# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S138
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...can, for this life, be extinguished, on the natural side of the parents, who in procreation act out of their dark depth, veiled from consciousness; and inasmuch as Christian consciousness apprehends what has been inherited immediately, at the same time, as something self-incurred by itself, it removes the foreignness in the concept of original sin through the most intimate appropriation. Man is conceived and born in the sin of his kind, just as the process of procreation itself — blessed in itself — has, in the state of wrath, become a bestial one, forgetful of God and of His image and destructive of it, while the shame of nakedness can only with difficulty be stifled; hence it always remains significant that, in the age of youth — when the organic life of the body, in which the spirit has, so to speak, spun itself in, has developed as the ground of self-consciousness, together with that spirit which has become dependent on it — the generative drive is found awakening, bound up with an indeterminable longing for something lost. But now, just as — as already touched upon — the good higher spirits have become inwardly free to the degree that they at all times not merely will the good because they are good by nature, but are also good because they will it, so that the free act of self-determination has willed nature just as it came forth from the Creator's hand, and has now raised it to the point that they can no longer sin, because their will has become so one with the divine that it already is a blessed enjoyment of God and has this as its everlasting consequence; just as we must regard the being of God as God's act, or being and willing in Him as identical, so that He is who He is because He wills it — so also has the decision and surrender to evil, in a being, made ready and completed that being's nature for evil, and determined it by the deed in such a way that its own power is no longer able to reject evil and to recognize and choose the good — only with the difference that the state of innocence was grounded in substance and was original, whereas its loss is the accidental, in no way comprised in creation.

The will of the spirit created after God is indeed essentially disposed, once for all, toward the good; this is its object, just as color is the object of sight, just as, among animals, instinct leads them to what is agreeable to them; but with perverted inclination, and the faculty of cognition darkened thereby, the spirit holds to be good (wherein consists the unchangeableness of this relation) precisely what merely appears so to it, but which in reality is only evil and harmful to it; for the possibility of the Fall consisted precisely in this: that it put the false good in the place of the true, that, through a disjointed partial notion of subjective perfection, its drive was misled to steer toward willing its own being — set as it is within creaturely limits — independently, just as God wills His own unlimited being, because it had once become conscious of its autexusia [power of self-determination]; and in missing the right goal, which never ceases to be the perfected unity of its striving with the divine will; and according to whether the free will gave the decisive weight to the power and influence of the idea of its true object, or to the opposite idea fixed, by virtue of the aroused drives, in the operation of the understanding, accordingly it had to shape itself, in its self-...