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 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.), § 48.]