# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S75
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith etc.   75

conceivable only as one that maintained itself, hermaphrodite-like, in equal balance between the service of God and the bondage of sin, and could return there each time after a holy or unholy resolve — but rather, as it actually is, inseparably bound, in unity with the desiring powers or drives. This concrete will was good and pure after the likeness of God (Gen. 5:1); by virtue of its freedom of choice, the self was to determine itself as to whither its impulses pointed it; yet within that freedom lay the causal power for the former, in that, when the opposing thought also presented itself to the knowing spirit in its conscious dependence on a higher Being, in its striving to go beyond whatever it is at any given moment of its existence, and insofar as it linked itself with the drive that especially heightens individual existence, it could pursue a direction that did not correspond to its relation to its Author and to His creating word spoken concerning it. Laid into the vital movement of a creature made after that likeness was the having, as the object of its inclination, of the perfection essentially ordained for it by God, in inseparable union with the love it desired toward Him — of whom, through faith in His word made known to it, it had the right image in its heart, and from which its own perfection likewise flowed — and with the conscience that, in unfolding it and guiding it to its goal, carried on the constant mutual intercourse of the divine and the creaturely life. Although, then, the general nature of the first-named striving joined itself most intimately with the other two powers, that striving was nevertheless set in motion — through the free activity of the understanding, which, thinking the idea of creaturely perfection apart from its actuality as conditioned by the Holy Spirit, fastened upon it (in connection with the sensuous drive of earthly-human existence, excitable through the sight of the lovely fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden) — *) so that the self, which without

*) Note. From this point the very widely held view of the origin of sin must be corrected — the view according to which the sensuousness of man, and his consequent unreceptiveness to the determining power of the spirit, and thus the natural weakness of the latter, explains the presence of evil. It is evident that the adherents and defenders of this derivation entangle themselves in a strange contradiction, in that they nonetheless wish to preserve for every man the freedom to decide either according to the impulses of reason or according to those of the lower powers of the soul, yet hold that this freedom ceases precisely where sin begins — because the self's succumbing indeed attests its powerlessness and bondage, the guilt for which would then have to rest either on an original sin of its own or on the Creator. Even were we to grant, as they say, that the free will can gradually take on different degrees of strength — the higher subduing the sensuous nature and attaining to virtue, the opposite case producing vice — we should still be left, on the question of how the spirit even comes to bear these fetters at all, if it is not supposed to have been originally entangled in sin (which would only do away with the former presupposition), with nothing else but that it is itself, in a state of potency, an animal nature, from which it raises itself, beginning from the point of childhood — when the preponderance of fleshly lust must be greatest — toward actuality by advancing from one stage of formation to