Ver. 1.toVer. 6.
Let every soul,every person, who has "presented his body a living sacrifice,"be submissive to the ruling authorities;manifestly, from the context,the authorities of the State.For there is no authority except by God[223]; but the existing authorities have been appointed by God.That is, theimperiumof the King Eternal is absolutely reserved; an authority not sanctioned by Him is nothing; man is no independent source of power and law. But then, it has pleased God so to order human life and history, that His will in this matter is expressed, from time to time, in and through the actual constitution of the state.So that the opponent of the authority withstands the ordinance of God,not merely that of man;but the withstanders will on themselves bring sentence of judgment;not only the human crime of treason, but the charge, in the court of God, of rebellion against His will. This is founded on the idea of law and order, which means by its nature the restraint of public mischief and the promotion, or at least protection, of public good. "Authority," even under its worst distortions, still so far keeps that aim that no human civic power, as a fact, punishes good as good, and rewards evil as evil; and thus for the common run of lives the worst settled authority is infinitely better than real anarchy.For rulers, as a class(οἱ ἄρχοντες),are not a terror to the good deed, but to the evil;such is always the fact in principle, and such, taking human life as a whole, is the tendency, even at the worst, in practice, where the authority in any degree deserves its name.Now do you wish not to be afraid of the authority? do what is good, and you shall have praise from it;the "praise," at least, of being unmolested and protected.For God's agent(διάκονος)he is to you, for what is good;through his function God, in providence, carries outHis purposes of order.But if you are doing what is evil, be afraid; for not for nothing(εἰκῆ), not without warrant, nor without purpose,does he wear his(τὴν)sword,symbol of the ultimate power of life and death;for God's agent is he, an avenger, unto wrath, for the practiser of the evil. Wherefore,because God is in the matter,it is a necessity to submit, not only because of the wrath,the ruler's wrath in the case supposed,but because of the conscience too;because you know, as a Christian, that God speaks through the state and through its minister, and that anarchy is therefore disloyalty to Him.For on this account too you pay taxes;the same commission which gives the state the right to restrain and punish gives it the right to demand subsidy from its members, in order to its operations;for God's ministers are they,Hisλειτουργοί, a word so frequently used in sacerdotal connexions that it well may suggest them here; as if the civil ruler were, in his province, an almost religious instrument of divine order;God's ministers, to this very end perseveringin their task; working on in the toils of administration, for the execution, consciously or not, of the divine plan of social peace.
This is a noble point of view, alike for governed and for governors, from which to consider the prosaic problems and necessities of public finance. Thus understood, the tax is paid not with a cold and compulsory assent to a mechanical exaction, but as an act in the line of the plan of God. And the tax is devised and demanded, not merely as an expedient to adjust a budget, but as a thing which God's law can sanction, in the interests of God's social plan.|Ver. 7.|Discharge therefore to all men,to all men in authority, primarily, but not only,their dues; the tax, to whomyou owe the tax,on person and property;the toll, to whom the toll,on merchandise;the fear, to whom the fear,as to the ordained punisher of wrong;the honour, to whom the honour,as to the rightful claimant in general of loyal deference.
Such were the political principles of the new Faith, of the mysterious Society, which was so soon to perplex the Roman statesman, as well as to supply convenient victims to the Roman despot. A Nero was shortly to burn Christians in his gardens as a substitute for lamps, on the charge that they were guilty of secret and horrible orgies. Later, a Trajan, grave and anxious, was to order their execution as members of a secret community dangerous to imperial order. But here is a private missive sent to this people by their leader, reminding them of their principles, and prescribing their line of action. He puts them in immediate spiritual contact, every man and woman of them, with the Eternal Sovereign, and so he inspires them with the strongest possible independence, as regards "the fear of man." He bids them know, for a certainty, that the Almighty One regards them, each and all, as accepted in His Beloved, and fills them with His great Presence, and promises them a coming heaven from which no earthly power or terror can for a moment shut them out. But in the same message, and in the same Name, he commands them to pay their taxes to the pagan State, and to do so, not with the contemptuous indifference of the fanatic, who thinks that human life in its temporal order is God-forsaken, but in the spirit of cordial loyalty and ungrudging deference, as to an authority representing in its sphere none other than their Lord and Father.
