# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S145
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Johann Georg Hamann's Instruction. 145

and redound to the glorification of God. Whoever wishes to compare the Israelites' itinerary with the course of my own life will see how exactly they agree with one another. I believe that the end of my pilgrimage will, through the grace of God, lead me into the land of promise — supposing that I should not have time and opportunity here to make good the disorders and the harm I have done to others. My friends would have had to grieve the more had I died of the poison of grief and despair. My health and my life, I repeat, are at once a wonder and a sign that God has despaired neither of my amendment nor of my future usefulness to his service. My son! give me thy heart! — There it is, my God! Thou hast demanded it, blind, hard, rocky, perverse, and stubborn as it was. Cleanse it, make it new, and let it be the workshop of thy good Spirit. It has deceived me so often, whenever it lay in my own hand, that I no longer wish to acknowledge it as mine. It is a leviathan which thou alone canst tame — through thy indwelling it shall enjoy rest, comfort, and blessedness.

I close with a proof of my own experience, in a heartfelt and sincere thanksgiving to God for his saving Word, which I have found, upon trial, to be the only light — not only for coming to God but also for knowing ourselves: the most precious gift of divine grace, which so far surpasses the whole of nature and all its treasures as our immortal spirit surpasses the clay of flesh and blood; the most astonishing and most venerable revelation of the deepest, most exalted, and most wondrous mysteries of the Godhead, in heaven, on earth, and in hell, concerning God's nature, attributes, and great overflowing will, chiefly toward us wretched men, full of the weightiest discoveries through the whole course of the ages unto eternity; the sole bread and manna of our souls, which a Christian can less do without than an earthly man can do without his daily necessities and sustenance — yes, I confess that this Word of God works as great wonders in the soul of a devout Christian, whether he be simple or learned, as those which are recounted within it; that the understanding of this book and faith in its contents can be attained by nothing else than by the very Spirit that drove its authors; that its unutterable sighs, which it works in our hearts, are of one nature with the inexpressible images that are heaped up in Holy Scripture with a greater wealth than all the seed of the whole of nature and its kingdoms.

The second is the confession of my heart and of my best reason: that without faith in Jesus Christ it is impossible to know what a loving, unspeakably kind, and beneficent Being he is, whose wisdom, omnipotence, and all his other attributes seem to be, as it were, mere instruments of his love for mankind; that this preeminence of men, the insects of creation, belongs among the deepest depths of the divine revelation; that Jesus Christ is not content only

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