# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 09 02_S2
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

2

there sits enthroned Moira (Fate), the all-ruling destiny over all their so-called gods, in whom they for the most part deified the beneficent or destructive forces of nature. The voice of God in the conscience a Socrates testifies plainly, and speaks here and there of a fear of God which restrains man from doing evil; the tragedies of the nobler Greek poets rest throughout upon the true moral view of the world which they possessed precisely from the light of the natural knowledge of God (this remaining spark of the original knowledge of God, created in man before the Fall in the divine image), that the holy and righteous God lets evil follow sin as punishment, that He avenges and restores the violated right by punitive retribution upon the guilty; yea, when heathen poets depict in ingenious fictions how this and that evildoer, according to the nature of his transgression, suffers eternal punishment and torment in the underworld, they thereby testify that and how the eternal punitive justice of God is an indelible truth essentially indwelling human reason and the natural light of the knowledge of God.

And if, finally, we look among all sorts of heathen peoples of ancient and modern times at their ever so grotesque self-tortures, at the bloody sacrifices of their children and the like: — are these not living testimonies of the Spirit of God judging and avenging in the awakened conscience, and of the unbearable torment of this inward punishment? Are they not, further, a pitiable cry of distress of the children of men who languish under the dominion of sin, in the anguish of conscience, under the curse of the law and the wrath of God, in the fear of death and of eternal damnation? — a cry of distress for reconciliation and redemption, which they indeed cannot accomplish from their own ability, through those powerless attempts to appease the offended God? — a cry of distress which, however, clearly indicates their need of redemption, and which could be answered only by a God-man as Redeemer, namely by the LORD Christ?

Thus did heathen think, speak and act out of the light of reason and of the natural knowledge of God.

Our present-day lying and apostate Christians, however, who imagine themselves to be free and yet are nothing but servants and fools of Satan, have let him blow out for them that natural light and have let a delusion be conjured before them, which they are pleased to call "religious enlightenment."

In this light, meaning to say darkness, these enlighteners, or properly darkeners, behold truths, meaning to say lies, for which they will one day, unless they are rescued from them by God's almighty grace, be condemned by those heathen on the day of judgment.

To these gross lies and denials of the present-day freethinkers and deniers of God there belong chiefly the following: that there is no personal God outside of and above the world, but that this itself is God and has arisen out of itself; that man originally owes his existence to the formative power of the earth, in that he passed from a primal matter first through lower stages of life (plants and animals), and that in him God (that is, the world) first comes to self-consciousness; that accordingly man, since he is essentially the self-conscious God, also cannot do what the stupid, superstitious multitude, led astray by the priests, and also other so-called moral men call sin against God and His commandments: it is merely the lack of "religious enlightenment" that such priest-servants and obscurantists do not yet see that what they have hitherto, out of superstitious bondage, still called cursing, blaspheming, perjury, murdering, whoring, adultery, stealing, robbing, gluttony, drunkenness, lying and cheating, etc., are really and essentially divine works; for since man is, after all, the essential self-god, he can also do only divine works.

Accordingly, in the light of the true "religious enlightenment" essentially no man is guilty and punishable if he performs the aforesaid divine deeds; and it is, alas, still the same superstitious prejudices and hated remnants of the old tyranny that there exists a government which punishes some of those divine works of the man-god,*) such as murdering, robbing, etc., and by shameful compulsion puts the sons of freedom in prison; therefore these latter, who have at last comprehended and grasped their self-godhood and therein the "true humanity" through the light of the new "religious enlightenment," ought to work with all earnestness and zeal to the end that the government, which after all occasionally awakens fatal apprehensions in the free self-gods, that is, men, be abolished as soon as possible, and that at the same time other repugnant barriers of the new freedom and of the "true humanity" be done away, such as chiefly are: marriage and property, and in their place community of wives and of goods be introduced; for even if in the worst (or best?) case it should come to pass that men all strangled and devoured one another, yet that divine primal matter would still remain over, out of which then, through the brooding power of the sun and through the formative power of the earth, through the intermediate stages of plant and animal life, a new race of man-gods would be produced, which would live on into the day the fresher and merrier and perform those accustomed divine works.

*) It is God's just judgment that when man does not with thanks and humility believingly accept our LORD Jesus Christ as the only true God-man, he, through the devil's first deception "ye shall be as God" and through the innate pride of his heart, dreams up for himself out of himself and his like a man-god.

Since, then, it stands thus, namely that man is the essential self-god, who in the cycle of passing away and coming into being just indicated produces himself again and again out of himself, it is finally the most absurd, most foolish priestly fable that there is an end of the world, a resurrection of the flesh, a last judgment and an eternal retribution, that is, an eternal life and an eternal pain of hell; for since man is, after all, the essential self-god and no other God outside of and above him, it is also unthinkable that there should be a judge for him.

Here you have now, dear reader, the sum of the new "religious enlightenment," whose dawn is already to be seen also in the "free papers" published here; here you have the beginning, middle and end of the new delusion and jugglery with which the old father of lies and arch-juggler, the devil, as with wholly newly invented wisdom, mocks and makes fools of the present deniers of God and enemies of the Bible and leads captive the children of fleshly freedom and of unbelief.

But let these enemies of the LORD and of His Anointed rage and cry out against Him never so much: Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us! (Ps. 2:3) it will nevertheless remain as it is further written: "He that dwelleth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall He speak unto them in His wrath, and vex them in His sore displeasure." Let them assault the Church of the Lord never so furiously, they will never shake the foundation upon which she stands, namely the confession of Christ, and never cast down the congregation of God which is built upon this rock; for she has the promise: the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. —

(Conclusion to follow.)

Father Matthew in Pittsburgh.

The Wahrheitsfreund, the Roman Catholic periodical published in Cincinnati, reported recently that the above-mentioned well-known Irish temperance recruiter delivered an address on temperance and the Temperance Pledge in the schoolhouse of the Roman Church of St. Paul in Pittsburgh. And behold! the most reverend lord Bishop was either so mightily seized by the irresistible eloquence of the traveling temperance advocate, or so heartily impelled from within by a genuinely Roman emotion over the probable power of a noble example, that, as the Wahrheitsfreund very approvingly remarks, he "received the pledge from the hand of the venerable apostle of temperance and added his name to those who had already joined themselves to the great cause." And in fact 600 little sheep presently followed their shepherd in this matter.

However unimportant this fact is in itself, it is so important and fresh a proof of the old Roman blindness concerning the evangelical