# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S237
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 237

defile, and beyond all measure gladly write and speak the very worst of everyone, as though he were the devil's own and dearest mouth," of whom Luther (Erl. Ed. vol. 63, p. 384) says that he had wanted to write nothing against him, "for I despise such a wicked man too much, and have always thought that his writing would count for nothing among all rational people, and least of all among Christians, and would soon perish of itself, like the curse of an angry, wicked man;" and who has now found a worthy successor in one who lets him live again as a German philosopher in the literature of the present day. Next the Italians Telesius and Bruno are cited, whose propositions Dr. Büchner would have left undisturbed in their place in the history of philosophy, had he possessed any knowledge of what these philosophers understood by matter. We shall not dwell on that.

But we ask, as we too bring our remarks to a close, and note in passing that no man who has attained the knowledge of the true God has ever doubted that whatever God has created, He can also preserve — despite all the activity of matter and all the retorts of the chemists — and does preserve, as long as He wills — what, then, has our loose-tongued babbler, who fancies himself speaking in the name of science, proved with all this display of scraped-together sham science? Above all this, that he does not know how to think correctly. He reasons thus: our chemists have not yet succeeded in annihilating matter by means of matter; therefore it cannot be annihilated; therefore matter remains eternal; therefore it has also existed from eternity; therefore it was not created; therefore there is no Creator. Would the most wretched advocate dare, even were it only to win a pig, to step before a judge with argumentation of this sort? And yet this demonstration is here set before the German people in the name of the science of the nineteenth century, in a matter in which the whole of eternity is at stake, and to the end of mocking, as an absurd dream, the most holy, divine Lawgiver whose voice speaks audibly in every man's breast — of exchanging the sublime revelations of the prophets and apostles, the blessed life in God, of whose truth and inner glory every century bears witness, for such wisdom of the gentlemen Büchner, Vogt, Czolbe, and their like! What degree of shamelessness, what depth of moral depravity reveals itself in this, can scarcely be uttered. A few more words on this.

Dr. Büchner says in the preface to the first edition of his work: "If these pages may venture to claim in advance some merit or character for themselves, may it be expressed in the resolve not to shrink squeamishly from the consequences — as simple as they are unavoidable — of an unprejudiced, empirico-philosophical view of nature, but rather to concede the truth in all its parts." He has not done this. So we now wish, in