# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S227
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Instruction Against Doubt of the Divine Word and Its Truth. 227

...grant him richly the power and illumination of the Holy Spirit, and help him again to a firm faith in the holy knowledge of His Word. After that, he should and must be most diligently questioned about the reasons that move him to doubt God's Word and its truth. If he then finds none of these, but relies solely on his own thoughts and appeals to his own opinion or imagined notion (as is commonly the custom of such persons in these cases), then the matter shows its own groundless emptiness by itself, since it befits neither him nor any man to conclude anything in such weighty matters out of his own delusion, and to contradict the Most High God Himself out of his own false imagining. But if he does indicate reasons, then these must be examined and weighed with diligence, whether they are of such importance that for their sake Holy Scripture should be called into doubt, and the blessed confession of the whole holy Christian Church abandoned. But such reasons he can never, to all eternity, bring forth; rather, if he indeed wished to contrive something, it would be nothing but sheer fancy and an empty thing, which, by God's grace, a preacher present, or another well-read Christian, could easily refute. But should he nevertheless, despite this, still wish to hold to his own conceived opinion, and allow nothing from Holy Scripture (from which, however, those who deal and treat with him should not let themselves be turned away, but should press upon it in every way) to persuade him, then the ancient teacher Tertullian, in his book On the Resurrection [lib. de Resurrect.], fol. 48, concedes that in such cases one may also use, alongside and in accordance with the holy, divine Word, intelligible or rational grounds; and he writes there as follows: We may indeed also deal with divine matters using our senses, but as a testimony of the true (that it agrees with God's Word, and is a witness to its truth) and not to lend support to the false; it must be according to the divine order, not against the divine order. Therefore, in keeping with this, let one, in the fear of God, alongside Holy Scripture, be mindful of such grounds as his natural senses and the evidence of his eyes may grasp; these one should set before him and always compare them with Holy Scripture, in some such manner as follows.

Firstly, every man is convinced, alongside his own conscience and Holy Scripture, by the common things of nature and of all created things, that there is a God, from whom all things — heaven, earth, man, and other creatures — have their origin, to whom they are also subject, and whose dominion he exercises over them; just as the blind heathen, in their darkness, have been able to recognize this, as their own writings testify, and as Paul agrees when he writes thus, Rom. 1:10, 20: That men know that God exists is manifest to them, in that God's invisible nature, that is, His eternal power and Godhead, is perceived, when it is observed in His works, namely in the creation of the world, etc. Because, then, that there is a God is manifest even without the testimony of the holy