# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1857_S169
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...influences, encouraged by the constant contemplation of and pointing to the highest gift imparted, to which nothing is too hard. Just as the bright light of the Gospel, with its power of God directed at the conscience, falls upon the consciousness and moves, penetrates, and fills it: so too does every inner sensation of such power, at the time when I outwardly perceive the Word in hearing or reading, work back upon the thoughts and the will, so that the fundamental desires of the human spirit are guided, through the knowledge and assent of faith, toward the true nature of their objects. The false, faulty inclination of these desires — to set appearance and falsehood in the place of truth, and to turn away from the one fountain of salvation into abominable unbelief — had produced a multitude of erring and perverted desires, in which, now here, now there, again and again, the subordinate, the inessential, incidental circumstances, etc., are made into the chief aim. Only among these could human freedom choose, and even here not always, since it not only remained passive toward some of them, but might also yield to the effectiveness of the motives of others — inasmuch as we often have the intention not to do a thing, while yet the causes driving toward the deed so outweigh the power of freedom that, its resistance notwithstanding, they break out into the deed. In general, even where no decision has yet been reached, man can never be conceived of without drives, which of themselves act within him whenever the motives of one side or the other are strong enough; and this we called, in contrast to the divine grace offered for their overcoming, which works with equal power upon the drives, the natural resistance. If, at the hour of its visitation, the power of choice again turns to the side of untruth, firmly holding to and retaining the corrupted disposition, unwilling to be converted: then that is precisely the clearest proof that the sinner is not a stone or a block or a mere machine (Formula of Concord, p. 928 ff., Latin p. 572 ff.), nor has he sunk through the Fall into a beast — otherwise he would need no Word for his instruction; his rational, free will has retained the capacity to resist even the greatest measure of the spiritual gift. To such activity, wholly and entirely his own, of fallen man, the initial receptive and passive disposition of the one coming to faith — a disposition called forth by the supernatural inclination of the will toward the good — already stands in more than the calm, indifferent hovering in the middle; it is caught up in a real opposition; and the libertas sese convertendi (the freedom to convert oneself) is, just as this disposition is, wholly and entirely not dependent on the creature itself as such, but rests purely and exclusively on the power of the divine motives in the Gospel, which present the true object of the fundamental human longings vividly, powerfully, and with certainty to the consciousness, through supernatural working. Never can the painful sense of our former ungodliness be separated in us from the thought that we