# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S131
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 131

...abiding division, the hostile estrangement from the divine law — which, apart from the Mosaic revelation, is comprised in a moral judgment forced upon the heathen through an innate awareness and a general, though counterfeit-liable, recognition of the True and the Good*) — and which confronts him, demanding tasks that seek release and yet regulate and restrict the expressions of life according to a normal standard — proves the powerlessness and insolvency of the creature. The Word of Revelation alone gives disclosure concerning the cause of all such misery, which lets the immortal soul, beyond the grave, fall subject to an avenging retribution. Hence in Psalm 51:7f. there is expressed, in the deep pain of the penitent confessor, at the same time the sense that the source and root of his actual sin — the guilt inherited and received from his parents, in which the children have nevertheless likewise sinned — being something now, once for all, present and lying in each person outside the reach of the free will, does not thereby take from divine mercy its claim upon the unholy one. Where all this is not the case, then, once the tradition...

...it wishing to point to a relationship of subordination of all one's own interests under higher conditions, whereby we must then, in our consciousness, extend the idea of an absolutely necessary originator and author of things to an all-guiding highest wisdom and love — granting dominion, in the governance also of what is most spiritual in us through an ethical "ought," to that idea, in such a way, namely, that it breaks through the selfish drives, inclinations, and desires. But because, in the soul's freedom, the possibility was given to man, and has become actuality, of receiving, through his personal I as well as through his position toward the world, impulses against the conscience, and of engaging with these with all his remaining powers, he is quite well able to deaden and blunt the immediate feeling, troublesome to him, by which the power of conscience moving from that source is pointed to. Likewise he can, prompted by that same drive of it, now deprived of its all-pervading supremacy, but wrongly guided by a persistence of knowledge veiled in weakness and a false judgment of the understanding (1 Corinthians 8:7), fall into doubt and mistaken offense — which, so long as it remains at mere confusion concerning the content of conscience, does not carry the danger of hardening.

*) Note. By the True and the Good we understand, once we have arrived at the idea of an all-encompassing reality, something essentially conformable to that reality — to our relation toward it and toward what else exists alongside us, and thus to human perfection. Truth expresses the relation of one and the same being to an understanding; goodness, its relation to a will with which it is compared; perfection, its relation to the sum of the effects possible through that same being. (Beauty is the correspondence of the ideal and the individual in appearance, in sensible form.—) The essence of conscience is one and the same in the child, the heathen, and the Christian; what matters here is not so much the maturity of consciousness (according to which the distinctness of the essential content of the concepts is determined), but rather that consciousness's receptivity for that which has its appearance in it; on this depends the power of the effect within feeling, which becomes erroneous only when it is a mediated one (cf. Luther on Genesis 6:21, part I, p. 65) — namely because of the corrupted condition of mankind as a whole. The light of the knowledge of ourselves, darkened by such things — that is, the darkening of sin within us, in that the inner spiritual perception of it, mediated through the conscience, being neither heeded nor cultivated, was ever more lost — was, by the Law of Scripture, to be made clear again: sin made clear, the language of conscience made clear again. See below, page 134, the citation from Augustine, etc.