# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S168
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

the resistance of such a soul, by nature, in its personal impulses,
against the spiritual workings of the Gospel and the power of its
motives. For these workings, by holding forth to the anxious heart the
truth of its objects as they were originally ordered, absolutely kindle
once more a desire for them, which can easily become a spiritual
affection, and they powerfully set the faculty of free choice — though
not with determining compulsion — into an inclination toward the
good; the power of innate sluggishness, aversion, and complete
incapacity toward it seeks in this way to break grace, and works upon
man's impulses and the resolve arising from them in just the same
way as the serpent's seed of evil planted in him does. In this moment
he is now free, which he was not before. If that resistance is
deliberately persisted in by him — especially through clinging to
seductive impressions, often received long before, including those of
so-called (false) worldly wisdom — and is continued as always and
thereby strengthened more and more: then the Holy Spirit withdraws,
because no other sacrifice remains any longer available for these
unfortunate ones (Acts 7:51, Matt. 23:37, Heb. 10:26), and becomes
their enemy and punishes them with the hardening that is decreed over
them (Isa. 63:10, 1 Sam. 16:14, 18:12). On the other hand, the renewal
of the spiritual nature of the personality, in its cognitive and striving
powers (Eph. 4:28), takes place in those who come to faith — not
because God is stronger than the creature, but because He, precisely
in the moments ordained for this from eternity, bears and works only
inclining, not determining, influence (cf. above, note *, p. 77f.), thus
calling forth the self-determination directed toward the securing of our
salvation, and restoring the lost freedom through a stirred-up good
willing set over against the natural evil — and to him who has not
willingly taken on the higher degree of evil willing that rejects the
good, God, through these same outward means and the inward
working of activity bound up with them, grants, by degrees, and
sometimes swiftly too, the victory in the struggle against natural
resistance or aversion, and continues to preserve it as faithfulness
increases. Thus the man who has been made receptive for it becomes
ever more energetic and decided in response to His impulses, a
self-determining force acting powerfully from within, and the holy
resolve — often formed in passionate, intense, great love and joy — is
renewed from day to day. — Immediate consciousness is the common
character, and hence also the generic concept, of cognition and
determination of will (together with the secondary feelings that
accompany them), which flow into it as into their branches, and in
which man originally feels and possesses himself; the work of God
begins, by way of the conscience, from this point in the soul, and it
comes to the exercise of the new, mighty