# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1862_S242
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

242 Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

2. Should Sulpitius pay no heed to any remonstrance, and also, suasu Theodosii
(at Theodosius's urging), refuse to report himself to the authorities for punishment,
ought Theodosius nevertheless to keep silent and commit the matter to God?

3. Can Theodosius, with a good conscience, also keep silent about the fact that
Juliana is published as a virgin, even though he himself does not perform the
publication of banns?

4. What ought Theodosius to do if he should be called upon to marry these people,
an act he cannot avoid, whether he may avert it by taking a journey,
and, doing all that, still keep a good conscience?

5. Whether Theodosius, in case the marriage should go forward, ought
nonetheless also to take Juliana in hand, since she is his penitent, and
give her, on account of the sin she committed, a private admonition?

We find on this, in keeping with God's Word, with the observance of our Lutheran
Church, and with Christian prudence, as follows:

as to the first question:

Although the papal canonists do indeed reckon adultery among the impediments
to marriage — namely, when someone wished to marry a person previously
defiled by adultery with him — this is nevertheless to be understood only of a wife
who, during her husband's lifetime, has carnal intercourse with another,
whether unmarried or married, which, however, did not occur in the present case.
Although that other case is most severely condemned by the blessed Luther against
the papists in the Roman Church: "I ask you," he writes, Tom. II.
Jena. Germ. fol. 153, and Tom. IV. Altenburg. f. 1408 (conf. Tom. II.
Jena. Lat. fol. 281), "whence indeed comes this strict law against
"men, which yet God never required? Do they not know,
"or do they not wish to know, that Bathsheba, as the wife of Uriah,
"committed this vice; that is, she was defiled with adultery,
"and after her husband's death she was nonetheless joined in marriage by David,
"who had broken wedlock with her and yet afterward, in legitimate matrimony,*)
"begot with her King Solomon. Now if the divine Law has permitted this,
"what then are tyrannical men doing against their fellow servants?"
To this Tarnovius likewise subscribed afterward, Libr. I. de coniugio c. 50
(book I, on marriage, ch. 50); Gerhard, in loco de matrimonio § 383
(in his treatment of marriage, § 383); Scherzer, in Systema, definition,
Loc. XVII, de coniugio, § XII, fol. 789 (topic XVII, on marriage, § XII, fol. 789).
So too the famous jurist Benedict Carpzov reports, Iurisprudentia
Ecclesiastica, Libr. II, Tit. I, defin. XIV, f. 335 (book II, title I, definition
XIV, fol. 335), that the Scabini of Leipzig, and the juristic faculty at the
universities of Gießen and Tübingen, as well as the consistory at Meißen,
Wittenberg, and Leipzig, have ruled no differently in this case. Now we do
not indeed wish to deny that the carnal, unlawful union, in the case laid
before us, of the married Sulpitius with Juliana, a woman still unmarried

*) In lawful wedlock.