# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S5
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Foreword. 5

...boldly may we look to God for good things, ask and hope, and know that Christ gives His Holy Spirit to His own, whereby they resist the devil, so that the devil cannot cast them into sin, as he does the godless, whose hearts are in his power, driving them to murder, adultery, blasphemy, etc. Therefore Christian freedom stands in the heart; it cannot be seen with fleshly eyes. Outwardly a Christian patiently and cheerfully bears every worldly and civil order and uses it as food and clothing; he may be a serf and a subject, he may hold to Saxon law or Roman law in the use and division of goods. None of this troubles faith in the least; indeed, the Gospel requires that such worldly orders be kept for the sake of peace. Paul, to the Ephesians, chapter 6, verses 5, 6, 7, etc., writes: "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, with good will," etc. And to the Colossians 3:22: "Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, etc. Whatsoever wrong he has done, that he shall receive again." So too was Joseph himself a slave in Egypt for a long time, and many other saints as well. Therefore the peasants' demand has no warrant; indeed, it would be necessary that so wild and unruly a people as the Germans are should have even less freedom than they have." (Loc. cit., p. 48f.) So writes a Melanchthon — a man so finely cultivated by the humanities, the humanist in the good sense of the word, who was at the same time a humble Christian submitting himself to God's Word and a theologian who saw deeply through the counterpart of that seeming wisdom of the blind world, which is nothing but flesh.

This struggle of the church was, then, not in vain. The terrible fire that threatened to consume the whole edifice of Germany's civil and social order, and to leave nothing behind but the horror of devastation, went out again after a short respite, for a longer stretch of time, almost entirely.

Yet Humanism, which wants to be independent of God and man, which teaches man to renounce happiness in the beyond as something uncertain and instead to draw it from himself, and which promises an eventual, certainly-coming transformation of the earth into heaven through the equal happiness of all — it is the Chiliasm of the coarse world; it is its religion, which, wherever Christianity falls, again and again breaks forth by force. Thus when, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Deism raised its head in England, then moved on to France, and from there and from England was exported to Germany as well, countless heralds of Humanism soon arose. Foremost among them, as their choragus [chorus-leader], stands Rousseau. It was he who, in truly enchanting speech, first again voiced the thought of humanity — that man