# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S166
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

166 From the Present State of the Church.

past are offered us, we demand above all historical truth, and whoever does not have at least the firm will to give us this, but thinks it makes no difference whether a couple of miracles more or less are involved, must answer for it if the present generation, instead of accepting the invented miracles along with the real ones, rather throws the real ones overboard together with the invented.

We have shown above that the Löhean direction, having come back from its earlier rigidity, is still engaged in seeking sure principles and at present wavers about without clarity. It shows the same character in the "Rosenmonate heiliger Frauen." The author is acquainted with "the self-chosen paths of sanctification" in which the asceticism of the medieval saints ran its course. He knows that one "must push one's way through many strange, indeed also poisonous and objectionable plants and growths" (p. XIV) in order to find the stream of faith and love toward Christ in the Middle Ages. But his judgments do not correspond to this; they are vague, indefinite, unsteady, erroneous. Thus we meet, at various places in that book, the author's favorite formula with which he seeks to fend off any criticism of the faults of his saints: "they are too great for our time," this one "not capable of it" (for example p. 39, p. 52, p. 337). But for Christian judgment it is a matter of indifference whether those faults are attainable by our time or not, and the self-chosen paths of sanctification are not made better by the fact that an energetic will or a great pride has cut them more apart from the ordinary highway and more through thick and thin than is customary to happen at present. One might perhaps object to us that, insofar as those bitter paths of self-chosen sanctification, painful to the flesh, were expressions — even if misguided expressions — of a devotion to the Lord, whose strength and intensity might allow one to infer back to the strength of this devotion, one could indeed here speak of faults which the present-day world is not capable of committing. But we must take exception to the correctness of this inference. It is not true that the measure of the energy with which such paths are pursued is the measure of the strength with which the saint gave himself up to the Lord. We maintain that those "great faults" were, for many saints, the reefs on which their devotion to the Lord foundered or threatened to founder, and that one may therefore with equal right take the measure of the slackening in that self-chosen asceticism as the measure of love toward the Lord, just as much as the reverse. That asceticism, since it is attainable just as much by the natural man as by the regenerate one, can nowhere be used to establish a judgment about Christian character. And indeed, lest we be misunderstood, not even in the sense that these were faults which presupposed a Christian heroism. Even in the Kural of the Buddhist Tiruvalluvar it is said: "If you undertake to measure the spiritual greatness of the penitent — that is as though you would count the dead;" and the question arises which have done themselves more harm, the Indian penitents or the medieval saints.