# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1861_S357
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Report on the Law. 357

37. Fines secundarii non sunt venditandi pro fine principali, nec eidem
opponendi. (Gerh.)

Subordinate purposes are not to be traded off against the main
purpose, nor set up against it.

38. Deus homines, non semet ipsum ordini alligavit. (Kromayer.)

God has bound mankind to the order, not himself.

39. Institutio obligat salvandum, sed non salvantem. (Scherzer.)

An institution of grace binds the one who is to be saved, not the
one who saves.

40. Non defectus, sed contemtus sacramentorum damnat. (Bernhard.)

It is not the lack, but the contempt, of the Sacraments that
condemns.

Report on the Law.

(Continuation and conclusion.)

3. To the correct understanding of the word "Love thy neighbor as
thyself" — an understanding rare even in our own day — belongs, finally,
also this: that the commandment of love of neighbor, alongside that of
love of God, is the greatest and foremost, and that love is therefore the
mistress of all the commandments and the standard by which their
fulfillment is measured; just as Scripture (Rom. 13:8–10) expressly calls
love the fulfilling of the Law, and indeed, following Gal. 5:14, the
fulfilling of all the Law.

On this Luther writes in his Church Postil, on the Epistle for the
4th Sunday after Epiphany: "Many books and teachings have been given to
instruct the lives of men, so many that they have neither number nor end,
and there is still no ceasing in the making of books and laws, as we see
in ecclesiastical and civil law and in religious orders and estates. And
all this might still be bearable, and even a special grace, if such laws
and teachings were all drawn and administered according to the chief law,
rule, and measure of love — as Holy Scripture does, which likewise gives
many and various laws, but draws and gathers them all together into love,
and subjects them all to love as well, so that they must all yield and no
longer be law, nor count for anything, wherever love is concerned. Of
this we read a great many examples in Scripture, and Christ himself, in
particular, cites Matt. 12:3–5, how David and his companions ate the holy
showbread. For although there was a law there that no one should eat that
holy bread except the priests alone, yet love here was a free empress
over that very law and forced it to yield beneath her, so that it had, at
that time, to give way and cease, since David suffered hunger; and it had
to endure this very judgment: David suffers hunger — he must be helped —
just as love says: Do good to your neighbor wherever he needs it.
Therefore, O law, stand back, and do not hinder him from doing such good;
rather, do the good yourself, and serve him in his need, and do not catch
him with