# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S364
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

364 The Rose Months of Holy Women.

story of Paula, who leaves her fatherless children in order to seek the
solitude of the Holy Land. (p. 14 ff.) When he then goes on to add that we
"would be treading the path of pride if we were to despise young women like
St. Paula on account of the wrong path which they chose for themselves — and
indeed chose after great examples — and were to pass by them, unconcerned,
as by strangers"; when he sets against the faults of that age the
not-lesser faults and infirmities of our own time, and counsels us not to
despise an age "for whose faults we are ourselves even too small," inasmuch
as we owed a duty (of recognition) to those who "indeed bore the manner of
their own times upon them, as we bear that of ours, yet nevertheless so far
surpass us in that very same faith which we confess, and in the love toward
Christ which is likewise required of us" (pp. 15-16) — then this is, at the
very least, a very misleading way of speaking. We would indeed be proud if we
could not bear heartfelt compassion for such as Paula. But what does it mean
to set the faults and false paths of our own time over against those of an
earlier one? Do we wish to heal error with error? Are we to find a wrong path
tolerable because it was "chosen after great examples"? Are great examples to
take the place of the infallible standard of the Word? Does it secure our
judgment when we are told that we are too small even for the faults of past
ages? Does a fault cease to be what it is, regardless of whether I feel myself
equal to it or not? And when we see, with sorrow, that natures noble in
themselves fall, through their love of Christ, into wrong paths, and seek the
exercise of their faith in things which true faith does not in fact regard as
a genuine fruit of faith and obedience to God's commandments, how can one hold
up those who so err as models of that same faith which we owe to the gospel
through God's grace, and say that they surpass us in the faith we confess,
while our confession forbids us to do what they did, forbids us to leave our
own and "run" into self-chosen solitude? If that does not mean leading people
astray with regard to the confession of our faith, I do not know what else
could be so called. For the confession is not strengthened by that; it is as
though one planted it with one hand and tore it down with the other.

And yet a false admiration for these wrong paths runs through the whole
book, wherever the treading of such a path is paired with a certain heroism,
a certain grandeur of human, eye-catching self-denial. As if it were not
precisely this trait — human and natural enough, to be sure — which, from the
days of the apostles onward, has lured people away from the evangelical path
toward self-chosen worship (ἐθελοθρησκεία, "will-worship," Colossians 2:23).

If, on the other hand, it is reported in our book that Apollonia threw
herself into the flames of the pyre, then, over and above all