# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S66
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

66  Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science.

pronouncements it blindly credits, so as to make itself worthy and deserving of the honor of being reckoned among the cultured. It is equally undeniable that materialism, in its effort to prepare a revolution — concerning which, as L. Feuerbach says, "when it breaks out, God-believing souls may then be certain that this revolution will be a victorious one, that the last day of monarchy and hierarchy has come" — presses song and novel, scholarly and popular writings, every branch of intellectual activity into its service, so that, to this end, the "new foundations for state and society" may gain the necessary firmness and scope, in order "to make men, out of theologians, anthropologists; out of God-lovers, philanthropists; out of believers, thinkers; out of those who pray, workers; out of candidates for the world beyond, students of this world; out of the religious and political chamberlains of the heavenly and earthly monarchy and aristocracy, free citizens of the earth; out of Christians, who by their own confession are half beast, half angel, men — whole men" — that this materialism has already, in many who do not suspect it, won firm ground for itself and prepared them to be its helpers, even though they "still shrink back squeamishly from its unavoidable consequences" and even appear as its opponents. Let us add that Christianity demands an elevation of man — one that runs contrary to his natural inclination — into the realm of the invisible, the holy, and the heavenly, a transformation of the whole man, a perpetual struggle of the spirit against the flesh; whereas that enlightenment, by contrast, makes no demands upon the spiritually dead man that run contrary to his corrupted nature, but instead proclaims to him a gospel such as he, in his condition, can only wish for — namely, that nothing exists or is to be feared except what he can see with his eyes, grasp with his hands, and himself hear, taste, and smell; that whatever he tells himself in his half-brutish state not only agrees perfectly with the results of science, but is itself the highest science — so one can understand the confidence with which that phalanx believes it can, little by little, overthrow Christianity.

To the Christian, of course, such threats can only appear childish and laughable. The kingdom of the eternal King has already victoriously withstood more dangerous attacks than those of the crude materialists. Nor is it the first time that Christianity has confronted a materialism that puffs itself up in the borrowed finery of science. When the philosophy of matter — or more precisely, of the flesh — was assembled by Epicurus into a system, clothed in scholarly garb, and spread abroad by a philosophical school as the result of natural science, the majority of all who belonged to heathendom, especially the greater part of the middle class, turned to it in theory and in practice, for it contained the final and deepest development of heathendom,