# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1859_S249
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Division of the Ten Commandments. 249

...in bad faith (mala fide): he constructs a prohibition of images out of his own imagination, non obstante scriptura sacra (notwithstanding the sacred Scripture). Whoever, finally, stands, as the Heidelberg Catechism does, with one foot on the principles of the iconoclasts (God is not to be depicted, images are not to be tolerated in churches), and with the other on those of the Lutherans ("although creatures may be depicted, yet God forbids their image to be made and kept, so that one might worship it or serve him thereby") — he acts in the worst faith (pessima fide): out of tiresome confessional stubbornness against the hated Lutherans, he knowingly and willingly bends not his own obstinate head under "the second divine commandment," but bends that commandment under his own obstinacy instead. 17) The pretense of a deep "oriental-reformed" reverence and keeping holy of the "second" commandment proves itself, in practical experience too, to be hypocrisy. All "Orientals" and all "Reformed" have the special prohibition of images in their catechisms; but alongside it — non obstante catechismo, non obstante scriptura sacra (notwithstanding the catechism, notwithstanding the sacred Scripture) — image-worship reigns in the Oriental Church; the "Reformed" English read out of the divine prohibition "You shall make yourself no image!" the divine command to manufacture images for others; and so every year they send whole shiploads of idols to the heathen lands; from the likewise "Reformed" Neuchâtel, the (Halle) People's Paper for Church and School (vol. 1857, no. 8, p. 124) reports, unveiling and revealing literal image-worship in the churches there: "The man of La Sagne, the man of Les Eplatures, is a character of the old stamp, and the king's command is his politics and his religion. For barely fifteen years ago the man of La Sagne kept the king's bust at the threshold of his temple, and on a Sunday one could indeed see the women kneeling in prayer before this image," and so on. Are such occurrences merely accidental? No, they are effects of that unchangeable law which always drives extremes (here, iconoclasm and image-idolatry) into mutual contact, and our shortsighted fellow believers would do well to take the "Incidit in Scyllam" to heart, rather than joining in the brainless prattle about a missing second commandment. 18) How many commandments stood on the first tablet of Moses? No one on earth knows that, nor is it necessary to know. The Lutherans count three, the Calvinists four, the symmetrists five commandments to the first table of the law. To want to fight out this arithmetical difference would be a quarrel over the emperor's beard. The matter is a pure indifferent thing (adiaphoron), depending solely on whether one chooses the two cardinal commandments, Matthew 22:37–40, or rather the "symmetry" and equal number of fingers on both hands, as the principle of division for the (Lutheran or Heidelberg) Decalogue — one as permissible (though not as commendable) as the other. 19) To want to divide it according to both principles at once (symmetry and the cardinal commandments), as Stier, and Schultz too, does, is conceptually confusing, does violence to the matter, runs contrary to the New Testament, and betrays a secret purpose, to which, willy-nilly, the whole question of the Decalogue is meant to be made subservient.