# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S132
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...[tradition] of the holy fathers has been abandoned, then also the organ of the universally human consciousness, in which the law of life appears in righteousness, must — through persistence in sin, which is growth in the same — have become ever more weakened the longer this continues, the less by nature it is receptive, through the inversion and elevation of love of the world and self-love, to this language of its innermost being; it has, as a result of acting against it, of resisting those inclinations, and of a total lack of practice, finally lost sharpness and correctness of perception — indeed has often been driven, as it were by branding-irons, all the way to insensibility (1 Timothy 4:2). The office of the covenant of Israel, with its power to make sin alive, prepared already from Paradise onward, is given for this reason: that it might intervene, hindering, in such a course of necessary darkening and wickedness of the heart (Ephesians 4:18f.), making the servant answerable before his Lord for his individually inherited total burden of sin, and showing him to have been sold, from the first moments of his existence, under the dominion of a lust contrary to God — a lust that, through the fixed commandments reaching him from without, is continually provoked and becomes exceedingly sinful in the fear and hatred of the appointed penalty — inasmuch as the Law unveils the true shape of evil through a solemnly set-forth testimony of the high judicial Majesty itself. Mercilessly it does not call the individual transgression to account only in part, so far as the will has either left unattained the outwardly sought conformity under the false delusion of the letter, or has set itself against the awakening pull of saving grace proceeding from conscience; rather it calls to account, unconditionally, the fruit ascribed to the rank-growing stem of inherited lust, together with that stem itself. For through one man sin came into the world, and death through sin, and thus, in this way, through the fall of the first man, death has passed through to all the rest, because they all sinned at the same time — for how otherwise could death have been a mighty tyrant from Adam to Moses even over those who had transgressed no positive divine commandment, for whose sake the guilty would have had to be subjected to death only after its manifestation, if the imputation from the forefather had not, before the divine tribunal, clung to them as well? (Romans 5:12ff.) To the objective side — that a fact contradicting the divine will, the corrupted natural condition of man, ought not, as being manifest, to be denied — there is added a subjective side, which, though not unattested by conscience, one most deceitfully conceals from oneself: namely, through the declaration, valid for all, of the Holy One in Israel, that this fact is ascribed, as to its author, to the one in whom it is — that he himself, the person in his innermost center, and not merely according to the appearances on the periphery, is inseparably entangled with sin and thereby immediately fallen under punishment, unworthy to have any other part in God than in His righteous wrath, as guilty to keep the...