# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S142
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

142    Johann Georg Hamann's Conversion.

parties is certainly a mistake to expect. To be sure, there are men to be found who stand, as it were, in a conservative middle between the extreme right and left. Yet it is questionable whether even they maintain the pure, untroubled, and undiluted evangelical standpoint of our Reformation fathers so perfectly, and are so familiar with the Lutheran doctrinal concept even in its consequences, and altogether so masterful of the matter, that through their united efforts, under God's grace and blessing, they could sift out the errors of both excesses and bring about a more thorough unity of doctrine than has existed hitherto. In any case, the most advisable course would be if these Lutheran pastors could unite with the two contending parties in this: to approach, outside their own churchly body, such Lutheran theologians in whom they all had confidence that they were orthodox, learned, and practical at once, and especially gifted with dialectical sharpness.

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Johann Georg Hamann's Conversion.
(Born at Königsberg in Prussia in 1730, died at Münster in Westphalia in 1788.)

J. Georg Hamann belongs among the few highly gifted writers of the German nation of more recent times who believed in Holy Scripture with their whole heart. He himself tells of his conversion in "Thoughts on the Course of My Life." Since Hamann's works are now found in only a few hands, we hope to do our readers a service by communicating to them here Hamann's own account of how he came to faith. It was written in April of the year 1758 in London, where Hamann was staying at the time. The account reads as follows:

Amid the tumult of all my passions, which overwhelmed me so that I often could not draw breath, I continually begged God for a friend — a wise, honest friend, whose image I no longer knew. Instead of this I had tasted the gall of false friendship, and the insufficiency of better friendships, tasted enough of it. A friend who could give me a key to my own heart, the thread through my labyrinth — this was often a wish I made without rightly understanding or grasping its content. Thank God! I found this friend in my own heart, who stole into it just when I felt its emptiness and darkness and desolation most keenly. I had once read the Old Testament through to the end, and the New twice, if I am not mistaken, in that period. Since I now wished to begin anew, it seemed to me as though I became aware of a veil over my reason and my heart, which had kept this book closed to me the first time. I therefore resolved to read it with more attention and in more order, and with more hunger, and to set down alongside it the thoughts that would occur to me.

This beginning, in which I still had very imperfect and impure