# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1860_S366
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

366 The Rose-Months of Holy Women.

...the whole course of life from youth to the grave; one purpose was held fast and finally attained. Kunigunda followed her husband Henry, virginal and bridal, into eternity, without her foot ever straying from the way of pure discipleship of Him whose kingdom is not of this world, etc. "Whatever erred and went wrong in this according to the manner of the times does not prevent the memory of the righteous from remaining a blessing and drawing others to the following of Jesus." (p. 60 ff.) I will not dwell on the fact that it repels me when, here and elsewhere, an excuse seems to be sought in "the manner of the times" for what is to be measured not by the spirit of the age but by the Word of God. But I should like to know where the salutary dread of going astray is supposed to come from, if the very thing in which error and fault occurred is made the very center of praise and commendation? "Whoever has the gift of continence, let him remain unmarried and not sin against marriage" — that is what should have been said. But if it is attributed, so to speak, merely to a lack of experience that we mistrust the happiness of such an irregular marriage, that means wanting to make our own experience, good opinion, and preference — instead of God's Word — the standard for what belongs to the happiness of this or that God-ordained estate and to our duties within it.

For the rest, the book would hardly have been written by Löhe if it did not, conversely, contain much that is quite excellent in its particulars. But the Apostle says: a little leaven leavens the whole lump. And in this book we are dealing not with isolated missteps, but with a questionable tendency that pervades the whole. This is what I wished to demonstrate with the passages cited above.

More than all the rose-months of holy women, what the present age needs is the image of that Alexandrian shoemaker, to whom a dream led the hermit Anthony, and of whom mention is made in the Augsburg Confession (Art. 13). For what is called following Christ, renouncing the world, and Christian virtue is now sought by countless people in forms whose Christianity is measured by the degree to which they present something extraordinary and have nothing to do with what bears the shape of an ordinary earthly calling. And yet it is all mask and illusion, unless the world is renounced within us and Christ dwells in the heart — he who bids us seek our peace not in special works but in his grace, the possession of which is precisely not bound to self-chosen worship.

But where, one will ask, is this denied by Löhe? I answer: in words, nowhere. On the contrary, he states expressly in the preface (p. XII) that he is now, as before, a faithful adherent of the symbolically Lutheran articles. And when he adds that he simply no longer belongs to those who confuse the symbolical articles with the dogmatic elaborations of them as found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and who hold both to be equally correct and important, that will have nothing at all to do with the content of the present book