# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 07 27_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

187

lows: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven."

It is in vain that you are bold enough with your mouth to call this conduct a shameful and slavish self-abasement, but your innermost conscience nevertheless testifies against your mouth, and you cannot get past acknowledging this moral beauty of true Christianity nevertheless in secret, and perceiving in it a superhuman divine power. —

So then, through the conversion of the heathen during 1800 years you are already, though against your will, urged and compelled in your reason and conscience to infer from a divine effect back to the divine power of the Holy Scriptures; and though here and there in the course of history, as for example in the missionary zeal of Charlemagne, in the fanaticism of the Spanish priests in Mexico and Peru, much that was human and fleshly may have been mingled in, yet the divine fact is thereby never done away, which is indeed everywhere attested also by an impartial history of the world, that the Gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, and wondrously transforms slaves of the devil into free children and heirs of God. —

But also within the outward compass of Christendom, within the Christian Church, the great deeds of the divine Word, and especially of the gracious Gospel, have not so been done in a corner that you should know nothing of them.

Or should you really have seen nothing of it, or heard from trustworthy people, how very many morally sunken and depraved men, gross transgressors of divine and human commandments, cursers, blasphemers, perjurers, murderers, robbers, thieves, deceivers, whoremongers, adulterers, gluttons, drunkards, liars, slanderers, on whom all human attempts at improvement proved utterly powerless, and whom human society, as the dregs and scum of all corruption, had already cast out from itself and morally outlawed and annihilated, yea, who in part had already been seized by the avenging arm of civil justice — how very many of these morally rotten and humanly incurable wretches, through the gentle and yet so mighty power of the Gospel of Christ, after they had first recognized and confessed their sinful misery with repentance by the Law of God, were thoroughly healed within, and as it were out of cruel tigers, ravening wolves, sly hyenas, unclean swine, lecherous goats, poisonous serpents, greedy hamsters and cunning foxes were wondrously transformed into lambs and doves?

And again, can you, in defiance of the trustworthy testimonies of history, deny the contrary, how very many noble and highly gifted princes, victorious generals, wise statesmen, renowned scholars and celebrated artists, deep thinkers and spirited poets, the shining stars of their century, the benefactors of mankind, the ornament of the world, have laid down all their crowns, fame, power, honor, wisdom and art at the feet of Him, overcome by the glory of His Word, whom you blaspheme as a crucified Jew?

But even this historical fact will hardly be so wholly hidden from you, how this and that noble spirit, wrestling for an essential truth satisfying heart and head at once, and for the knowledge of God, after he had sought and searched for it in vain among the profoundest thinkers of all times and peoples, found it at last in the Holy Scriptures, in which indeed, though not in the form of scientific thinking, are contained and revealed, to the sincere sense of truth, all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge concerning God and man, nature and history, and, so far as knowing is appointed to man here below, all riddles and contradictions of the human heart and life are satisfactorily solved, which without the revealed Word of God lie dark and unsolved.

And should the highest triumph of the divine Word and of its mighty working, even in the realm of thinking and knowing, be so wholly strange and unknown to you, how the spirit of divine truth dwelling in it and pervading it has ever and again with irresistible power seized and convinced even such as actually set out to refute the Holy Scriptures and to cast down its divine authority? But indeed these enemies, vanquished by God's Word, were not fellows of your sort, who with premeditated wickedness of heart and will, with hatred and rebellion against God, with constant stifling of the natural voice of conscience, with a face of flint and a harlot's brow set yourselves against the Almighty, and, though powerless worms of the dust, whom He could crush with one footstep, yet imagine that you can hurl Him from His throne and make His Word of truth of none effect. No! in those sincere souls the doubt sat not in an evil heart and will, but only in the unenlightened understanding, and therefore the Gracious and All-wise condescended to their weakness and folly, and by the enlightenment of the Holy Ghost solved for them one seeming contradiction of the Scripture after another, so that they became inwardly more and more convinced of the unity and harmony of the Holy Scripture and certain of it as divine truth. But you, so long as you persist in your wickedness of heart and will against God, shall by His righteous judgment not recognize the truth, but find in His Word, wherein He hides Himself from you just as He reveals Himself to those, nothing but darkness, error, folly, nonsense and absurdity; for as one seeks God, so one finds Him, and with the froward He is froward.

Those glorious facts, however, concerning the mighty effects of the divine Word in the realms of life and knowledge, you cannot possibly deny, since in general and in particular they have the testimony of history on their side, without betraying plainly your evil will against the conviction of your understanding and conscience. —

But what will you finally answer to him who, after he had for a considerable time been one of your most revered heroes and idols, now, seized by the mighty hand of God and wholesomely humbled, speaks quite another language, and at the same time raises therein testimony and judgment over and against you? I mean, namely, the gifted German poet H. Heine in Paris, who for decades with you mocked the Lord and despised His Word, but glorified and deified man and his wisdom and fleshly lust.

O how he now recognizes, in the pains of sickness and under the wasting of the body, the powerlessness and nothingness of his former fancies and dreams, the folly of his wisdom, the bottomlessness and comfortlessness of his philosophy, the perversity of his heart and will!

How his conscience has awakened from its stupor, broken forth from suppression, and out of a silenced one become a loudly speaking witness!

Now he is not ashamed to confess "that he has returned to God, like the prodigal son, after he had long kept the swine with the Hegelians;" now he declares openly that he "cannot use the God of the Pantheists (deifiers of the world and deniers of the personal God), since he is a poor dreamy being, interwoven and grown together with the world, yea, as it were imprisoned in it, without will and powerless; for in order to have a will one must be a person, and besides, if one desires a God who is able to help, one must also assume His personality, His being beyond the world, and His holy attributes (qualities): the all-goodness, the wisdom, the all-righteousness, etc. Therefore he had also, with anxious zeal, committed to the flames such poems as contained only halfway 'allusions' against the dear God; for it is better that the verses burn than the versifex (the verse-maker)." Then he remarks, "that the God of the Pantheists is at bottom no God at all, and that Pantheists in general are really only bashful Atheists, who fear less the thing than the shadow which it casts on the wall, namely the name. And since there is now only a choice between the absolute God of the Bible and Atheism, he confesses that he has returned to the old superstition (as the enemies call the true faith), to a personal God; and although the high priesthood of Atheism — namely you and your kind — has pronounced its anathema upon him, and the fanatical priests of unbelief would gladly have stretched him on the rack, that he might confess his heresy, he would do this before the torture and confess it freely, that he has returned like the prodigal son. Nor would he in any way hush this up, as many an enlightened, well-meaning friend has tried to do."

Behold! this Heine, one of your former favorites and captains, who after God's