# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S1
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume IX.    January 1863.    No. 1.

Preface.

That humanism has not only driven Christianity entirely out of a large part of the present generation, but has also infected, poisoned, and corroded so-called Christian theology itself down to its innermost heart, is an undeniable fact. We understand by humanism here the belief in an ideal of humanity — the belief that humanity already bears within itself, or better, bears within itself alone, in this world, the seed of a development toward perfection and universal happiness, and that therefore nothing more is needed to attain that ideal than to give every human being the greatest possible scope for free, unhindered development; indeed, that freedom and equality, equal rights, equal possession, equal enjoyment, are not merely what is to be striven for, but the certain, sure goal of humanity, upon whose attainment want and misery will at last have vanished from the earth, happiness will have set up its dwelling there, and heaven will be on earth.

This humanism is, by its very nature, as old as the fallen world. As soon as man had fallen away from God, he felt the bitter fruit of his sin, the curse with which God, for his sake, had cursed the earth. Amid all that still remained to him he felt unsatisfied, unhappy, wretched. But instead of seeking the cause of his misery in his sin, and his help in a return to God, he took the consequences themselves for the cause, and regarded what this world could offer him as that which alone could make him happy.

Hence the opposition of the Church to this humanism of the unbelieving world is likewise just as old as the Church herself. Already in the first world the unbelieving Cainite race sought its welfare in the exploitation of the treasures of the earth (Gen. 4:16–22), while the believing — though soon ever more dwindling — Sethite Church, renouncing happiness in the things of this world, sought its happiness and blessedness in the preaching of the name of the LORD: namely, in the promise of him who should crush the head of the serpent and of every evil, in the promise of a future redemption from sin, death, and hell, and in the hope, grounded thereon, of an eternal life beyond. (Gen. 4:25–26.) In the generation living after the Flood we find