[Footnote 1:  Nitzsch, the most eminent dogmatic theologian among Schleiermacher’s immediate disciples, denies the possibility of conceiving of a case where loving consideration for others, or any other dutiful regard for them, will not attain its end otherwise and more truly and nobly than by lying to them, or where “the loving liar or falsifier might not have acted still more lovingly and wisely without any falsification....  The lie told from supposed necessity or to serve another is always, even in the most favorable circumstances, a sign either of a wisdom which is lacking in love and truth, or of a love which is lacking in wisdom.”]

“Of course,” he says, “such a procedure presupposes a certain relation of guardianship, on the part of the one who speaks untruth, over him whom he deceives, and a relative irresponsibility on the part of the other,—­an incapacity to make use of certain truths except to his actual moral injury.  And in each case all depends on the accuracy of this assumption.”  It is appalling to find a man like Rothe announcing a principle like this as operative in social ethics!  Every man to decide for himself (taking the responsibility, of course, for his personal decision) whether he is in any sense such a guardian of his fellow-man as shall make it his duty to speak falsely to him in love!

Rothe frankly admits that there is no evidence that Jesus Christ, while setting an example here among men, ever spoke one of these dutiful untruths; although it certainly would seem that Jesus might have fairly claimed as good a right to a guardianship of his earthly fellows as the average man of nowadays.[1] But this does not restrain Rothe from deliberately advising his fellow-men to a different course.

[Footnote 1:  Rothe says on this point:  “That the Saviour spoke untruth is a charge to whose support only a single passage, John 7:8, can be alleged with any show of plausibility.  But even here there was no speaking of untruth, even if [Greek:  ank][a disputed reading] be regarded as the right reading.”  See on this passage Meyer in his Commentary, and Westcott in The Bible Commentary.]

Rothe names Marheineke, DeWette, von Ammon, Herbart, Hartenstein, Schwartz, Harless, and Reinhard, as agreeing in the main with his position; while as opposed to it he mentions Kant, Fichte, Krause, Schleiermacher, von Hirscher, Nitzsch, Flatt, and Baumgarten-Crusius.  But this is by no means a question to be settled by votes; and not one of the writers cited by Rothe as of his mind, in this controversy, has anything new to offer in defense of a position in such radical disagreement with the teachings of the Bible, and with the moral sense of the race, on this point, as that taken by Rothe.  In his ignoring of the nature and the will of God as the basis of an argument in this matter, and in his arbitrary and unauthorized definition of a lie (with its inclusion of the claim that the deliberate utterance of a statement known