# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S136
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...precisely, in a remarkable way, in such fashion that it is at the same time — although we do not become aware of it as something having arisen from our own doing — nevertheless apprehended by us as something burdened with guilt, especially when the rays of Moses fall upon us and consciousness takes up more or less of his clarity into itself. For everyone in whom conscience awakens finds sin within himself as a deviation of the very I itself, as a disturbance of nature borne with desire and inclination, not unwillingly — one which he also declares to be wrong, something that ought not to be (that is, as a reatus). By the fact that a voice now compels him, and all of us who are his like, to acknowledge this same culpability of our own will, it points, undisguisedly, back to a falling-away that took place earlier, before birth — since God could not accuse within conscience unless an original guilt of our own bound our consciousness, which develops within a determinate time — so that, although man recognizes himself to be in the slavery of the evil fundamental direction — because development cannot abolish its own principle and transform itself into its opposite, but all its movements and changes must keep within the self-willed boundary — the guilt has become the property not of God, nor of Adam alone, but of ourselves as well.

"We were all in that one man, when we all became corrupted in that one man. Not yet, indeed, had the particular form been created and allotted to us individually, in which we as individuals were to live; but there already existed the seed-bearing nature from which we were to be propagated. And since this nature, through sin, was defiled, and entangled in the bonds of death, and justly condemned, no man of a different constitution could be born from man. And hereby there arose, proceeding from the abuse of free will, that chain of this misery which leads the human race — whose origin is corrupted, whose root is gnawed through — from evil to evil, down to the ruin of the second death, which has no end, excepting only those who are set free through the grace of God." (Augustine, De civitate Dei 13, 14.) How, indeed, could it be otherwise? If it stands firm and beyond doubt certain that our sins, which we commit, are rightly imputed to us in conscience — through a voice not of deception and of lying, but of truth; likewise, that the transition to an actual evil thought, word, and deed in man is bound, not to the independent point of decision of a freedom of choice still left to him, but is, by virtue of hereditary sinfulness, a necessary, unavoidable one — then we may also not refuse to acknowledge this inborn condition, the source of our actions, as an object of imputation, as guilt; otherwise our condemnation would be unjust, and the second death into which we fall — the thought fills us with dread — a wholly dreadful, undeserved fate. That sin of Adam's is by no means, for us, merely a foreign one, as the church also confesses with one voice; see Augsburg Confession, Art. 2: "that this inborn disease and original sin is truly sin (Lat. peccatum)..."