# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6 Foreword.

is by nature pure and good, and that, in order to be happy, he need only abandon the unnatural, need only become natural again, need only return to nature, back to himself, need only become man again — a speech that, mediately and immediately, entered like sweet poison into millions of hearts of the modern world.*) From this teaching there then developed the theories, ever more prevalent, of inalienable, innate human rights, of inborn freedom and equality, of the sole fitness and legitimacy of the democratic-republican constitution of the state, as well as the socialist and communist theories of the modern age. These theories came to bloom and to fruit in the world-shaking catastrophe of the first French Revolution, whose watchword, as is well known, was "liberty, equality, and fraternity" — concepts which it then proclaimed, in the first constitution it created, in the year 1791, as the foundation of its new model state, and declared, in the preamble to the "Rights of Man," to be the supreme principle of all the laws of the state. To what summit of human and national happiness this grandest experiment of Humanism attained is well known — a happiness over which all the murder-spirits of hell exulted with mocking laughter against mankind, as over their highest triumph in the history of the world, and at which even the humanists abroad felt, from horror, the blood freeze in their veins. Nonetheless, the first seed of the humanistic theories has shot up rank and wild, watered and fertilized first of all by German vulgar rationalism, and then by the German pantheistic and materialistic philosophical systems. Communism, or at least an ochlocratic [mob-ruled] state — after the abolition of all monarchies and of the church, after the extermination of all princely houses and of all proclaimers of Christianity and of every religion, whom they call "priests" — that is what hovers before the public spokesmen of the present generation as the soon-to-be-attained goal of the happiness of the peoples, as the arrival of the golden age prophesied for millennia by all the prophets of the human spirit, as the thousand-year kingdom of mankind, and what they hold out before a deluded and bewitched multitude that has fallen away from God and renounces eternal life beyond — selling brutality and bestiality as humanity.

And how does it stand, in this respect, with our America? The founding of our Union falls precisely in the time when the more respectable Humanism stood in the vigor of youth and had the charm of novelty. In addition, it seemed to hold the only correct principles for a new republican state, which evidently could never consolidate itself without a complete separation from the state and without absolute religious liberty. So it was that humanists such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,

*) It is that same Rousseau who gave his five children, begotten out of wedlock, to the foundling home, and yet in his dying hour declared that he was giving Nature back his soul just as pure as he had received it from her.