# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S365
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Rose-Months of Holy Women. 365

...help us past that with the statement: "The faults of the ancient blood-witnesses are too great for our age ever to become their equal in them." (p. 39) When the twelve-year-old Eulalia flees her mother by night to seek a martyr's death, it is said: "Beware of judging this little one before you possess her flame in your heart — and not her faults, of which you surely are not capable, but rather better avoid your own — as she avoided the excess of her testimony and her courage." (p. 52.) When people who know nothing of ardent love for Christ are warned against sitting here in judgment, nothing can be said against that. But when it is held up, as it were, as a blemish not to be capable of such a fault, then I do not know what lesson children or parents are supposed to draw from it. Of Euphrosyne it is related that she left her father's house on her own authority, entered a convent, disguised herself as a monk under the name Smaragdus, and lived together with her father — who sought her out in sorrow — for thirty-eight years without letting herself be recognized by him. What, then, is remarked upon this? "They went," it says (p. 47), "a way of renunciation which, though not right, is nonetheless, for all its error, astonishing, and fit to rebuke a generation that seeks its highest happiness in soft-hearted love of kin." But does one suppose one can drive out Beelzebub with Beelzebub? Does the violation of the Ten Commandments become a virtue because it has something "astonishing" about it? And is softness supposed to find its cure by mirroring itself in conduct contrary to God and nature? Where in all the world are we taught to hold up one perversity to the shame of an opposite perversity?!

Sometimes our book itself shows a feeling that this will not do. But strange is the way out that is then taken, in order to leave the model once set up some meaning. Thus, after it was told of Marcellina that she gave herself over to a self-chosen asceticism which her brother Ambrose had to restrain, it says at the close (p. 208): "If you strove unceasingly after eternal life, then you have lived enough, even though you sought your sanctification not by the way of mortification, but by the genuinely evangelical way of an ever-renewing renewal of God's grace in Jesus Christ." Is that not as much as saying: do as she did, only quite differently? — With other stories, however, this is not said. Thus more than one tale is set before wives and maidens according to which maidens — such as Kunigunda, Pulcheria, Richardis — entered into marriage with the settled resolve to remain virgins. How that is to be reconciled with the God-ordained purpose of marriage and with the express precept of the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 7:2 ff.) is not mentioned with a single syllable. It says instead, regarding Kunigunda and Emperor Henry II (p. 58): "They enjoyed for a time a happiness of which we know so little that we mistrust it." Indeed, the close of this life story is formed by the enthusiastic words: "One sense and one will were carried through the whole