# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S173
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Ecclesiastical Present. 173

beatification of virginal bodies impossible for the historical Paul? Or is it enough that Löhe simply omits this and other things that do not suit him — for instance, that Thecla receives from Paul the command to go and proclaim the word of God? Luther says somewhere: "it has been a peculiar plague of the devil, that we have no Legenda Sanctorum in pure form. They are the most shameful lies, and it is a hard labor to correct the Legendae Sanctorum." Certainly it is a heavy loss for the church that the lives of so many of her noblest witnesses are inextricably entangled with fables, and one may call this a plague of the devil, or likewise a judgment of God upon the craving for wonders and the lack of plain evangelical faith in the ancient church; but it is truly not remedied by acts of violence and arbitrary misreading of the facts.

But alongside the arbitrariness of exclusion stands the no lesser arbitrariness of the acceptance of what is allegedly genuine, and its groundless justification. It is indeed at times as though the deficient historical proof were meant to be replaced by the self-certainty of faith. Without a shadow of doubt Löhe tells the story of the finding of the cross of Christ by Helena, the mother of Constantine (p. 166). That Eusebius, in his Life of Constantine, at the very point where he reports at length on Helena's pilgrimage to the holy places, knows nothing and says nothing of any finding of the cross of Christ, does not trouble him — nor does the fact that the travel-report of a Gallic pilgrim from the year 333, among the holy relics of Jerusalem that he lists, does not mention the holy cross. He does not even follow the account of Ambrose, according to which the cross of the Lord showed itself to be the genuine one, alongside the crosses of the two thieves, by the inscription of Pilate that remained upon it. He instead follows the latest version, according to which the inscription had fallen from the cross of the Lord and the latter had to be identified only by a miracle. "Bishop Macarius, to whom the crosses mattered more than to many a disciple of the 19th century, hit upon the idea of testing the crosses as a remedy on a sick person, amid prayer and supplication. If the bones of the prophet Elisha in the Old Testament had the power to raise a dead man, because God so willed it; if a cloak and a sweat-cloth, indeed the shadow of apostles, had through God the power in the New Testament to heal the sick — why not the cross on which our eternal salvation was accomplished? A conclusion one may try to overturn." So Löhe (p. 167); and he then relates how a dying matron, upon touching the third cross — which was accordingly Christ's — was restored to life. We shall not let ourselves be led astray by the side-glance at the "disciple of the 19th century to whom the crosses mattered so little." We are indeed less concerned about the crosses than about this: that the word of the cross and "sound doctrine" (Titus 2:8) not be marred by human inventions that rest not even on humanly certain ground, let alone on a divine