# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S228
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Scripture has no conflict, it follows from this itself, that there must be a means of knowing him and a law of obedience to him between him and his peoples. For, just as among mortal men there is no dominion so small that it does not have its own land-law or city-law, by which it makes known to its subjects what its will is, what they shall do and not do: so it is certain that all the more such a great God, who not only rules in general over heaven and earth, but who especially has under himself, in all the world, the noble creature, man, must surely have prescribed to the same his will and proclaimed his law, from which he may know what he shall do and not do. Now, should we go through the whole world and search after the knowledge, law, and statute of this great God, we shall nevertheless find it nowhere on the wide earth and under the sun, except only in the holy Book of the Bible. In that book alone is found the knowledge of this eternal God according to his revealed being, only there (I say) and nowhere else in all the world. Likewise his law and will are found in this book alone, and also nowhere else in all the world. No book, no writing, no speech is found between heaven and earth which comes so near to this mighty God as this book, this Scripture, and this speech, which also displays itself so powerfully and, in itself, so wholly divine, that everyone who does not intend deliberately to fight against the revealed truth must confess: Here speaks the mouth of God and no human wit — as indeed that very fact must also be the proof and the mark of this great God's knowledge, law, and statute. For the knowledge of divine things (says Hilary, book 1, On the Trinity) one must use divine teachings and instruction, since the incapacity of men simply cannot of itself have any knowledge of divine things, nor can they grasp with their bodily senses the understanding of invisible things; for man can attain neither that which is given by God for the use of our life, nor, by his own understanding and judgment, the Creator himself. By these words Hilary shows that this great God's law, statute, and Word must not be a human thing but a divine and heavenly one, and therefore is not to be found in human things but only in divine things; or as Ambrose puts it, Epist. book 5, Epist. 31, that heavenly mysteries God the Lord Himself must teach, and that man must not search them out within himself, seeing that he, man, does not rightly know even himself, and therefore much less can he, of himself, rightly know the high God and his will. When, accordingly, holy Scripture comes in with divine splendor and power, God the Lord thereby testifies to it as his Word, his knowledge, statute, law, and will. Moreover, search through the book of the holy Bible, and read it with the contemplation of your heart, and you will find, the longer the better, its divinity (so to speak) confirmed also in this way: that this book, holy Scripture, in all divine matters, in whatever is of God and divine, rejects everything human, everything worldly, everything fleshly, and does not in the least yield to such mysteries