# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S130
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...it is the disturbance and the contradiction of this creatively willed relationship which man, by virtue of conscience, feels as his natural condition; for conscience is that fundamental power in our spirit by which God — whose breath of life united itself with the dust-formed shape of the earth, and thereby called a personality, together with its human nature, into being (Gen. 2:7) — makes Himself known to that personality as the highest power, as lawgiver and judge.*) The

*) Note. Cf. Romans 1:19f.: "The knowledge of God is manifest among the heathen," etc., with v. 32: "who have known the ordinance (that is, a will subjecting the life-realm of creaturely being to His revealed rule) of God," etc. (according to the original text). The created world testifies, as an object of the outward senses, through the application of a correct syllogism, to the eternal power and divinity of its Maker; the invisible things are perceived, since the world's beginning, though this remains noumenon (v. 20) — as opposed to phenomenon, which Hebrews 11:3 designates as an already-appeared primal stuff, to whose absolute existence, there, creation through the one Word of God is opposed in the undoubted certainty of faith — just as a matter to which a demiurge must first give a determinate form can only be an absurdity. To be sure, the idea of an immeasurably perfect Being is present, in the corresponding faculty granted to the newborn child, not as actual existence (actu primo), still less as its exercise (actu secundo), but only as a possible existence, according to capacity (potentia propinqua) — which, as the dogmaticians teach, is comprised not merely in the natural disposition (potentia proxima), but indeed requires, for its development, instruction and the consequent use of reason (from which the potentia remota, quae a complurium causarum interventu dependet, is further to be distinguished). But as the infant matures, a fullness of stirrings opens up to its general consciousness, stirrings able to manifest themselves quite independently of the personal I, while in that same consciousness all the other powers and impulses of its soul become concentrated. In their innermost depths there is mirrored a reflection of the Divine (under the form of a subjective activity related to this reflection — in which the world's contingency and harmonious order according to universal laws finds its evidence), originally for no other purpose than that its own awakening life should confess itself to Him, incline itself striving toward Him, and in this union find its true satisfaction and blessedness. He, in whom every creature has its being, wished thereby to make felt His presence — everywhere active, and likewise sustaining us — in such a way that a communion of will and a gracious, mysterious indwelling of the holy God might take place within us, because we are His offspring. Through sin this spiritual bond was torn apart in a manner not to be lamented enough: so the conscience, which was meant to be a mediating bond for it, and from which, until then, the whole life of the soul had been illumined, sanctified, and blessed, had to take up an entirely different stance toward the person of the one who had departed. Instead of joining that person into a feeling, willing, and living in harmony with God and with themselves, it breaks them apart into a conflict bound up with shame and fear; and, because the normal relationship between self-consciousness and God-consciousness is now abolished, it is accustomed, as a symptom of the diseased, healing-needy condition of this organ — common to all at its root — to make known, through perceptible remembering, admonishing, warning, and reproachful, painful disquiet at each individual emerging desire or act, the manifold nature of the relations (hence it is called Mitwisser, "co-witness," because it continually accompanies the I, Romans 2:15) in which sin was committed against the good and gracious will of the Creator. Before, in the dark womb of the faculty of cognition, the germ of a presentiment of something supersensible forms itself, with the help of a receptivity to outward impressions, ever more clearly into a thought, the conscience already begins, as that very presentiment, to appear, and, commanding, without our...