# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Referat on the Right Preaching of the Doctrine of Justification. 49

corrupted nature. He recognizes that the Law is spiritual, but that he himself is carnal and sold under sin, that his whole heart is full of unbelief and disobedience and evil desire, his understanding in spiritual matters wholly darkened, his will wholly perverse and utterly opposed to the will of God, so that he wills only what God does not will, and does not will what God wills; in short, that he is entirely and altogether a sinner by nature, a corrupt tree that can bring forth only evil fruit.

Accordingly, man also recognizes that, first and foremost for the sake of the guilt of original sin which clings to him, and out of which, as out of a bitter root, all the evil fruits of actual sin in thoughts, words, and deeds proceed, he is before God a lost, cursed, and damned man — in short, a child of wrath by nature. For through this office and work of the Law, his conscience rises up against him as a true accuser, an impartial witness, and a righteous judge, so that he begins to know himself, to see how he appears before God, and to condemn himself as guilty of eternal death.

At the same time man also recognizes, in this mirror of the Law, that through this feeling of God's wrath in his conscience, and through the sense of spiritual death, he receives no power to come out of this misery and to keep the Lord's commandments. Rather, the sharper the preaching of the Law presses upon him, and the more it convinces him in his understanding and conscience of the culpability and damnableness of his hereditary corruption and of every single thought, word, and deed flowing from it, and the more he becomes aware that, on account of the innate unbelief and disobedience of original sin which wholly and entirely pervades him, all his imagining and striving, his thinking and speaking, his doing and suffering, his working and resting, indeed his waking and sleeping, are cursed by and before God — the more deeply and thoroughly does man thereby recognize his complete spiritual incapacity and powerlessness even to think anything good, let alone to do it, and that he must utterly despair of and give up all his own reason and strength for becoming righteous before God. And in that man, in his understanding and conscience, grants this judgment of God in his Law to be right, there arises thereby that shame and anguish, that repentance and sorrow, and that salutary terror before God's wrath and judgment in the heart, which God, through the preaching and office of the Law, first of all intends to produce in the sinner's heart.

Besides this effect of the Law there is, however, yet another, which God does not intend but the devil does, and by which man would in any case be lost forever, were God not at hand with the Gospel. This effect, namely, which occurs incidentally and shows most clearly the utmost corruption of nature, is this: that, according to Romans 7, sin takes occasion by the commandment and is stirred up all the more violently against it. It comes about, then, that precisely through the Law sin increases in power, and through the prohibition transgression is multiplied. And in that, at the same