# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S134
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...there arose in them the propensity toward a self-chosen worship of God and of idols, which in particular falsified the doctrine of the spirits and of the blessed seed of the woman. So then, to be sure, God, through Moses, overwhelmed them with rights and statutes, precepts and rules, which may have been suited to the unruliness of the character of that age — which, not being so enervated and degenerate in a refined manner, was capable of and in need of a stricter, sharper discipline — and which may also have been conditioned at the same time by physical circumstances, so that men might learn to depart from their own undertaking, which there counted for nothing and helped not at all. And so that sin might appear as such, just as over against error, the law of life hidden in conscience — subjected, through the profaned, deceitful heart and tongue, to ambiguity — became, in the Ten Commandments of the Lord their God, something manifest to the apostate race and openly declared, a law from which they themselves had renounced allegiance, but which precisely thereby bore witness to them once more of Him — though in a concrete application to the calling of the chosen people. Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 57:1: "Quia homines appetentes ea, quae foris sunt, etiam a se ipsis exules facti sunt, data est etiam conscripta lex; non quia in cordibus scripta non erat; sed quia tu fugitivus eras cordis tui, ab illo, qui ubique est, comprehenderis et ad te ipsum intro revocaris." It was a testimony that man should not suppose that he could find, in himself, in his own heart — insofar as the heart is not identical with conscience, but as a personal center mediates its appearance — or in the collective life of the peoples of the earth, the pure imprint of that which was permitted to be his norm of life. The effect of this revelation of the Law upon the heart could be none other than this: that one now had to recognize that evil does not consist merely in sinning against an indwelling better knowledge, but is a violation of a most holy, judging, truthful God who confronts man — a God from whom that better knowledge likewise derives its origin. But inasmuch as the form of an eternal holy will of God, together with the knowledge of His personhood — perceptible to us, as to its essential content, from the light of nature, yet amid human wavering and clouding through the darkening and perverting influence of arbitrary self-will and bondage to the devil — was meant ever again to come to light for the soul that kept falling back anew into sleep, so that it might recognize and confess its own wickedness, since it wills and intends nothing good, and from the sole of the foot to the head there is nothing sound in it: the Decalogue on Sinai was, also with the intent that merely presupposes the shutting up of all under sin (Galatians 3:22ff.), bound together with that yoke of countless ceremonial and civil ordinances, which for the most part had either a typological or a preparatory significance, so that the whole covenant might take up a prophetic stance toward the New Testament, where the promised resolution of the sundered relationship between the holy God and unholy man was to be accomplished through the reconciliation wrought by the one and only Fulfiller (whom Lactantius calls viva praesensque lex). (Cf. Deuteronomy 30:11–14 with Romans...