# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S133
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Election of Grace and Some Matters Connected Therewith, etc. 133

...to keep the Law, but, because he has not done so, has become guilty before it. (Cf. Baier, loc. cit., p. 397f., reatus culpae et poenae.) Indeed, our own consciousness of guilt — never, to be sure, abandoned by any tradition of the Law — already has so wondrous a power that we always acknowledge the evil as our own, notwithstanding that we resist it with the weapons of unbelief, and notwithstanding that we would gladly silence the inner accuser and seek to fight and suppress him — he mocks our vain efforts, unconquerable; and even if the state of hardening — indeed the fruit of a long series of transgressions of a practical atheism, whose imputation it bears within itself — has gradually withdrawn itself from the condemning judgment, which, outside of Judaism and Christianity, is, as has been said, even more easily possible: yet it sometimes casts, in the very midst of the joys of the world, without any doing of ours, the shadows of secret terrors and anxieties as a dark background; and an inextinguishable feeling of insecurity, which never wholly disappears for the whole span of earthly life, fills the soul with an unease that, just as quickly — especially when temporal misfortune strikes, or death is foreseen — can pass over into the most violent, most tormenting pangs of conscience, indeed into the furies of despair or madness.

Luther rightly says, on Genesis 2:16f. (part I, p. 27), that to man, in his holiness and goodness, the single commandment regarding the eating from the trees of Paradise was given — not that he should thereby become righteous, but as a sign that he should exercise and prove himself in it, showing that he was already righteous and walked in obedience to God; for no law as such confers righteousness, but rather those who are already righteous beforehand do the Law. Adam, and Eve too, through the man's instruction, were rather to perceive and bear in mind thereby that they had a Sovereign Lord — recognizing their inclinations, which moved out of and in accordance with communion with God and which were natural to them, as ordered for them, and recognizing conscience in its activity not as an autonomy of their spirit and nature, but as the effect of a personal divine will standing above them — just as, likewise by virtue of that same will, they were destined to be the organ through which God wished to let His thoughts concerning creation, and within creation, become audible (Genesis 2:18–24). By means of a commandment given to them from without, they were likewise to become conscious both of their immanent divine determinedness and of their own, derivatively self-determining faculty, and thereby to place themselves into active unity with the kindred highest Spirit and with the principle of their vital movement. But when the perceptions and the speech of men, who had become flesh, grew confused ever more hastily, and conscience was darkened, so that through it they indeed felt themselves in need of a mediation with the Godhead, but, deceived about a righteousness that remained as unattainable to them as the distant heavens, imagined they could make themselves righteous by their manner of life and custom: there arose...