# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S2
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

2 Preface.

this same opposition thereafter. Heathenism arose, which sought the goal of its highest desires so entirely in the creature, in the things of this present life, that it raised the creature itself to be its gods and thus its highest good and its last refuge, while the Church, holding fast to God's revelations, waited with Abraham, as a pilgrim in the vale of earth, for a city whose builder and maker is God, and sought the promised heavenly fatherland. When at last he appeared in the world whom the prophets had promised as "the consolation of all the Gentiles," the Jew, sunk in earthly hopes after the flesh, expected to hear from the mouth of him who had been promised to him above all others nothing other than the announcement of a now-dawning golden age of perfect earthly happiness. But when he — the hope of the nations, appeared at last in the world — opened his mouth, this proclamation rang out: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!" They had expected the word: "Blessed are you, for you shall now become rich!" Instead they had to hear the opposite: Blessed are those — whether they be outwardly rich or poor in earthly goods — whose spirit, whose heart, is poor in them; those who have, as though they had not, and those who, when they have nothing, regard themselves as having everything. (Matt. 5:3; cf. Luke 6:20; 1 Cor. 7:29; 2 Cor. 6:10.)

Although Christianity stands diametrically (e diametro) opposed to humanism, we nevertheless find this view of life not only practically acknowledged and realized throughout all centuries by countless nominal Christians, but there also confront us in the history of the Christian Church whole sects which have established the most consistent humanism, in theory, as the sole correct view, and have freely and publicly professed it. Most crassly it appears in the fourteenth century, in certain varieties of the "Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit," namely among the Turlupins, Adamites, and Luciferians, who carried out in the crudest manner, in practice, their common theory: "All that happens in love is pure, for the spirit that reigns in us as God cannot sin; earthly lust, too, can do the spirit no harm — it redeems, rather, through the dissolution of marriage and of property, the sense of impurity arising from artificial division." *) No other spirit, indeed, was it that made itself known at the time of the Reformation among the Swabian and Thuringian peasants under Thomas Münzer, among the Münster Anabaptists under Jan of Leiden, and among the Libertines in Switzerland; it was none other than the spirit — of humanism, which sought to found heaven on earth for the old Adam, and every cross and every burden

*) Evidently these Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit have long since had this honor stolen from them by our "Young Germany," with its rehabilitation of the flesh, free love, and its communism, as though it had brought something new onto the scene and stamped upon our century the signature of the age of coming-of-age [Mündigkeit].