to be false, for the express purpose of deceiving the one to whom it is spoken, is not necessarily and inevitably a lie), Rothe stands quite pre-eminent.  Wuttke says, indeed, of Rothe’s treatment of ethics:  “Morality [as he sees it] is an independent something alongside of piety, and rests by no means on piety,—­is entirely co-ordinate to and independent of it."[1] Yet so great is the general influence of Rothe, that various echoes of his arguments for falsehoods in love are to be found in subsequent English and American utterances on Christian ethics.

[Footnote 1:  Wuttke’s Christian Ethics (Lacroix’s transl.), sec. 48.]

Contemporaneous with Richard Rothe, and fully his peer in intellectual force and Christ-likeness of spirit, stands Isaac August Dorner.  Dr. Schaff says of him:[1] “Dr. Dorner was one of the profoundest and most learned theologians of the nineteenth century, and ranks with Schleiermacher, Neander, Nitzsch, Julius Mueller, and Richard Rothe.  He mastered the theology of Schleiermacher and the philosophy of Hegel, appropriated the best elements of both, infused into them a positive evangelical faith and a historic spirit;” and as a lecturer, especially “on dogmatics and ethics ... he excelled all his contemporaries.”  And to this estimate of him Professor Mead adds:[2] “Even one who knows Dorner merely as the theological writer, will in his writings easily detect the fine Christian tone which characterized the man; but no one who did not personally know him can get a true impression of the Johannean tenderness and childlike simplicity which distinguished him above almost any one of equal eminence whom the world has ever known.”

[Footnote 1:  Supplement to Schaff-Hertzog Encyc. of Relig.  Knowl., p. 58.]

[Footnote 2:  Preface to Dorner’s System of Christian Ethics (Am. ed.), p. vii.]

When, therefore, it is considered that, after Rothe had given his views on veracity to the world, Dorner wrote on the same subject, as the very last work of his maturest life, a special interest attaches to his views on this mooted question.  And Dorner is diametrically opposed to Rothe in this thing.  Dorner bases the duty of truthfulness on our common membership in Christ, and the love that grows out of such a relation.[1] “Truth does not,” indeed, “demand that all that is in a man should be brought out, else it would be a moral duty for him to let also the evil that is in him come forth, whereas it is his duty to keep it down.”  But if an untrue statement be made with the intention to deceive, it is a lie.

[Footnote 1:  See Dorner’s System of Christian Ethics (Am. ed.), pp. 487-492.]