# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1861_S358
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

358 Report on the Law.

your forbidding it. Likewise, he says there too, that on the Sabbath one
should do good to a neighbor who needs it, however strictly the Law
forbids doing anything on the Sabbath; rather, because there is a need to
help the neighbor, love must take precedence and the Sabbath must count
for nothing. Now if the laws were thus all drawn into love, and were all
mastered according to love, it would not matter how many of them there
were. For whoever could not hear or learn them all could still hear and
learn a few — one or two — in which he would nonetheless learn that same
love which is taught in them all. And even if he hears and learns them
all, yet cannot recognize love in all of them, he might still, sooner or
later, come to recognize it in one single law. This rule and manner of
mastering and understanding the laws St. Paul also gives here, where he
says: Owe no man anything, but to love one another. Likewise: He that
loveth another hath fulfilled the law. Likewise: All the commandments are
summed up in this commandment: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Likewise:
Love worketh no ill to his neighbor. Likewise: Love is the fulfilling of
the law. All the words of this epistle conclude and declare that love is
mistress over all the laws. Conversely, where the laws are taught and
enforced without love and apart from love, there is no greater
misfortune, no greater injustice, no more wretched misery on earth. For
there the law is nothing else but a plague and ruin. There the proverb
holds true: Summum jus, summa injustitia — the strictest right is the
very worst wrong. And Solomon, Eccl. 7:16: Noli nimium esse justus — be
not overly righteous. Indeed, in such a case one leaves the beam stuck in
one's own eye and does not even notice it, and busies oneself instead
with pulling the splinter out of one's neighbor's eye; there one makes
timid, frightened, and despairing consciences, without any need or cause
at all, and besides with great harm to body and soul. And great toil and
labor go on there, and yet it is all in vain. Let us prove this with
examples: suppose, in the case mentioned above, that when David was
hungry (1 Sam. 21:6) the priest had refused to give him the holy bread,
and had been so blind as to stand upon the law without recognizing love,
and had denied him the food — what would have come of it? As far as it
depended on him, David would have had to die of hunger, and the priest
would there have committed a murder for the sake of the law; and there
would certainly have been nothing else but summum jus, summa injustitia —
the sharpest right, the sharpest wrong. Moreover, if you look into the
heart of such a mad priest, you find this horrible abomination: that he
makes sin and conscience where there is no sin and no conscience — for he
holds it a sin to eat the bread, when it was in fact love and a good
work; while, conversely, he holds it no sin at all to let David die of
hunger, but rather a good work and service to God. But who can adequately
describe such horrible, blind, perverse folly? For by such dealing he
does as much evil as the devil himself could not do worse — namely, by
making sin and conscience where