It has been suggested that the first serious antagonismof the state towards these mysterious Christians was occasioned by the inevitable interference of the claims of Christ with the stern and rigid order of the Roman Family. A power which could assert the right, the duty, of a son to reject his father's religious worship was taken to be a power which meant the destruction of all social order as such; anihilismindeed. This was a tremendous misunderstanding to encounter. How was it to be met? Not by tumultuary resistance, not even by passionate protests and invectives. The answer was to be that of love, practical and loyal, to God and man, in life and, when occasion came, in death.[224]Upon the line of that path lay at least the possibility of martyrdom, with its lions and its funeral piles; but the end of it was the peaceful vindication of the glory of God and of the Name of Jesus, and the achievement of the best security for the liberties of man.
Ver. 8.toVer. 10.
Congenially then the Apostle closes these precepts of civil order with the universal command to love.Owe nothing to anyone;avoid absolutely the social disloyalty of debt; pay every creditor in full, with watchful care;except the loving one another.Love is to be a perpetual and inexhaustible debt, not as if repudiated or neglected, but as always due and always paying; a debt, not as a forgotten account is owing to the seller, but as interest on capital is continuously owing to the lender. And this, not only because of the fair beauty of love, but because of the legal duty of it:For the lover of his fellow(τὸν ἕτερον, "the other man," be he who he may, with whom the man has to do)has fulfilled the law,the law of the Second Table, the codeof man's duty to man, which is in question here. He "hasfulfilled" it; as having at once entered, in principle and will, into its whole requirement; so that all he now needs is not a better attitude but developed information.For the, "Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,[225]Thou shalt not covet," and whatever other commandment there is, all is summed up in this utterance, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"(Lev. xix. 18).Love works the neighbour no ill; therefore love is the Law's fulfilment.
Is it a mere negative precept then? Is the life of love to be only an abstinence from doing harm, which may shun thefts, but may also shun personal sacrifices? Is it a cold and inoperative "harmlessness," which leaves all things as they are? We see the answer in part in those words, "as thyself." Man "loveshimself," (in the sense of nature, not of sin,) with a love which instinctively avoids indeed what is repulsive and noxious, but does so because it positively likes and desires the opposite. The man who "loves his neighbouras himself" will be as considerate of his neighbour's feelings as of his own, in respect of abstinence from injury and annoyance. But he will be more; he will be actively desirous of his neighbour's good. "Working him no evil," he will reckon it as much "evil" to be indifferent to his positive true interests as he would reckon it unnatural to be apathetic about his own. "Working him no evil," as one who "loves him as himself," he will care, and seek, to work him good.
"Love," says Leibnitz, in reference to the great controversy on Pure Love agitated by Fénelon andBossuet, "is that which finds its felicity in another'sngood."[226]Such an agent can never terminate its action in a mere cautious abstinence from wrong.
The true divine commentary on this brief paragraph is the nearly contemporary passage written by the same author, 1 Cor. xiii. There, as we saw above, the description of the sacred thing, love, like that of the heavenly state in the Revelation, is given largely in negatives. Yet who fails to feel the wonderfulpositiveof the effect? That is no merely negative innocence which is greater than mysteries, and knowledge, and the use of an angel tongue; greater than self-inflicted poverty, and the endurance of the martyr's flame; "chief grace below, and all in all above." Its blessed negatives are but a form of unselfishaction. It forgets itself, and remembers others, and refrains from the least needless wounding of them, not because it wants merely "to live and let live," but because it loves them, finding its felicity in their good.
It has been said that "love is holiness, spelt short." Thoughtfully interpreted and applied, the saying is true. The holy man in human life is the man who, with the Scriptures open before him as his informant and his guide, while the Lord Christ dwells in his heart by faith as his Reason and his Power, forgets himself in a work for others which is kept at once gentle, wise, and persistent to the end, by the love which, whatever else it does, knows how to sympathize and to serve.
[223]Readὑπὸnotἀπό.[224]"To believe, to suffer, and to love, was the primitive taste" (Milner).[225]This clause is perhaps to be omitted here.[226]See Card. Bausset,Vie de Fénelon, ii. 375. Leibnitz, in a letter to T. Burnet, quotes the words from a work of his own;Amare est felicitate alterius delectari.
[223]Readὑπὸnotἀπό.
[224]"To believe, to suffer, and to love, was the primitive taste" (Milner).
[225]This clause is perhaps to be omitted here.
[226]See Card. Bausset,Vie de Fénelon, ii. 375. Leibnitz, in a letter to T. Burnet, quotes the words from a work of his own;Amare est felicitate alterius delectari.
