# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S362
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

362 The Rose Months of Holy Women.

model. This, at the very least, we expect to see sharply brought out in a
book which wishes to hold before us models drawn from times in which the
stream of faith and of love was forcing its way through many alien, indeed
even poisonous and objectionable, plants and growths.

And so indeed it seems to be. For alongside the majority of the pictures
there also stands a warning sign. But are the warnings so framed that
unguarded and untrained minds are safe from the danger of finding the
perverse worthy of imitation? We cannot say the latter, and must therefore
ask, with double astonishment, what it was that moved the author, out of the
rich treasury of history, not to choose other and better models for women and
maidens.

For an explanation we are pointed to a quite external occasion. Because in
the second part of the "Hausbuch" published by Löhe there is found a
"calendarium sanctorum, a register of the commemoration days of saints who
found recognition and standing in the Church of earlier times," the memory of
these departed saints was, it seems, to be made fruitful again for the
Protestant readers, male and female, of our time. So it is said in the
preface (p. 1).

But the less one can say that he bound himself exclusively to the customary
Lutheran calendar in order to explain, say, the names customary there
according to history or legend, the less it can be understood why he so
often attached his models to names for which, given the lack of historically
attested reports or the surplus of legends, scarcely anything can be adduced
except that they still stand in our calendar today.

And the matter becomes not one whit less questionable, but only much more
questionable, when one is supposed to console oneself, as with Margaret, with
the maxim: "Where there is much fable, there is also much true light" (p.
201). For with this "canon" any "Lie-gend" [a play on Legende, "legend," and
Lüge, "lie"] can be used as a model at the expense of the love of truth. Or
is that scruple supposed to be helped along by that other maxim attached to
the fabulous story of Christiana? We read there (p. 227): "Given so many
attested and irrefutable wonders which we read of from the times of the
persecutions, it can indeed not be hard for us, or even unwelcome, to accept
a few more wonders:"

If one picks out of legend, as out of a great rubbish-heap, the individual
flowers that have strayed into it, cleans them, and binds them together, one
can easily make out of legend stories of models whose edifying quality holds
up just so long as — until one comes to know the whole, actual fable. Or can
one really expect a serious Christian to let stories serve him as a call to
repentance in cases where "we leave to the reader entirely his own thoughts,
his own valuing and undervaluing, belief and unbelief"? And yet the words
just quoted form, in Löhe, the introduction to the exhortation to