# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S67
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 67

of the falling away from God and the sinking into the creature, which was possible in a people still spiritually active. At the time of its highest bloom, however — it was the time of the incarnation of God — the divine light of the gospel of Christ the Redeemer confronted it, and soon it, together with its supposed scientific results, had to flee, stripped of all its splendor, out of the lecture halls and out of literature, into the dark corners of the godless heart, on account of the shame of its nakedness now made manifest. Though, then, through a judgment of God for the dreadful relapse of so many into the deepest night of heathendom, the school of Epicurus may indeed blossom a second time in our own day, Christianity for all that remains unshaken, in undefiled and indestructible splendor, illuminating all who do not willfully close their eyes to it. Sooner shall heaven and earth pass away than that the words of the King of truth should pass away, or that God's Word should no longer be believed and proclaimed. The earth, on which the All-Holy One himself once dwelt as man, shall not, so long as the light of the sun shines upon it, be deprived of the spiritual light of truth either.

But as often as the old enemy of mankind sets up a power of deceit, whether old or new, in order to do harm to the heavenly truth that leads to the enjoyment of the highest and eternal good, and to hinder its efficacy, Christendom too must recognize it as its duty, by exposing the web of deceit, to strengthen the weak among the brethren and to warn the unwary. It is in this spirit that a series of essays has been undertaken, which are to be communicated in this journal for a closer acquaintance with a philosophical sect which for some time now has begun to carry on its destructive work, with great success, among the so-called educated here in this country as well. The reader should not be surprised that he is thereby led into the domain of metaphysical and natural-philosophical questions; for the deceit of materialism, insofar as it appears as science, consists chiefly in this: that it passes off, with great emphasis, as indisputable facts and results of exact natural science, that which, more closely examined, is nothing more than a metaphysical speculation totally botched through crude, clumsy, and faulty thinking. To recognize this, it suffices almost alone to resolve not to hold one's own reason captive under the obedience of another's reason, but to use it for the purpose for which it was given. If Epicurus, nearly 2200 years ago — very minor matters aside — could develop the very same doctrine in scientific form, with "clarity and consistency," which the modern materialists proclaim as "a conquest of the modern age, dependent on the new and grand acquisitions of the empirical sciences" — a fact every expert must acknowledge — then the reader who makes use of his own reason is by no means