# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16 The Newest Papist Council, etc.

...namely from sins of weakness and rashness, she was free. (Cf. Luke 2:43; John 2:3–4; Mark 3:31–35.) 5. That Mary had need of a Savior and Reconciler (Luke 1:47). 6. That Mary was called blessed on account of her faith (Luke 1:45). 7. That she died, and thus also had, in some measure, to experience the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23).

This, however, was taught and confessed not only in the very earliest centuries of the Christian Church, within it, in accordance with Holy Scripture, but also later, indeed in the very midst of the papal church, by its most famous teachers — those held in the highest esteem by the papists themselves above all others — down to this very day; and those who afterward, within the Roman Church, contradicted this doctrine have among themselves, to this hour, never been of one mind; one has invented this, another that, concerning the nature of the alleged sinlessness of the holy Virgin; but between the two parties within the papal church — those who on the one side denied and on the other side asserted this sinlessness — there has raged such a hideous and bitter strife that the Pope, had he wished to settle the matter earlier, would thereby have staked the entire standing of his church.

First, we now wish to communicate a few testimonies of the church fathers from the period after the third century and before the actual establishment of the papacy, on the point in question.

Thus Augustine writes: "One must hold absolutely firm and not doubt in the least that every man who is conceived through man and woman is born with original sin, given over to sinfulness and subject to death, and is therefore born by nature a child of wrath." (De fide ad Petrum, ch. 23.)

The same: "Although Christ took His body from the flesh of a woman, who had herself been conceived through that propagation of the flesh, yet because that body (the body of Christ) was not conceived in her in the same way that she had been conceived, it (the body of Christ) was likewise not sinful flesh, but the likeness of sinful flesh." (Lib. 10, De Genesi ad litteram, ch. 18.)

The same: "Whoever believes that there is, or has ever been, in this life one man, or some men — the Mediator between God and men alone excepted — for whom the forgiveness of sins was not necessary, is opposed to Scripture, which says: Through one man sin came into the world." (Lib. de perfectione justitiae.)

The same: "That Simeon adds and says: 'And a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed' (Luke 2:35) — this indeed indicated that Mary too, through whom the mystery of the Savior's incarnation had been borne,