Where denial of God leads – Der Lutheraner 1851

      160 years ago, in 1851, the German American Missourians were well aware of the effects of Socialism.  And some years later, Walther himself would deliver the definitive series of lectures on this.  But on the heels of the failed 1848 revolution in Germany, an unknown contributing pastor sent in a short blurb based on the experience of Germany's neighbor, France.  This was one among many articles against atheist radicals in Der Lutheraner about this time, and Walther noted this 35 years later.  From vol. 7 (August 5, 1851), p. 200:

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Where the denial of God finally leads. 

Mr. [Franz] Schmidt does not shy away from praising in his “Free” paper the dreadful lie that there is no God as the highest truth. But where this denial of God finally leads, the history of the French Revolution of the last century shows us by a clear example. In The History of the World by Becker, vol. 12, p. 294, it says about it thus: 

“The slightest sign of a religious act was a death crime ... In Arras, a sixty-year-old person was executed merely because he had prayed.”

 

But this abomination of desolation was still to be eclipsed by the greater of a new worship. The destroyers of Christian ecclesiasticism invented the Cult of Reason, and celebrated it for the first time on Nov. 10, 1793, in the church of Notre-Dame. A woman was driven half-naked as the goddess of reason on a triumphal chariot to the altar, where she was worshipped with hymns and excrescences, then veiled and carried in a solemn procession on an armchair entwined with oak leaves into the convent. [Pierre Gaspard] Chaumette begins his address: 

 

“Fanaticism [i.e. true religion] has run away; to reason, to truth, to justice it asked its place, leaving its squinting eyes that could no longer bear the glare of the light. We took possession of the temples he left and gave them a new purpose. For the first time the people of Paris appeared today in those Gothic vaults, which for so many centuries had repeated the voice of error and at last sounded the call of truth. There we have sacrificed freedom, equality, nature. Not vain images, but a masterpiece of nature we have chosen to represent nature, and this sacred image has inflamed all our hearts. A single wish, a single prayer rang out from all sides: No more priests, no other gods than those which nature presents to us! Mortals, stop trembling before the impotent flashes of a god whom your imagination created! Acknowledge no other deity than Reason, whose noblest and purest image I present to you.” 

At these words the speaker unveiled his goddess, who was immediately invited to take her seat beside the president, and received from him and the secretaries the fraternal kiss amid loud cheers. In accordance with Chaumette's requests, the Metropolitan Church was given over to the worship of reason, and at the end the whole assembly of legislators set out there to sing in the new temple a hymn of freedom composed by Genier, which concluded with the patriotic call to the heroes of freedom to sanctify terror, so that soon the last slave may follow the last king into the grave.

For several months this farce was repeated not only in Paris but in all the cities of France; the churches became the scenes of the most unworthy performances; young demure girls were forced to attend the same in the company of the most contemptible female persons. The heaviest sacrifice was reserved for the shy beauty; it consisted in presenting the Goddess of Reason in a costume that embarrassed even the Parisian opera dancers. Not infrequently this role came to an unfortunate orphan whose parents had just bled on the scaffold, and several commissariats of the Convent were inventive in refining these shameful feasts for lechery.

The dear reader thus sees that it is no indecency when Der Lutheraner reproaches Mr. Schmidt with his denial of God and seeks only to promote the brutalization, immoralization and dehumanization of mankind on his part, but promotes the fullest, truest truth on its part. For anyone who wants to see, the French Revolution provides the sad proof that with the denial of God, people also lose their moral footing, and finally sink into the deepest abyss of depravity and irrationality. Would that Mr. Schmidt would go into himself; would that he would listen to the voice of his conscience, which will not yet be completely dead in him. We sincerely pity the wretch who is so abandoned by all reason that he dares to deny his God, and who is so blinded by the devil that he blasphemes the Almighty.

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       That same "Revolution" is occurring in America today, whether people want to acknowledge it or not.  The socialist forces certainly know it and are saturating the media with inflammatory "news", and they are rewriting history.  The above history is certainly not taught in American public schools today. —  But the socialists did not fool those Missourians.  It was the Missourian Lutherans, not just C. F. W. Walther, who led the defense of Christianity in the face of those who would destroy it.