Re: Gleise im Bf. Flensburg

a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself,
weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends
man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are
ignorant. Hear God.

For in fact, if man had never been corrupt, he would enjoy in his innocence
both truth and happiness with assurance; and if man had always been corrupt,
he would have no idea of truth or bliss. But, wretched as we are, and more
so than if there were no greatness in our condition, we have an idea of
happiness and can not reach it. We perceive an image of truth and possess
only a lie. Incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge, we
have thus been manifestly in a degree of perfection from which we have
unhappily fallen.

It is, however, an astonishing thing that the mystery furthest removed from
our knowledge, namely, that of the transmission of sin, should be a fact
without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves. For it is beyond doubt
that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin
of the first man has rendered guilty those who, being so removed from this
source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not
only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more
contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an
infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a
share that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence?
Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet without