# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S73
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.   73

—diated. On the other hand, into the substance of the creaturely will there has been laid by its Creator, in the first place, a multiplicity of naturally subsisting drives which, because they are directed not merely toward objects always present but also toward future ones, cannot be conceived without a becoming in the creature, one that always presupposes impulses of this kind. We find, then, these elements of our willing in ourselves, because our living self as a whole concentrates within itself a sum of cognitive and active powers, which for those born of Adam form a spiritual-bodily organism. Such an endowment, found already present by the personal consciousness and itself first generating that consciousness, on whose ground my soul has its being, is felt by the latter, in gradual development, as much as a power that moves it as an estate to be set in motion by it for definite purposes. Arising prior to the psychically free will and to any knowledge about it, it alone mediates the self's going-forth-from-itself and self-apprehension, and, being finite, is capable of increase as well as decrease, of improvement as well as deterioration. The creaturely will is therefore never a capacity that is simply through itself alone, but rather a conditioned capacity, dependent on a connection, ordered for it, with influences that actually operate upon its acts and that come from its own substance. Since one always generates the other, certain forms of desire must underlie these, forms to which the All-Wise has bound freedom of will, and through them we become capable both of enjoying what accords with them and of feeling the opposite. Being bound to them was necessary, because we are not independent lords able by our own power to turn something into what is pleasant for us, but were rather meant to be governed by motives; we nonetheless remain just as fully free as, on the one hand, the blind force of natural instincts, and, on the other, the conditions of a purposeless and disconnected caprice, do not as such fall within the realm of personal life, and as those promptings of the human will leave open a possibility of not acting, or of acting thus or otherwise. From this it follows at the same time that, while an abiding direction of these desires, whereby they intensify into inclination, and thus also their ethical quality, is indeed conditioned by the free will as the governor ordained for them, the will itself, following its own decision, thereafter only confirms itself in the former direction. For if the fundamental desires of our nature have been so corrupted by some fact that, through self-deception and the destruction of their harmony, the truth of their object — above all the highest good — has vanished from them, so that they have gone astray, and the further desires arising out of them have fallen into the darkest perversion and disorder: then the disposition of the heart has become an evil one, and the will is bound to the sphere of evil just as, in the reverse case, it is bound to the opposite — free in the one, unfree with respect to the good — because one's own guilt has ruined the capacities that the Creator determined for the good. The inclination of our will toward a definite end is conditioned by the motives which we think; it is these that