# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 10 28_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36

human usage of speech is formed; the Scripture would express itself just so, even if all men had insight into the optical illusions. For we astronomers, too, do not cultivate astronomy with the design of altering the common usage of speech, but we would open the gates of truth without touching that. We say as the people do: the planets stand still, go backward; the sun rises and sets, it goes forth from one end of heaven like a bridegroom out of his chamber and hides itself at the other end, it ascends to the middle of heaven . . ., this we say with the people, that is, as it appears to our eyes, although it is not really so; as to which all astronomers are unanimous. How much less may we demand of the Scripture given by inspiration of God that, setting aside the common usage of speech, it should measure its words according to the standard of natural science, and with obscure and unsuitable forms of speech about things which exceed the capacity of those to be taught, should perplex the simple people of God, and thereby bar to itself the way to its proper and far loftier aim.

Ad 4. I. Newton, who in his leisure hours occupied himself also with theology, and wrote down "Observations upon the Prophecies of Holy Scripture, particularly the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John," says in this work: We have now Moses, the prophets, the apostles, yea the words of Jesus Himself. If we likewise will not give them our assent, we are just as little to be excused as the Jews. For to believe the prophets is a sure mark of the true Church. For thus God has caused it to be foretold: that in the last times the wise shall regard it, but the wicked, who do wickedly, shall not understand it. The power of emperors, kings and princes is a human power: the authority of church councils, of synods, of bishops and priests is only a human authority. But divine is the authority of the prophets, which name Moses also and the apostles deserve, and the sum of the religion is this: "But though an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. Gal. 1, 8.

Concluding Remark. What will the kind reader say now, when we communicate to him the following passage from No. 17 of the "Freie Blätter," published by Mr. F. Schmidt?:

"We must not break off today without having mentioned a name that shines in the brightest splendor in the heaven of the 17th century: Isaac Newton. — Over against Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo you appear as hypocritical and irresponsible persons, if you still go on and on thinking sun and planets circling about the earth; over against Newton you appear as hypocrites or fools, if you any longer dream of the all-knowing, all-good, all-wise, and the like, fatherly hand of a personal God. — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo have broken through the vault of heaven; Newton has overthrown the throne of the Most High imagined behind it. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo showed you the structure of the world as it really is; Newton let you behold the Master-builder Himself face to face. — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo have taken heaven from you and given you the world — the glorious — instead; Newton has freed you from the Lord God and laid you on the bosom of Nature — the all-loving." Do not these words sound as if Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and namely Newton had been the most horrible atheists, yea the founders of atheism, whereas they were, as the kind reader has seen from the passages of proof set forth above, at least of Kepler and Newton, pious, believing men, who from the heart abhorred all atheism? Has Mr. Schmidt so little respect for his readers that he lies to the very face of history before them, that he holds them too ignorant to notice it; and good enough to fill their memory with lies, and to order their conceptions accordingly? And does he not shrink before those men, who would turn in their graves, because they are still so shamefully slandered long after their death, who will certainly, however, accuse Mr. Schmidt before God for it on the last day! Or does Mr. S. perhaps think he has left himself a back door open, in that he lets these words follow upon those: "For what is the law of gravitation, which Newton knew and unveiled, what is that other than the life-full, self-creating and self-sustaining Nature in the place of the idol, which you imagined as creating and sustaining the All?" But does it not, then, agree well: to investigate and know the laws of nature and — to love and confess Christ from the heart? With those men it did agree, yea, stood in close union with one another. Or does Mr. Schmidt think that those men had only not so clear an understanding, or had not reflected so thoroughly on the relation of nature to revelation, as he, otherwise they would also perhaps have been of another opinion? If he thinks so, he surely stands alone in the world with his opinion. And has he written such madness as lies in the words last cited only in a state of not sober senses, or really in sober senses? He believes in a law — the law of gravitation — and yet not in a lawgiver, as if a law could be without a lawgiver, and as if he who speaks of a law did not thereby also at the same time admit that there is a lawgiver? Mr. Schmidt therefore contradicts himself, and according to him it is henceforth "hypocrisy, irresponsibility," if any one still believes that one needs lawgivers to make laws, for they make themselves. And then, what is the law of gravitation, to speak without nonsense? It is the ordinance of the Creator and Preserver of things, according to which He will so govern all bodies that they attract one another, each one according to the proportion of its mass. From this law the motions of the bodies on the earth and of the heavenly bodies, including the earth, can in part be explained. According to Mr. Schmidt, however, all other phenomena in the world also, therefore the chemical changes also and the growth of organic bodies, even the activities of the soul, could be explained from it, yea — let him grasp it who can! — that law would have brought forth heaven and earth and all that is therein, without Creator, Preserver and Ruler. So a law is a living thing, that thinks and acts. Now next Mr. Schmidt will report to his readers that without a lawgiver a law has given itself, that from here a railroad to the Pacific Ocean should be laid out, and that this law has also set itself to the work without delay, and will certainly soon be finished with it.

This Mr. Schmidt is the same from whom the Bible-hostile articles discussed earlier in the Lutheraner also proceed.

One sees from this that Mr. F. Schmidt works not only at religious enlightenment, but also at that of common human understanding, namely, as the mole (according to the old notion) at the roots of the plant.

Confessions of a Denier of God and Deifier of the Flesh toward the End of His Life.

When man makes himself to be God,
And God holds Man*) for a mock,
He must at last stand wholly bare
And also go down with shame.

*) Christ.

Toward the end of the last century and in the beginning of this there were in Germany two strong spirits after the flesh, the one a great poet, Goethe, and the other a great thinker, Hegel; both of whom would know nothing of the Bible, God's Word, and especially of the Lord Christ, the Son of God and of Mary, as the only God-man, through whom alone forgiveness of sins, life and blessedness come to them, as to all lost and condemned children of Adam.

And therefore the devil has deceived them, so that, according to God's righteous judgment, by virtue of their unbelief, they have employed their great gifts in the service of the devil, the world and the flesh. There the one, with all the magic of graceful poetry, has glorified and deified the variegated, manifold world of the senses, and the other, with great expenditure of deceptive pseudo-wisdom, the human mind; and out of their school there have naturally grown up poetasters and thinkerlings, who in shameless stripping off of all pious awe before God's Word, in so-called scientific undermining of this foundation of the Christian faith, in open denial of the personal God, in impudent mockery of the Lord Christ, in scoffing jesting-away and poetizing-away of man's sinful misery and of the need of divine grace, in glorification of the world and of the flesh and of the lusts and pleasures of both, and chiefly in preposterous deification of the human mind and its inventions, arts and sciences, have in fact surpassed their masters.

One of these spiritual sons of Goethe and Hegel was now also the well-known poet H. Heine, a Jew by descent, who, living in Paris, this Sodom of the new world, from there for more than 20 years bewitched and poisoned the growing youth of Germany with songs and poems which he had himself previously swallowed down from the cup of Satan's intoxication; for of a demoniac inspiration, heated at once by voluptuousness and champagne, his poems and those of his fellows bear witness; and since at the same time they flow along in seductive grace and in the bewitching euphony of the language and, like carnal music, are full of soulish voluptuousness, and as they also, besides unbelief and political licentiousness and unruliness, especially glorify and deify the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh, it is indeed no wonder that thousands and again thousands of growing youths of Germany, especially if they in no Christi-