# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S107
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 107

of a being that possesses, along with the most perfect blessedness,
immortality, . . . . . but everything springs from that eternal order to
which everything is subject, and without which everything would be
vain confusion and everything would go to ruin." — Already in these
few citations, which we cannot multiply here, the thoughtful reader will
recognize a scientific development of that doctrine certainly not inferior
to "the clarity and consistency of today," a doctrine which Dr. Büchner,
under the title Force and Matter, peddles in his own fashion, without
being able to set up a single new, tenable thought, or one that proves
the whole. But Epicurus, too, did not invent this doctrine. It is one
already very old, though it has always passed itself off as very new. For
it makes use, in presenting its content, of the knowledge of nature
belonging to any given age, in such a way as if that knowledge were
wholly dependent upon it, and conversely as if this doctrine were a
consequence of that knowledge. So it is put forward by the materialists
of our time as the result of modern natural science, and its
representatives comport themselves exactly as if "new and splendid
acquisitions of science" had proceeded from them — just as Epikur never
once admitted that the natural philosophy woven into his teaching had
been developed not by himself but by his predecessors Mochus, Leucippus,
and Democritus. Materialism, by its whole nature — since it consists of
assertions that boldly fly in the face of truth, and has as its goal only
the denial of everything divine — admits of no further development, but
maintains itself in the field of science solely through a shameless
seizing for itself of the advances of genuine science, by means of a
clumsy distortion of the same, as we have had occasion to observe
above. When the apostle Paul, at the Areopagus in Athens, testified
specifically to the philosophers of the school of Epicurus concerning the
existence of God, the Creator, Lord, Ruler, Preserver, and Judge of the
world, he pointed, to their shame, to a better knowledge that had been
expressed by certain poets of their own people. This reference is not
without significance for us either. We share here, in closing, one such
poem, cited by the apostle, with the intention of prompting the reader
to a comparison of what has been presented above to us as the highest
achievement of the human spirit in the nineteenth century, with what
Cleanthes, about 250 years before the birth of Christ, laid down as the
result of his inquiry in a hymn to Zeus. From such a comparison a
definite judgment may be formed as to whether heathendom, in a span
of over two thousand years falling between the composition of those two
writings, has advanced or declined in the form and content of its
thought. We give the hymn in a translation by Prof. Dr. Carrière.

Zeus, chief of the immortals, of many names, father of the universe,
Who guidest all after thy law with everlasting almighty power,