ment. A warlike or ardently sensuous people will naturally attest its distinctive religious character by deeds, by force of arms. But the nature of faith as such is everywhere the same. It is essential to faith to condemn, to anathematize. All blessings, all good it accumulates on itself, on its God, as the lover on his beloved; all curses, all hardship and evil it casts on unbelief. The believer is blessed, well-pleasing to God, a partaker of everlasting felicity; the unbeliever is accursed, rejected of God and abjured by men: for what God rejects man must not receive, must not indulge;—that would be a criticism of the divine judgment. The Turks exterminate unbelievers with fire and sword, the Christians with the flames of hell. But the fires of the other world blaze forth into this, to glare through the night of unbelief. As the believer already here below anticipates the joys of heaven, so the flames of the abyss must be seen to flash here as a foretaste of the awaiting hell,—at least in the moments when faith attains its highest enthusiasm.[1] It is true that Christianity ordains no persecution of heretics, still less conversion by force of arms. But so far as faith anathematizes, it necessarily generates hostile dispositions,—the dispositions out of which the persecution of heretics arises. To love the man who does not believe in Christ, is a sin against Christ, is to love the enemy of Christ.[2] That which God, which Christ does not love, man must not love; his love would be a contradiction of the divine will, consequently a sin. God, it is true, loves all men; but only when and because they are Christians, or at least may be and desire to be such. To be a Christian is to be beloved by God; not to be a Christian is to be hated by God, an object of the divine anger.[3] The Christian must therefore love only Christians—others only as possible Christians; he must only love what faith hallows and blesses. Faith is the baptism of love. Love to man as
- ↑ God himself by no means entirely reserves the punishment of blasphemers, of unbelievers, of heretics, for the future; he often punishes them in this life also, “for the benefit of Christendom and the strengthening of faith:” as, for example, the heretics Cerinthus and Arius. See Luther (T. xiv. p. 13).
- ↑ “Si quis spiritum Dei habet, illius versiculi recordetur: Nonne qui oderunt te, Domine, oderam?” (Psal. cxxxix. 21.) Bernhardus, Epist. (193) ad magist. Yvonem Cardin.
- ↑ “Qui Christum negat, negatur a Christo.”—Cyprian (Epst. E. 73, § 18. Edit. Gersdorf.).