CHRISTIAN DUTY IN THE LIGHT OF THE LORD'S RETURNAND IN THE POWER OF HIS PRESENCE
Romansxiii. 11-14
THE great teacher has led us long upon the path of duty, in its patient details, all summed up in the duty and joy of love. We have heard him explaining to his disciples how to live as members together of the Body of Christ, and as members also of human society at large, and as citizens of the state. We have been busy latterly with thoughts of taxes, and tolls, and private debts, and the obligation of scrupulous rightfulness in all such things. Everything has had relation to the seen and the temporal. The teaching has not strayed into a land of dreams, nor into a desert and a cell; it has had at least as much to do with the market, and the shop, and the secular official, as if the writer had been a moralist whose horizon was altogether of this life, and who for the future was "without hope."
Yet all the while the teacher and the taught were penetrated and vivified by a certainty of the future perfectly supernatural, and commanding the wonder and glad response of their whole being. They carried about with them the promise of their Risen Master that He would personally return again in heavenly glory, to their infinite joy, gathering them for everaround Him in immortality, bringing heaven with Him, and transfiguring them into His own celestial Image.
Across all possible complications and obstacles of the human world around them they beheld "that blissful hope" (Tit. ii. 13). The smoke of Rome could not becloud it, nor her noise drown the music of its promise, nor her splendour of possessions make its golden vista less beautiful and less entrancing to their souls.[227]Their Lord, once crucified, but now alive for evermore, was greater than the world; greater in His calm triumphant authority over man and nature, greater in the wonder and joy of Himself, His Person and His Salvation. It was enough that He had said He would come again, and that it would be to their eternal happiness. He had promised; therefore it would surely be.
How the promise would take place, and when, was a secondary question. Some things were revealed and certain, as to the manner; "This same Jesus, in like manner as ye saw Him going into heaven" (Acts i. 11). But vastly more was unrevealed and even unconjectured. As to the time, His words had left them, as they still leave us, suspended in a reverent sense of mystery, between intimations which seem almost equally to promise both speed and delay. "Watch therefore, for ye know not when the Master of the house cometh" (Mark xiii. 35); "After a long time the Lord of the servants cometh, and reckoneth with them" (Matt. xxv. 19). The Apostle himself follows his Redeemer's example in the matter. Here and there he seems to indicate an Advent at the doors, as when he speaks of "uswho are alive and remain" (1 Thess. iv. 15). Butagain, in this very Epistle, in his discourse on the future of Israel, he appears to contemplate great developments of time and event yet to come; and very definitely, for his own part, in many places, he records his expectation of death, not of a death-less transfiguration at the Coming. Many at least among his converts looked with an eagerness which was sometimes restless and unwholesome, as at Thessalonica, for the coming King; and it may have been thus with some of the Roman saints. But St Paul at once warned the Thessalonians of their mistake; and certainly this Epistlesuggestsno such upheaval of expectation at Rome.
Our work in these pages is not to discuss "the times and the seasons" which now, as much as then, lie in the Father's "power" (Acts i. 7). It is rather to call attention to the fact that in all ages of the Church this mysterious but definite Promise has, with a silent force, made itself as it were present and contemporary to the believing and watching soul. How at last it shall be seen that "I come quickly" and, "The day of Christ is not at hand" (Rev. xxii. 12, 20, 2 Thess. ii. 2), were both divinely and harmoniously truthful, it does not yet fully appear. But it is certain that both are so; and that in every generation of the now "long time" "the Hope," as if it were at the doors indeed, has been calculated for mighty effects on the Christian's will and work.
So we come to this great Advent oracle, to read it for our own age. Now first let us remember its wonderful illustration of that phenomenon which we have remarked already, the concurrence in Christianity of a faith full of eternity, with a life full of common duty. Here is a community of men called to live under an almost opened heaven; almost to see, as they lookaround them, the descending Lord of glory coming to bring in the eternal day, making Himself present in this visible scene "with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God," waking His buried saints from the dust, calling the living and the risen to meet Him in the air. How can they adjust such an expectation to the demands of "the daily round"? Will they not fly from the City to the solitude, to the hill-tops and forests of the Apennines, to wait with awful joy the great lightning-flash of glory? Not so. They somehow, while "looking for the Saviour from the heavens" (Phil. iii. 20), attend to their service and their business, pay their debts and their taxes, offer sympathy to their neighbours in their human sadnesses and joys, and yield honest loyalty to the magistrate and the Prince. They are the most stable of all elements in the civic life of the hour, if "the powers that be" would but understand them; while yet, all the while, they are the only people in the City whose home, consciously, is the eternal heavens. What can explain the paradox? Nothing but the Fact, the Person, the Character of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not an enthusiasm, however powerful, which governs them, but a Person. AndHeis at once the Lord of immortality and the Ruler of every detail of His servant's life.Heis no author of fanaticism, but the divine-human King of truth and order. To know Him is to find the secret alike of a life eternal and of a patient faithfulness in the life that now is.
