# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1844 11 02_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

the weakness and untenability of his own arguments to the thoughtful reader, and makes no one appear ridiculous and contemptible but himself. —

The strongest ground which the unbelievers of our day bring forward against the divinity of Holy Scripture and the Christian religion drawn from it is, as they suppose, this: whoever wishes to hold the Bible to be true must trample his reason underfoot — must, that is, believe things that contradict themselves. What, they cry, is it possible that God should first have given man reason and then have sent after it a revelation through which reason, God's first gift, should become a lying voice? No, they say, what contradicts our reason we cannot and may not believe. Away, then, with the Bible! it wants us to become unreasonable; away with the priests! they preach nonsense as saving truth and have nothing else in mind than to keep the world in the old blindness and superstition of a dark former age, and to make it ever more foolish still, so that they may use such benighted souls for their own selfish, shameful purposes, however it pleases them, and make them their slaves.

That is the great sword of Goliath with which our scoffers nowadays come marching up against the Lord of Hosts. And if they dress up this line of argument further with all sorts of ridiculous portrayals and distortions of the revealed mysteries of Scripture, then not only do they themselves already sing songs of victory in advance, but a whole rabble of people who read this — people neither accustomed nor willing nor able to think seriously and judge thoroughly about matters of religion — fall in with these scoffers in blind charcoal-burner's faith, and with admirable patience say a meaningful "yes" to everything told them, imagining that whoever can even parrot the words "O divine reason!" thereby belongs among the enlightened and the coming-of-age of the nineteenth century, who have at last thrown off the shameful chains of priestcraft.

To all these heroes of reason we now first put the question: Are the judgments of your reason really as reliable as you claim? — We do not speak here of earthly, temporal things, not of the art of winning fruits from the land, building houses, governing states, waging wars, discovering numerical relations, tracking and measuring the paths and distances of the heavenly bodies, seeking out and determining the forces and effects of nature, etc. — for here, where reason rests upon experience, it often proceeds quite securely. But we speak here of quite different things; here the question is: which judgments of reason are infallible concerning the being and will of God, the origin of the world, the destiny of man, and his fate after death? We are not satisfied when you only ever cry, "Reason! Reason! O heavenly light!" Such empty exclamations may serve those who hold your gospel to be true simply because they wish it were true; but they do not serve us. You wish to take the Bible from us; we therefore have a right to ask you: what do you want, what can you offer us in its place? But we demand a plain and honest answer: tell us, what certain, sure, firm, irrefutable ground of conviction — one that holds up in distress and death — does reason give concerning those highest matters with which the human spirit can occupy itself, and for which it thirsts after truth and clarity? You unbelievers always speak of darkness which you would dispel, and of light which you would spread abroad. Does it consist of irrefutable truths? — or perhaps of doubts? of problems still to be investigated? If it is the latter, then speak no more of your light; for then you bring only darkness!

But let us not wait, dear readers, for our present-day unbelievers to answer for themselves. The history of worldly wisdom has long since clearly answered our questions. For what are the results at which, up to now, the greatest and most famous philosophers have arrived, by means of their reason, in their inquiries into the most important questions concerning man?

Pythagoras teaches that we become beasts;

Socrates: that he knows nothing;

Plato: that we have no personal continuance;

Aristotle: that the material world is eternal;

Spinoza: that he scarcely knows anything of God;

Kant: that we can know nothing at all of God;

The atheists teach that there is no God at all; that everything that exists, exists of necessity;

The materialists: that man is a mere machine;

The idealists: that God has no existence (being) at all [Fichte];

The pantheists: that everything that exists is God [Hegel].

But lest anyone think we mean to pass over in silence the more fully developed results of the researches of reason, we here add all the propositions at which the notorious materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie finally arrived by the sole use of his reason. In his well-known short writings they run as follows: "There is no God; the world, on the other hand, is eternal. Soul and spirit are mere sounds, with which no concept can be connected. What is called the soul is a marrow of the brain that has arisen out of dung and filth. Man is only a wound-up bodily machine that stops in the course of its running down; or else a plant. All the happiness of man depends solely upon a sound and strong body, and consists in agreeable moral sensations. Everyone must seek to indulge these and let nothing disturb him in doing so. Whatever direction the bodily machine may turn itself toward is permitted, since this is a means to happiness. Whoever seeks his happiness and delight in love and lust, or in anything else, according to the disposition of his body — even if it should prove highly harmful to other people — has, for his own sake, a right to consider all this permissible, and to satisfy himself with it. Reason and science serve only as torment and place too many obstacles before our pleasures. Conscience, virtue, and fairness are fictions which do not let us long enjoy our delights, and of which, for the sake of the common herd, one need only keep up the appearance."

This, then, is the light which reason has hitherto brought to the world of men, and which you unbelievers bring and offer to us in place of the light of divine, biblical revelation; and what does it consist of? — Partly in sheer nonsense, partly in the most undisguised admission that one knows nothing and can give no certain answer to the most important questions of the human heart. What think you, Christians? Do you really have any desire to entrust yourselves, on the way toward truth, to a guide that has brought the world to such a goal? Do you have any wish to give up, for the sake of that stuff which the greatest philosophers — admired and praised by all spirits wishing to seem great — have hatched out with the help of their sun of reason, what Jesus Christ and his holy apostles and prophets teach you? Can it really unsettle your derided faith in Christ, who calls himself the way, the truth, and the life, when you hear that this is what, up to now, the sharpest minds in the world have recognized by the mere light of their reason, and have brought up to the light of day out of the mineshafts of their spirit? Can you then wonder at it, or take offense, when the scoffers of our day summon all their wit to rework the whole of biblical revelation into a comedy, into a farce, and to hand it over to the laughter of a frivolous public that thinks about nothing? Consider that the scoffers must act this way, because they know very well that, in a serious weighing of the arguments and an impartial comparison of the wisdom of reason with divine revelation, they would lose the game. By the monstrous offspring of a base wit they must seek to divert their readers and hearers from examining their false conclusions, just as a conjuror diverts his onlookers from his secret sleight of hand by all manner of harlequinades.

But to you, unbelievers, who stand in awe of that wisdom of the philosophers which a well-instructed Christian child laughs at, we ask: if reason is really so great a light, if it is really so infallible a judge, to whose pronouncements every mortal — indeed, even the immortal God himself —