Having made these concessions, in the realm of feeling, to the defenders of the “lie of exigency,” which may be “either uttered from love to men, or as defense against men—­a defense in which either a justifiable self-love or sympathy with others is operative,” Martensen proceeds to show that every such falsehood is abnormal and immoral.  “When we thus maintain,” he says, “that in certain difficult cases an ‘untruth from necessity’ may occur, which is to be allowed for the sake of human weakness, and under the given relations may be said to be justified and dutiful, we cannot but allow, on the other hand, that in every such untruth there is something of sin, nay something that needs excuse and forgiveness....  Certainly even the truth of the letter, the external, actual truth, even the formally correct, finds its right, the ground of its validity, in God’s holy order of the world.  But by every lie of exigency the command is broken, ’Thou shalt not bear false witness.’”

Martensen protests against the claim of Rothe that a falsehood spoken in love “is not at all to be called a lie, but can be absolutely defended as morally normal, and so in no respect needs pardon.”  “However sharply we may distinguish between lie and untruth (mendacium and falsilo-quium), the untruth in question can never be resolved into the morally normal.”  And he suggests that if one had more of wisdom and courage and faith, he might be true to the truth in an emergency without fear of the consequences.

“Let us suppose, for instance,” he says, “the ... case, where the husband deceives his sick spouse from fear that she could not survive the news of the death of her child; who dare maintain that if the man had been able in the right way, that is in the power of the gospel, with the wisdom and the comfort of faith, to announce the death of the child, a religious crisis might not have arisen in her soul, which might have a healing and quickening effect upon her bodily state?  And supposing that it had even led to her death, who dare maintain that that death, if it was a Christian death, were an evil, whether for the mother herself, or for the survivors?

“Or, let us take the woman who, to save her chastity, applies the defense of an untruth:  who dare maintain that if she said the truth to her persecutors, but uttered it in womanly heroism, with a believing look to God, with the courage, the elevation of soul springing from a pure conscience, exhibiting to her persecutors the badness and unworthiness of their object, she might not have disarmed them by that might that lies in the good, the just cause, the cause whose defense and shield God himself will be?  And even if she had to suffer what is unworthy, who dare maintain that she could not in suffering preserve her moral worth?”