What was true of Him is true for evermore. His servant now, in this restless close of the nineteenth age, is to find in Him this wonderful double secret still. He is to be, in Christ, by the very nature of his faith, the most practical and the most willing of the servantsof his fellow-men, in their mortal as well as immortal interests; while also disengaged internally from a bondage to the seen and temporal by his mysterious union with the Son of God, and by his firm expectation of His Return.|Ver. 11.Ver. 12.|And this,this law of love and duty, let us remember, let us follow,knowing the season,the occasion, the growing crisis (καιρόν);that it is already the hour for our awaking out of sleep,the sleep of moral inattention, as if the eternal Master were not near.For nearer now is our salvation,in that last glorious sense of the word "salvation" which means the immortal issue of the whole saving process, nearer nowthan when we believed,and so by faith entered on our union with the Saviour. (See how he delights to associate himself with his disciples in the blessed unity of remembered conversion; "whenwebelieved.")The night,with its murky silence, its "poring dark," the night of trial, of temptation, of the absence of our Christ,is far spent,[228]but the day has drawn near;it has been a long night,butthat means a near dawn; the everlasting sunrise of the longed-forParousia, with its glory, gladness, and unveiling.Let us put off therefore,as if they were a foul and entangling night-robe,the works of the darkness,the habits and acts of the moral night, things whichwe canthrow off in the Name of Christ;but let us put on the weapons of the light,arming ourselves, for defence, and for holy aggression on the realm of evil, with faith, love, and the heavenly hope. So to the Thessalonians five years before (1, v. 8), and to the Ephesians four years later (vi. 11-17), he wrote ofthe holy Panoply, rapidly sketching it in the one place, giving the rich finished picture in the other; suggesting to the saints always the thought of a warfare first and mainly defensive, andthenaggressive with the drawn sword, and indicating as their true armour not their reason, their emotions, or their will, taken in themselves, but the eternal facts of their revealed salvation in Christ, grasped and used by faith.|Ver. 13.|As by day,for it is already dawn, in the Lord,let us walk[229]decorously,becomingly, as we are the hallowed soldiers of our Leader; let our life not only be right in fact; let itshewto all men the open "decorum" of truth, purity, peace, and love;not in revels and drunken bouts; not in chamberings,the sins of the secret couch,and profligacies,not—to name evils which cling often to the otherwise reputable Christian—in strife and envy,things which are pollutions, in the sight of the Holy One, as real as lust itself.No; put on,clothe and arm yourselves with,the Lord Jesus Christ,Himself the living sum and true meaning of all that can arm the soul;and for the flesh take no forethought lust-ward.As if, in euphemism, he would say, "Take all possibleforethought againstthe life of self (σάρξ), with its lustful, self-wilful gravitation away from God. And let that forethought be, to arm yourselves, as if never armed before, with Christ."
How solemnly explicit he is, how plain-spoken, about the temptations of the Roman Christian's life! The men who were capable of the appeals and revelations of the first eight chapters yet needed to be told not to drink to intoxication, not to go near the house of ill-fame, not to quarrel, not to grudge. But every modern missionaryin heathendom will tell us that the like stern plainness is needed now among the new-converted faithful. And is it not needed among those who have professed the Pauline faith much longer, in the congregations of our older Christendom?
It remains for our time, as truly as ever, a fact of religious life—this necessity to press it home upon the religious,asthe religious, that they are called to a practical and detailed holiness; and that they are never to ignore the possibility of even the worst falls. So mysteriously can the subtle "flesh," in the believing receiver of the Gospel, becloud or distort the holy import of the thing received. So fatally easy is it "to corrupt the best into the worst," using the very depth and richness of spiritual truth as if it could be a substitute for patient practice, instead of its mighty stimulus.
