# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 10 28_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

37

discipline and schooling, were intoxicated with this wine of reeling, and so ensnared by the magic nets of that demonic poetry, and at the same time inwardly so enervated and poisoned, that, as is greatly to be feared, most of them will thereby be lost eternally, and only eternity itself will make manifest, in its whole extent, this unspeakable damage and this poisoning of souls unto hellish perdition.

Now when H. Heine, this seduced one of Satan and this seducer of youth, lived in Paris in health and good cheer, and indulged the coarser and finer lusts of the flesh, surrounded by like-minded brethren and companions, he made no secret that he was a French Epicurean and Sadducee. He declared bluntly how he smiled down with pity upon the "gloomy Nazarenes," and said straight out: "we want no abstinence, no renunciation and mortification, — we want ambrosia (food of the gods), fragrant gardens, rapture, harmony and the enjoyment of life."

And in keeping with this confession he has expressed himself everywhere in his writings; and it would lead too far here, if one wished to prove from passages in them how he partly mocked and blasphemed the true God and Lord and His eternal and heavenly goods and joys, which the Word of Holy Scripture testifies, and scorned all Christian virtue and morals, and partly exalted to the heavens the lustful flesh and the world of sensual charm and the fleeting pleasures and lusts of both, as though the true, the divine life consisted in them.

Quite different, however, is the sound of Heine's confession when, probably in consequence of his dissolute life, he lay sick in Paris with consumption of the spinal marrow, when the sweet ambrosia had turned into bitter wormwood, the fragrant gardens into the desolate sickroom, rapture and harmony into insipid sobriety and discordant cries of pain and sighs, and the enjoyment of life into painful and reluctant renunciation of life.

Then conscience begins to awake, this judging voice of God in his heart, which he had hitherto deafened by the lusts of the flesh; — then his reason, out of its natural light, which until now (blinded by the sophistries of the carnal understanding led astray by the ignis fatuus of the devil) he had almost wholly extinguished, comes to itself again. For he writes thus:

"At some moments, especially when the cramps in the spine rage too violently, the doubt struck through me whether man is really a two-legged God, as the late Professor Hegel assured me twenty-five years ago at Berlin. In the month of bliss—what a remarkable dispensation for a man who declared earthly bliss and enjoyment to be the destiny of man—I had to lay myself in bed and have not risen again since. Meanwhile, I will confess it frankly, a great transformation has taken place in me. I am no longer a God, I am no longer the "freest German after Goethe," as Ruge called me in healthier days; I am no longer the great Heathen No. 2., whom men compared with the vine-wreathed Dionysus*), while to my colleague No. 1., Goethe, they granted the title of a Grand-Ducal Weimarian Jupiter†); I am no longer a Hellene (Greek) full of joy in life, who smiled down upon gloomy Nazarenes (Christians). I am now only a poor, deathly sick Jew, an emaciated picture of misery, an unhappy man."

*) Dionysus was, in the Greek mythology, the so-called god of joyous enjoyment of life, called Bacchus by the Romans.

†) Jupiter was the so-called father of the gods.

True, it is evident from this confession that conscience and the divine law of the 10 Commandments, which he surely knew, had not yet been thoroughly awakened and made alive in him; for there was still lacking the acknowledgment of the personal, eternal and almighty, holy and righteous God, against whom and against whose Word and will Heine's whole life was only one great immeasurable sin; there is still lacking even the intellectual knowledge of his inborn sinful corruption and of the sinful thoughts, words and works proceeding from it; and still more is lacking the contrite recognition of his own cursedness and damnableness before the holy and righteous God and His law. So there is also not yet the faintest inkling that Jesus Christ is, after all, something other than Heine had formerly imagined, when he called Him "the Jew of Nazareth, who had brought a gloomy view of the world into joyous, pleasure-loving heathenism;" and still less can there be discovered in that confession even the weakest glimmer of hope that in the end there might yet be for him in this Jesus a droplet of the malefactor's grace, although he had formerly been His blasphemer and despiser. And one must indeed assume that never and nowhere did even the smallest seed-grain of the evangelical truth fall into his heart, though he, even if a Jew, yet lived at least in Germany within the reach of the Gospel; and this could hardly happen, since he walked straight against God and, through the deceit of the devil and the evil lust of the flesh, deafened and stifled even the natural light of reason and the voice of natural conscience.

This serious truth, however, comes forth clearly from that confession, that his former opinion of the divinity of man appears to him as delusion and folly, that his joyous heathen enjoyment of life has withered and dried up under his hands, and that upon the former sweet intoxication a fearful emptiness and sobering, a loathsome weariness of life, has followed; he now scoffs and mocks at the sham wisdom of his former teacher and recognizes it as folly and madness. The truth seizes him with bitter force, that the goods of this world and the joys and pleasures of the flesh are vain and empty, void and fleeting, and cannot possibly satisfy the human heart. Unbelief in his former unbelief takes possession of his soul; and with a lost life behind him, a slow, painful dying before him, the awakened and terrified conscience within him, the holy and righteous Judge and Avenger of his sin and misdeeds above him, the yawning abyss of hell beneath him, his soul yearns in vain for annihilation. —

"Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth. Do what thy heart desireth and what is pleasing in thine eyes, and know that for all this God will bring thee into judgment." Eccles. 11, 9.

A poet has put the system of the Hegelians briefly into verse. They think and say thus:

Man is free and hates constraint,
He gives himself his laws,
He need but follow his impulse
Then golden treasures bloom for him.
Eternity is fairyland,
Religion a leading-string,
Which one needs only for children.

Man is sufficient unto himself,
In every station and land,
He is a God, yes, feature for feature,
In the most correct sense,
This a Hegel in Berlin,
To bring up mankind aright,
Lately proved in full humility.

It was already dark upon the world,
Else it would long since have been seen,
That only man holds up creation,
As long as it shall stand.
If one day it flies out of its hinges,
Its own fire overcomes it,
Then that is but an accident.

Man is God and no one more
Here below and there above,
There it is truly often hard
To praise this God for me:
The one has delirium,
The other goes bent with hunger,
The third becomes quite ill.

Yet all this will pass,
If one but looks at it by the light,
The true son of gas-enlightenment
Reduces the dark quite to nothing.
That is what shows so clearly
To the fiery spirit of the young age,
Per steam it always goes further.

Naturally everyone sees at once,
And it lies not far off, indeed:
The earth is the kingdom of heaven:
What are the stars to them?
To pay homage to vice is the custom
And all else is only smoke,
The flesh is deified for us!