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Excerpts from Two Sermons by Friedrich August Tholuck: "What is Human Reason Worth?" (c. 1840) and "When is Greater Civic Freedom Fortunate for a People?" (1848)

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Roman scepter now rules over them. It is impossible to speak of the blindness that goes hand in hand with such an intoxication of freedom, which blindly aspires only to political rights. How the first concepts of right and duty have been turned upside down in human judgment following these days of revolution! The troops who refused to violate sacred oaths were branded criminals. By contrast, the label of freedom fighters was given to those who, after the freedoms that had already been granted, raised the weapons of revolution, if not out of a voluntary desire, then from a sad mistake. And how numerous the errors and crudest blindness which to this hour are rampant among young and old, and are being carried eagerly by blasphemous lips even into the huts of simple, honorable workers or of the simple farmer. There is to be no more ruler and no more servant, though it is evident to all that nature herself has made the one hand fit to hold the scepter, the other to hold the plow and the spade. The only goal is to unbind, to set free, everything and in all relationships, even though it is obvious to the simplest eye that becoming free does not constitute human happiness, but the ability to use freedom does. If you give freedom to a ten year-old child and you put it there and say to it: “My child, you are free,” is that fortunate for it? Yet it is said over and over that education is supposedly the magic remedy that will teach the use of freedom, even though history has preached a thousand times what a wide abyss is firmly established in man between head and heart, and that the enlightened and educated mind in the service of an evil, godless heart is good for nothing other than showing it the devious ways to gloss over the desires of its heart. Yet the only sufficient means of reshaping the heart of man, religion, is to be expelled from school. While history teaches how in the childhood of humanity religion was the sacred seed from which all education of man grew, while the experience of millennia teaches that the hearts of children are receptive to religion more so than are any others, while Christ, the Savior, proclaims: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of God,” and with this inscription consecrates all schools to be nurseries of the Church, religion is now to be thrown out of the schools like a useless piece of furniture. But free! free! – well, that is now the slogan, and with eyes blindfolded people unbind and separate what no one, once the intoxication is over, is perhaps able to bind together again with eyes open. In the beginning there is a good feeling, but the burden must be borne by the end. Believe me when I say that by virtue of this arrogance and blindness alone, a people that strives for no other freedom than civic freedom throws away its true happiness.

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