# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical Creation Account and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 39

8. "Aliena est (culpa originalis), quia in Adam omnes nescientes
peccavimus; nostra, quia, etsi in alio, nos tamen peccavimus, et nobis justo
Dei judicio imputabatur, licet occulto."

(Original guilt) is a foreign guilt, because we all, without knowing
it, sinned in Adam; it is our own, because we, although in another,
nevertheless sinned ourselves, and it was imputed to us by a just judgment
of God, although that judgment is inscrutable to us.

9. "Quia genus humanum in parente primo velut in radice putruit,
ariditatem traxit in ramis."

Because the human race decayed in its first parent as in its root, its
branches too have withered.

10. Exceptio firmat regulam in casibus non exceptis.

Where an exception is made, it confirms the rule for the cases not
excepted.

The Biblical Creation Account and the Geological Theories
of the Earth's Formation.

Through the great number of diligent and capable observers of nature,
and through the ingenious instruments invented for its more precise
investigation, the recent age has succeeded in making an exceedingly great
number of discoveries in all fields of visible creation. The human mind,
however, is not satisfied with a mere collection of individual facts; it
seeks to explain the facts, to repeat, as it were, within itself the coming-
into-being of them, to add in thought to the facts actually observed that
which underlies what happens and has happened — that is, it sets up a
theory about it. The deep fall of human nature now also becomes manifest,
often in a very humbling way, in the explanation of natural things. For
many, by placing love of a preconceived theory ahead of love of truth,
hold fast to it not only in opposition to facts that contradict it — facts
which are then dismissed with a forced interpretation — but also in
opposition to the revelation of him who is the Creator and Preserver of
all things. This contradiction between the theory and the divine
revelation, which could and should lead them back from an error, is on the
contrary used by them as a justification, when they ignore or even mock,
as the utterances of ignorant men, the saving Word of the Creator and
Redeemer who condescends in grace to man, lost in error and sin.

To the Christian, by contrast, everything expressly revealed in Holy
Scripture is certain truth, which may not be called into doubt even by
the most apparent conflict with the facts of experience — for a real
contradiction is in itself impossible. That the holy