# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

144    Johann Georg Hamann's Conversion.

as the only way to receive the understanding of this Scripture, and I brought my work, with divine help, with extraordinarily rich comfort and refreshment, uninterrupted to its end on April 21.

I feel, thank God, my heart now calmer than I have ever had it in my life. In the moments in which melancholy has wanted to rise up, I have been overwhelmed with a comfort whose source I cannot ascribe to myself, and which no man is able to instill so overflowingly in his neighbor. I am amazed at its abundance. It swallowed up all fear, all sadness, all mistrust, so that I could find no trace of them left in my mind. I pray God that He would bless the work He has begun in me, strengthen my weak faith through His Word, and give me the Spirit — the gracious, the overflowing Spirit of that Word — the Spirit of peace, which passes all understanding, and not such a peace as the world gives; the Spirit of love, without which we are nothing but enemies of God (and he who hates this Benefactor, how can he love even temporally?); the Spirit of hope, which does not put to shame, unlike the shadow-play of fleshly imaginings.

If I have received from God the great good, the priceless pearl, the prize for which God has caused me to be born, how should I now doubt His governance over my whole life? Its end is attained. I surrender myself to His wise and only good will. I now know the blindness and corruption of my own too well not to disown it. My sins are debts of infinitely greater weight and consequence than my temporal ones. The gain of the whole world could not pay off the former; and if Abraham had to hear from Ephron, a Canaanite, concerning 400 shekels of silver: what is that between me and thee? should not God let a Christian think more generously than a heathen? If the first had come to terms with him about the main matter, how should God be concerned about a trifle — to throw it in with the bargain besides? The 300 pence are his debts; he will deal with me as Paul dealt on behalf of Philemon's servant, and will know how to settle them according to His wisdom.

I have set down these thoughts on the course of my life for myself, or for my dear father and brother, and I therefore wish that they may serve the latter, or my closest friends, for their perusal. In them I have spoken with God and with myself; the former I have justified with respect to my life, while accusing myself, informing against and uncovering myself — — all to the praise of the only good God, who has forgiven me in the blood of His only-begotten Son, and in the testimony which the Spirit of God confirms in His Word and in my heart. God has poured me from one vessel into another, so that I should not settle too much on my lees, and turn sour and stinking beyond recovery. Everything must work together for our good; since the death of sin redounds to our life, so all its sicknesses must serve, by experience and example,