# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S74
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

awaken the potency of these into actual energy, arouse the desire that thereby arises, and drive the spirit to actions, so that it fulfills them and removes what stands opposed to it as unpleasant or detestable. It is freedom that makes the spirit capable of following the original inclination or not, and of choosing among the motives that can or should determine it. It is free only insofar as it has motives; where these are lacking, it is determined by inner necessity or by something outside itself; it can also happen that a kind of motive of such preponderant strength has, from the very outset, arisen through self-determination that the others can accomplish nothing more in their efficacy. These depend, as to their quality, on the objects of my basic desires; if the mental image formed of them is a false, mendacious one, then the ideas which necessarily accumulate around them are never suited to furnish motives that would protect these drives from the proliferating seed of corruption — they must instead steer them, in ever increasing measure, toward a perverse direction. One link here supports the other and carries it further within the inner organism of the soul, in accordance with the moral basic constitution that the will has first given it. Insofar, then, it is indeed an accident of the freedom of created being, because created being does not possess the ground of its life within itself, and accordingly, through the consciousness of the true and the good — in which the Author has, with respect to beings outside Himself, laid down the imprint of eternal thoughts brought forth out of Himself — the objects and their mutual super- and subordination are determined and assigned to the striving impulses of its will, either to develop them into an abiding habitus (as cannot be conceived in the absolutely perfect Being, but was indeed realized by the good angels), and thereby to bring about a system, corresponding to the divine ultimate end, of self-willed spiritual (and bodily) states and the temporal and eternal consequences arising from them; or else to deviate from the received light meant for the development and revelation of its life, and, by so misusing its own strength as well as all the other gifts lent to it, and by arbitrarily tearing apart its connection with its God-appointed destiny, to make the subject in which it exists into a fallen, evil spirit. — The objection that the latter is possible only on the presupposition of an already inborn disposition to choose evil motives through a deviation from the right image of the object falls away for anyone who does not construe the free act according to the principle of natural necessity — that what is in the effect must already have been in the cause — but rather posits it as the first, unmediated beginning of a series of effects, just as God is the Author of a creation; only the pure possibility of the fall (the mere negatio impossibilitatis ad peccandum) — not the capacity in the sense of an actual innate disposition — was given to us through such transcendental freedom. Just as little is this freedom, taken in lifeless abstraction, separated from all the elements of the will