# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S361
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Rose Months of Holy Women. 361

reach back to the days of the martyrs and confessors under the Roman emperors."
And with regard to the "stream of faith and love toward Jesus Christ, which
extends from those ancient times deep into the Middle Ages," it is said that it
had to force its way through many alien, indeed even poisonous and
objectionable plants (p. XV). Indeed it says (ibid.) that "the confessors of a
purer doctrine might feel themselves admonished and called upon to walk the
same path, by a clearer light, all the more purely and faithfully, and to live
outwardly and inwardly in such a way that in them the image of the Son of Man
might be found again — he who, equally removed from the perversities of
earlier and of present days, ought at all times to have been able to give to
all a measure and example for the avoidance of faults of every kind." From
this one gathers that the intention of the little book is to warn against
self-chosen paths of sanctification and against such models, and to lead people
away, to him who at all times ought to have been able to give to all a measure
and example for the avoidance of faults of every kind. Yet, on the other hand,
"the mention of the roses," in the narrator's meaning, was meant to suggest
"that the life-stories of the holy women are fragrant as roses and still today
spread abroad the scent of a holy and heavenly life" (p. VII ff.). And so we
find ourselves, right at the threshold, faced with the question of how it
might indeed succeed in bringing the roses that bloom along the false paths of
self-chosen sanctification so close to our hearts that we do not, together
with the scent of life unto life, also breathe in that of death unto death.
This could only be conceived of by judging, faithful to history and averse to
all fable, with unyielding strictness according to the eternal word of truth,
what is objectionable, and by sharply sorting out what, after the removal of
the chaff, might still remain worthy of imitation. And indeed the task would
even then be difficult enough. For to show what was not right in a walk along
the right path, and to distinguish the clinging sin from the striving after
true sanctification — that is not hard. But to sort out what, in a walk along
the wrong path, is nevertheless not simply objectionable, indeed in a certain
sense worthy of imitation — that is a difficult and precarious matter and
requires the utmost caution and circumspection. Least of all should we allow
ourselves to be called upon to walk "the same" path — if it is a false one —
merely "more purely" and "more faithfully." For it is not our subjective
purity and faithfulness that makes the false path into a right one; rather, if
the path is the right one, then we may hope that our faithfulness too will be
pure and genuine and become ever more so. Therefore we can only say: do not
let yourselves be seduced by the faithfulness and zeal of those who walk on
the wrong path into entering their path, but seek the right path and let
yourselves be found faithful and zealous upon it, as they are upon theirs. In
this way, nothing is left of the whole model except the shape and form of
zealous faithfulness; its essence and goal become something quite different
from that of the so-called model