f 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.

[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