# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Johann Georg Hamann's Conversion.    143

concepts of God's Word for the reading of it, was nevertheless made with more sincerity than before, on March 13. The further I went, the newer it became to me, the more divinely I experienced its content and its effect. I forgot all my books about it; I was ashamed ever to have compared them with the book of God, ever to have set them beside it, indeed ever to have preferred any other book to it. I found the unity of the divine will in the redemption of Jesus Christ: that all history, all miracles, all commandments and works of God ran together toward this one center — to move the soul of man out of slavery, bondage, blindness, folly, and the death of sin, toward the greatest happiness, the highest blessedness, and an acceptance of such goods, at the greatness of which we must be alarmed even more than at our unworthiness, or at the possibility of making ourselves worthy of them, when they are revealed to us. I recognized my own crimes in the history of the Jewish people; I read my own life's course, and thanked God for His long-suffering with this His people, because nothing but such an example could entitle me to a like hope. Above all else I found in the books of Moses a rare discovery: that the Israelites, uncouth a people as they seem to us, in some instances asked of God nothing but what God was willing to do for them; that they recognized their disobedience just as vividly as any repenting sinner ever did, and yet forgot their repentance again just as quickly; but that in their anguish they called upon nothing but a redeemer, an advocate, a mediator, without whom it was impossible for them either rightly to fear or rightly to love God. With these reflections, which struck me as very mysterious, I read, on the evening of March 31, the fifth chapter of the fifth book of Moses, and fell into deep thought; I thought of Abel, of whom God said: The earth has opened her mouth to receive your brother's blood — — I felt my heart pounding, I heard a voice in its depths sighing and lamenting, like the voice of the blood, like the voice of a slain brother wanting to avenge his blood, if I did not hear it in time and continued to stop my ear against it; — — that this very thing made Cain restless and a fugitive. I suddenly felt my heart well up, it poured itself out in tears, and I could no longer — — I could no longer conceal from my God that I was the fratricide, the murderer of His only-begotten Son's brother. The Spirit of God went on, notwithstanding my great weakness, notwithstanding the long resistance I had until then set against His testimony and His touch, to reveal to me more and more the mystery of divine love and the benefit of faith in our gracious and only Savior.

I continued, amid sighs which were represented before God by an intercessor dear and precious to Him, in the reading of the divine Word, and enjoyed the very assistance under which it had been written,