# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S168
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

168 From the Present State of the Church.

We do not perceive that the narrative is measured according to this canon. We will not lay any particular weight on the fact that the author says of the widowed Paula that she might just as well as others have "imagined" that she ought to administer and increase her fortune in the interest of her five children, instead of applying it solely to the relief of the misery of strangers. We content ourselves with laying a finger on 1 Timothy 5:8 against this disproportionately so-called "imagining." But all the more decisively must opposition be raised to the manner in which Löhe relates that Paula carried out her resolve to withdraw from the world. She "pressed more and more into the sweet secrecy of a life vowed to God and separated from the world. To be sure, she indeed shuddered at the thought of leaving her children, since she in particular was endowed with a greater degree of motherly love and tenderness than others. It was to her as though she should tear her heart out of her breast, but so she was led, so minded, so resolved; her children seemed as though they could be quite well provided for in another way, while her own inner perfection seemed to require a complete dying to self." So she then took leave of everyone, in order to settle in the Holy Land beside her guide Jerome. As she embarked, "the young son Toxotius, amid loud, bitter weeping, stretched out his hands toward his departing mother; others joined in his wailing cry as in a chorus, but she turned her eyes away from the shore and toward heaven and toward the Redeemer, to whom she believed she must bring this sacrifice for her own perfection." We are supposed, then, to recognize a "leading of God" in the fact that Paula acted thus. According to which canon? According to the one above, that "he who has a divine calling to exercise himself in the task of all temporal things is the one whom God makes solitary, taking from him his own"? But God took from Paula her husband indeed, but not her son Toxotius, and if she left him, she did so indeed because she was so "minded, so resolved" — we would say, was of such a mind self-willedly — but not because God had so led her. And I think we may demand of a book that is written "to awaken the sense of discipleship" that it say this, and not merely conclude by saying that "however much light and times have changed among us, we must honor and admire the holy strength of this soul." We do not mean by this to take from holy Paula anything that rightly belongs to her, and we do not condemn her; but we say that that deed of Paula's was sin, and if God received her into grace, He did so despite it, and perhaps also, because she sinned with good intention, turned her faulty deed graciously to a wholesome outcome for her.

We would have to repeat ourselves if we wished to name all those passages in which the author of the "Rosenmonate" betrays the same lack of a sober judgment grounded in evangelical truth. He has, perhaps in his zeal against the "narrow and harsh Protestant view," simply failed to hold fast to the distinction between the self-chosen