in contradiction to its absolute norm: so it had to be that, when the latter occurred, the content of conscience became, objectively, something other than ourselves, so that it now enters consciousness in the form of a commanding demand. Although man's manner of life in his fallen state is for the most part little more than a product of the influences of national character, surroundings, the age, and upbringing — just as his arbitrary intervention in nature also has fixed limits, so that he can never tear apart the coherence within it, and can act upon it only by means of the nature already appropriated to him in his own body, as a point of transit for nature's own irresistibly operating laws — nevertheless, through the reflection of the willing I upon itself, the determining circle of all those powers is broken through, and even the power of habit is not unconquerable, insofar as the self wills to withdraw itself from the dominion of individual impulses by free reaction. With this, however, the possibility is at the same time given of increasing, actualizing, and developing in the most manifold ways the inheritance of ingrained evil within him. To make oneself, of course, into a good man — one who indeed can do only what is truly good, Matt. 12:33ff., 7:17ff. — is given to no one, as he now is, by himself; the rectifying of his relationship to God, and immersion into a divine life, is something that lies far beyond his powers. But whence that moral law in the conscience, if the creaturely person had not also been created free unto the good in the very first beginning of all our being? And why does the Gospel everywhere appeal to the feeling of guilt in man as an undeniable fact of his inner life, if he had not, by virtue of the freedom of will originally given to him, been responsible for the fall into sin?

God has erected a wondrous monument to his wisdom, power, and goodness in the creation of spiritual beings after his own image. They were meant thereby to be capable of turning toward him with free inclination — that is, in the knowledge of his love, to love him in return and to enjoy his blessed communion. Without them, the whole rest of the world would remain an utterly insoluble riddle, darkness and silence, hidden from itself, just as its Creator would be hidden from it. How can God reveal himself to souls that, in their natural life, are merely caught up in sensory perceptions and the inclinations determined thereby, governed without any capacity to raise themselves, with their thinking and desiring, into the realm of the spirit?*) A knowledge of God and divine things is possible only through a crossing over out of the realm of the visible into the invisible, first of all through a going into oneself, whereby an I grasps itself and reveals itself as a willing spirit, yet at the same time, out of its limitation and the

*) Note. Compare Acts 17:26ff. That we are his offspring, and that he is very near to us, guarantees to our being in God the possibility of finding God.