# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1863_S7
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Foreword. 7

Thomas Paine, and others, gained here an incalculable influence, not only on the shaping of our political conditions, but at the same time also on the principles, ideas, and views that came to prevail among the people. This element of dissolution and destruction within our people has, moreover, received a powerful reinforcement in recent decades through the immigration of whole hosts of men of radical subversion, who to a man will know nothing of God and of an eternal life, who hold earthly life to be the sole, first, and last goal of human existence, and who see, in the realization of their principles of universal liberty and equality, nothing less than the dawning of universal human happiness.

Especially the last years have therefore brought a severe trial by fire to the Christian communities here. But — to say it plainly at once — they have not withstood this trial. Not that American theology — if indeed we may speak of such a thing — has only now fallen! It is only too evident that, quite apart from all the other errors peculiar to the sects here, it has long since granted entry within itself to many humanistic ideas and endeavors of the modern world. Wherever, in the monarchies of the Old World, a revolutionary movement occurred, it has, in the religious papers here, almost without exception betrayed its sympathies with the rebels. Wherever any evil against the European princes was put into circulation by the atheistic revolutionary journalists and their correspondents, it has almost always busily spread it as proof that only under a republican constitution can a people be happy, that the model republic for the whole world is the American one, and that the whole world still has before it the prospect of becoming free and happy after the ideal of the constitution here. Participation in temperance agitation has here become almost the test of living godliness among the so-called faithful. In almost all the lodges of the most varied secret societies, the reverends of all the so-called denominations are represented, who naturally seek to give effect to their freemasonic, deistic philanthropism not only in the uncanny hiding-places of their lodge assemblies, but also from their pulpits, in their religious organs, and in the whole of their ministerial administration. No discovery or invention that strikes the eye is made but the theology here celebrates it as a new proof of the greatness, the fruitfulness, the creative and all-conquering power of the human genius, and extols it highly as an actual testimony that at last the age of progress, of illumination, of enlightenment has dawned — while, alongside this, it points to the earlier centuries, with a proud sense of self, as ages of darkness, of superstition, of barbarism, of immaturity. One sees the theology here carried along, unresisting, by every current of fashionable opinion of the time; indeed, it does not shrink from serving move-