# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 12 21_S1005
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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the very great and important ones (hence the death penalties upon some kinds of them among God's people); and the very common lack of insight into them is one of the most striking proofs of the sad ignorance of men in matters which yet signify much more than those which they are wont to know otherwise. For this reason we must above all take a look yet at the second side of the divine natural law concerning the degrees of consanguinity in marriage, the transgression of which is often attended by consequences no less terrible. By this are established the lateral or collateral lines, both the equal line, which binds brothers and sisters together into one blood and family, but also takes into account the children of brothers and sisters, etc. (only not with respect to marriage in the first instance), and the unequal line (so called because in lateral relationship it is ascending and descending), which refers to such persons as are one or more degrees nearer to the common ancestor than the other. The latter we mentioned above in passing, and it comprehends, for example, uncle and nephew, aunt and niece, great-uncle, great-nephew, etc., while the direct ascending and descending line, as the fundamental and most inviolable, embraces parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. Since man and woman through the sexual relation and conjugal love become one flesh, the brothers and sisters of the spouse, yea, also of the betrothed and of the bride, stand in the lateral line on a par with one's own brothers and sisters according to the flesh, since betrothal, like marriage itself, draws together the families that were previously separate. Likewise the stepmother counts as the father's flesh and the stepfather as the mother's own body, stepchildren as children of one's own blood, and likewise the parents-in-law and children-in-law maintain the position of real parents, children and brothers and sisters. For from the nature of marriage it follows with what unconditional force the members of the house taken in through marriage establish a close relation, much less other forms of reception, for example adoption, or even discipleship, domestic service, etc. In the measure that the degrees of kinship touch the natural life of an individual, they are more or less morally inadmissible for marriage.

It is, however, the will of God — recognizable indeed without a special historical manifestation of the divine law, but also, without the same, far sooner to be darkened in the human breast and weakened to insensibility — that the family spirit should unite the growing generations of men with one another, that in civil life conjugal fellowship should bring the distant and separated families into relation with one another, that the blessing which mankind is to experience in the family and by virtue of it, as self-forgetting, educating love and as self-sacrificing help and care among one another, should be conditioned by a bond of fellowship drawing them nearer and nearer together. An infinitely higher significance this natural relation gains through the foresight and for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, without which every earthly union is unholy, which, like a leaven, is to permeate the kingdoms of the world and to transform the peoples and states into one holy family, into God's state and people on the highest stage of theocracy. To the extent now in which this order and purpose of the Most High Ruler over the human race suffers arbitrary violation, bodily and spiritual judgments of God set in, which avenge and punish it upon the peoples and generations. The gradual spreading abroad of men in general, as in a particular people, and the decided rejection of all marriages within the nearest family circles are to go hand in hand for this reason, because the possibility of marriage elsewhere is given; and it is, if unnatural, so against the divine destiny of man, to confine the propagation of his kind to existing families, and an earthly calling of the individual, to marry outside the circle of his personal family relationship. It is unnatural, contrary to the law of nature, not in itself, except the marriages in the direct ascending and descending line, which it is an unalterable commandment to avoid as shameful, because, in the establishing of a world where children are begotten of parents, it cannot be otherwise; but it is a duty laid down relatively (with a view to the further development of the human race), to extend the conjugal unions to the wide circles of earthly life, and indeed, if we take into consideration the accidental condition of the world, required already by the origin of civil unions and societies in the form of states, which was necessarily demanded for sin's sake and therefore divinely sanctioned, for which it is one of the most important advantages when the families belonging thereto are brought nearer to one another, so far as is possible, and as it were organically interpenetrate, demanded by the purpose of general security and bodily welfare*); but then also preeminently by the destiny, which indeed holds for all men and peoples, to be received into the kingdom of redeeming love through JEsus Christ, the King of all kings (Daniel 7, 14.).

*) That the states in their present external conception (not according to the natural determination running through the national formations, and the idea which comprehends all legal forms of earthly fellowship) are no necessary development of this created world, as the philosophers will have it, but an accidental one, Augustine has already expounded, and called attention to their origin through the Cainites. (De civ. Dei 15, 20.) Over against those of like mind with them, it was the will of the heavenly Ruler that, if not before, yet after the Flood, when Nimrod and others disquieted the more peaceable families, His justice, ruling in protection and retribution, should embody itself in the common life of men, and accordingly every existing national community, to which self-defense was transferred and in which men bound themselves by law and lawful exercise of power, became a manifestation of divine order on earth. (Cf. 1 Peter 2, 13. with Rom. 13, 1.) Hence also the various forms of government in the world are only so and so many approximations to a full type of the government of God, standing above all and almighty guiding their destinies, the one nearer, the other farther from the divine archetype, which Christ, whose vicegerents the gods on earth are, will present in the kingdom of glory before His Father. (1 Cor. 15, 24. ff. Rev. St. John 21, 23. ff. 22, 3. ff.) But the right of nature in the sense of the Socialists gives nothing but a theory of compulsion by civil penal laws and separates the coherence of the righteousness of outward actions toward others from the one straight line of human life's direction, which is revealed through the knowledge of the Most High in the conscience. And that the form of the governmental power, the How of its history — not its being in itself, its existence in general, according to which it remains God's creature and institution — rests upon free human actions and compacts, yet takes from it nothing of the inviolable dignity which God has bestowed upon the bearers of majesty, so long as they are such. Only the bloody atrocities of revolution of a so-called popular sovereignty without God's grace and warrant, which is a contradictio in adjecto and therefore a lie, like the idol of a political absolutism founded upon mere human caprice, are the irreconcilable opposites which, by their violent separation of individual freedom from submission to the general, deserve to be called nothing more than rebellions against nature and its divine authority. Injustice from above awakens the more dangerous injustice from below and stirs up new, more uncanny powers, "for that is the curse of the evil deed, that it, propagating, must ever bear evil"; and in such general corruption the judgments of the Most High carry themselves out, in which the guilt-laden executors of them will not escape the days of vengeance through the wild stream of the national spirit that has burst out of its bed. Luther had a heart for the distress of the German subject like no other; but in the anguish of his wrath at seeing his pure cause mingled with the murderous peasant revolt in southern Germany, he commanded that the robbers and incendiaries be struck dead like mad dogs. His doctrine is not freedom from the law, that is hellish slavery; but in the law, the peace of conscience, which the ungodly have not, for they are like a raging sea, that cannot rest, and whose waves cast up mire and dirt.

And precisely the fact that, with the confinement of the ancient people of Israel to a small space, to a dwelling together within narrow bounds, the strictest legal provision regarding the degrees of marriage was given positively (3 Moses 18, 20.), testifies, even if it were not already evident from God's punishment upon the earlier inhabitants of Canaan, who were devoted to destruction (3 Moses 18, 24. ff.), manifestly for the law of nature, inasmuch as it was here so much the more wrong to sin against the same, the more easily this Messianic people, which was to prepare the way of the LORD to the other Gentiles and was fenced off from them for that very end, could effect marriage among themselves throughout the whole land. Yet it is also gathered from the observation that in the Old Testament not all marriages of the forbidden kinship incurred the same vice, nor did the temporal legal penalties strike them with equal severity; that the levirate marriage, since the nearest brother of the deceased had to marry the widow left behind, if she was childless by her first husband, for the sake of continuing the latter's family (5 Moses 25, 5. Matt. 22, 24. ff.), raised the otherwise unlawful degree (3 Moses 18, 16. 20, 21.), called Niddah, to a lawful one; yea, that the children and first descendants of the primeval human-