For the inventor has done nothing other than apply God’s gift of sense. If, however, one makes use of a divine gift and it then acquires an evil purpose, the evil element must have injected itself between the moment of invention and that of its application in real life. And just as gold, for example, should have been a gift of nature, a blessing of the earth, but has become an element of the Devil so, too, invention, a gift of reason, has become an element of the Antichrist. For the Antichrist becomes most clearly recognizable by the fact that he transforms what is essentially noble into something lowly. It is truly the nature of his existence and activity to desecrate the holy, to degrade the sublime, to pervert the true and to scar the beautiful. Not satisfied with his reign over what is in essence vulgar – for this is admittedly also a component of the earthly world – he seeks to extend his dominion over the noble. However, it could never fall under his power if it remained noble, so he first transforms it into something evil.
