It is true that Rothe assumes that the subject of Theological Ethics is an essential branch of Speculative Theology; but in his treatment of Special Duties he seems to assume that Society rather than God is their background, and therefore the idea of sin as sin does not enter into the discussion.  His whole argument and his conclusions are an illustration of the folly of attempting to solve any problem in ethics without considering the relation to it of God’s eternal laws, and of the eternal principles which are involved in the very conception of God.  Ethics necessarily includes more than social duties, and must be considered in the light of duty to God as above all.

“The intentional deception of our neighbor,” says Rothe, “by saying what is untrue, is not invariably and unqualifiedly a lie.  The question in this case is essentially one of the purpose....  It is only in the case where the untruth spoken with intent to deceive is at the same time an act of unlovingness toward our neighbor, that it is a violation of truthfulness as already defined, that is, a lie.”  In Rothe’s view, “there are relations of men to each other in which [for the time being] avowedly the ethical fellowship does not exist, although the suspension of this fellowship must, of course, always be regarded as temporary, and this indeed as a matter of duty for at least one of the parties.  Here there can be no mention of love, and therefore no more of the want of it.”  Social duties being in such cases suspended, and the idea of any special duty toward God not being in consideration, it is quite proper, as Rothe sees it, for enemies in war, or in private life, to speak falsely to each other.  Such enemies “naturally have in speech simply a weapon which one may use against the other....  The duty of speaking the truth cannot even be thought of as existing between persons so arrayed against each other....  However they may try to deceive each other, even with the help of speech, they do not lie.”

But Rothe goes even farther than this in the advocacy of such violations, or abrogations, of the law of veracity, as would undermine the very foundations of social life, and as would render the law against falsehood little more than a variable personal rule for limited and selected applications,—­after the fashion of the American humorist who “believed in universal salvation if he could pick his men.”  Rothe teaches that falsehood is a duty, not only when it is needful in dealing with public or personal enemies, but often, also, in dealing with “children, the sick, the insane, the drunken, the passionately excited, and the morally weak,”—­and that takes in a large share of the human race.  He gives many illustrations of falsehood supposed to be necessary (where, in fact, they would seem to the keen-minded reader to be quite superfluous[1]) and having affirmed the duty of false speaking in these cases, he takes it for granted (in a strange misconception of the moral sense of mankind) that the deceived parties would, if appealed to in their better senses, justify the falsehoods spoken by mothers in the nursery, by physicians in the sick-room, and by the clear-headed sober man in his intercourse with the angry or foolish or drunken individual.