# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S149
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Survey. 149

and that ecclesiastical as well as political conditions and events press with all their might toward such a decision. As regards the church especially, it is not merely outward circumstances and occurrences, but chiefly the inner disposition and shape of the same, that presses toward a thoroughgoing decision. For although the spirit of the world and unbelief have from of old also stirred within the church of Christ, although it has from time to time come forth in quite crude outbursts and sought to assert itself, although immorality in earlier times now and then showed itself in more naked depravity than in our own days — never yet has godlessness come forth so systematically as now, and never yet has it found such acceptance. Vulgar Rationalism still held to, and insisted upon, the recognition of a God beyond the world and upon morality and respectability; Straussianism — which is nothing other than the consistent development of Rationalism into complete unbelief, into a full degrading of divine revelation into an error-ridden, fairy-tale-like word of man — found, indeed, widespread response but little entrance among the people, because it required too much reflection, and in any case a closer acquaintance and engagement with Scripture, for its understanding, and this generation had long since ceased to be inclined to that. But when Materialism arose, and with a brazen brow disputed away God and the soul on the basis of more recent natural science, and thereby also did away with conscience, responsibility, immortality, judgment, heaven and hell by the simple road of metabolism, and thereby proclaimed also full freedom for all fleshly being, for all sins and vices — that struck home! For that was philosophy not only for the common man's common sense, but for every kind of baseness of mind, both for the filthy baseness of the street-corner loafer and for the elegant baseness of the blasé fop in kid gloves, as well as for the scholarly dressed-up and primped-up baseness of the so-called learned man. That was the religion of this generation now brought to light, whose idol is matter and industry, and whose wisdom of life and rule is: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." The uproar it made is already past again, for in our days everything rushes onward like the snorting steam-horse; but whoever thinks that its impression and its spirit have likewise flown past is certainly greatly mistaken. That is the spirit which sets itself against everything churchly in every land, the spirit which above all hates discipline and rises up unanimously against all Christian-moral discipline and order as against a new offspring of priestly domination. For were it merely a spirit that resisted such domination while nevertheless remaining a morally Christian spirit, it would acknowledge the necessity of Christian discipline and order and would take it into its own hands, so that it might not be misused in supposedly impure and power-hungry hands. Were it a spirit that truly loved freedom, morally Christian, that acknowledged only the one highest authority in matters of faith — the Lord and his holy Word — but would not tolerate that