# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S123
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Questions of the Day. 123

immediate existence of that consciousness itself. Hence, "as from
that time on every people has its own particular language, and every
language its own particular genius, so now too every people has its
own particular genii and gods. The history of the tower-building is
the history of the origin of heathenism." Hence their shading is also
the shading of the latter. For without doubt the participation in the
crime of the tower-building was not the same; some were more, others
less implicated, so that the measure of participation also becomes
the measure of the judgment, and the measure of this judgment becomes
the fundamental measure of history and of the whole course of history
through the millennia. — — We understand why the Hamites are, in
every respect, the most trampled-down peoples of the earth to this
very day, and how upon them, as upon the chief bearers of the mystery
of wickedness which they made themselves millennia ago, its dreadful
and disfiguring effects have been stamped even in color and bodily
form down to this very day": a fateful stamping upon body and soul
which, neither here nor among other peoples especially struck by the
curse, is, as has been said, lifted in its consequences even by the
Gospel.

So says the author, and we may confess that we can, on the whole,
find ourselves in agreement with him that in the Babel-Catastrophe a
truly disastrous upheaval really did once again take place in and
with mankind. Nevertheless, we have some reservations concerning the
conclusions which Dr. Fabri connects with this. We recall the
universality and all-sufficiency of divine grace, recalling: "God
will have all men to be helped," and: "Christ is the propitiation —
not for our sins only, but for the whole world"; recalling also that
no guilt is so heavy and no ruin so great that redemption and healing
may not be found for it in the "unsearchable riches of divine grace."
How far this extends, in each case, already here below, we do not
know — in any case to the whole inner man and to his whole standing
before God. But if no soul as such is excluded from the new birth,
and, on the other hand, no people as such, with all its members, is
included without exception either; and if nevertheless the blessings
bound up with the divine visitation of grace do befall whole peoples —
as the Hebrew people under the old covenant, the Germanic, Slavic,
and other peoples under the new covenant — among whom, after all,
only individual souls ever attain and exhibit the true new birth; then
it is by no means, after all, the principle of individuality
emphasized by the author that has worked itself out here in the way
he supposes: this must indeed give us pause before denying in advance
to any people as a whole the same experience of the divine visitation,
especially since Scripture, too, does not give so definite a
justifying occasion for this as the author represents, or as it would
have to, if we really wished to build upon it a conclusion binding on
us. We cannot know how far it pleases God to let the gracious