But glorious is the method illustrated here for triumphant resistance to that tendency. What is it? It is not to retreat from spiritual principle upon a cold naturalistic programme of activity and probity. It is to penetrate through the spiritual principle to the Crucified and Living Lord who is its heart and power; it is to bury self in Him, and to arm the will with Him. It is to look for Him as Coming, but also, and yet more urgently, to use Him as Present. In the great Roman Epic, on the verge of the decisive conflict, the goddess-mother laid the invulnerable panoply at the feet of her Æneas; and the astonished Champion straightway, first pondering every part of the heaven-sent armament, then "put it on," and was prepared. As it were at our feet is laidthe Lord Jesus Christ, in all He is, in all He has done, in His indissoluble union with us in it all, as we are one with Him by the Holy Ghost. It is for us to see in Him our power and victory, and to "put Him on," in apersonal act which, while all by grace, is yet in itself our own. And how is this done? It is by the "committal of the keeping of our souls unto Him" (1 Pet. iv. 19), not vaguely, but definitely and with purpose, in view of each and every temptation. It is by "living our life in the flesh by faith in the Son of God" (Gal. ii. 20); that is to say, in effect, by perpetuallymaking use ofthe Crucified and Living Saviour, One with us by the Holy Spirit; by using Him as our living Deliverer, our Peace and Power, amidstallthat the dark hosts of evil can do against us.
Oh wonderful and all-adequate secret; "Christ, which is the Secret of God" (Col. ii. 2)! Oh divine simplicity of its depth;
"Heaven's easy, artless, unencumber'd plan"!
Not that its "ease" means our indolence. No; if we would indeed "arm ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ" we must awake and be astir to "know whomwe have trusted" (2 Tim. i. 12). We must explore His Word about Himself. We must ponder it, above all in the prayer which converses with Him over His promises, till they live to us in His light. We must watch and pray, that we may be alert to employ our armament. The Christian who steps out into life "light-heartedly," thinking superficially of his weakness, and of his foes, is only too likely also to think of his Lord superficially, and to find of even this heavenly armour that "he cannotgowith it, for he hath not proved it" (1 Sam. xvii. 39). But all this leaves absolutely untouched the divine simplicity of the matter. It leaves it wonderfully true that the decisive, the satisfying,the thorough, moral victory and deliverance comes to the Christian man not by trampling about with his ownresolves, but by committing himself to his Saviour and Keeper, who has conqueredhim, that now He may conquer "his strong Enemy" for him.
"Heaven's unencumbered plan" of "victory and triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh," is no day-dream of romance. It lives, it works in the most open hour of the common world of sin and sorrow.We have seenthis "putting on of the Lord Jesus Christ" victoriously successful where the most fierce, or the most subtle, forms of temptation were to be dealt with.We have seenit preserving, with beautiful persistency, a life-long sufferer from the terrible solicitations of pain, and of still less endurable helplessness—every limb fixed literally immovable by paralysis on the ill-furnished bed;we have seenthe man cheerful, restful, always ready for wise word and sympathetic thought, and affirming that his Lord, present to his soul, was infinitely enough to "keep him."We have seenthe overwhelmed toiler for God, while every step through the day was clogged by "thronging duties," such duties as most wear and drain the spirit, yet maintained in an equable cheerfulness and as it were inward leisure by this same always adequate secret, "the Lord Jesus Christ put on."We have knownthe missionary who had, in sober earnest, hazarded his life for the blessed Name, yet ready to bear quiet witness to the repose and readiness to be found in meeting disappointment, solitude, danger, not so much by a stern resistance as by the use, then and there, confidingly, and in surrender, of the Crucified and Living Lord. Shall we dare to add, with the humiliated avowal that only a too partial proof has been made of this glorious open Secret, thatwe knowby experiment that the weakest of the servants of our King, "putting onHim,"find victory and deliverance, where there was defeat before?
Let us, writer and reader, address ourselves afresh in practice to this wonderful secret. Let us, as if we had never done it before, "put on the Lord Jesus Christ."[230]Vain is our interpretation of the holy Word, which not only "abideth, butlivethfor ever" (1 Pet. i. 23), if it does not somehowcome home. For that Word was written on purpose to come home; to touch and move the conscience and the will, in the realities of our inmost, and also of our most outward, life. Never for one moment do we stand as merely interested students and spectators, outside the field of temptation. Never for one moment therefore can we dispense with the great Secret of victory and safety.
Full in face of the realities of sin—of Roman sin, in Nero's days; but let us just now forget Rome and Nero; they were only dark accidents of a darker essence—St Paul here writes down, across them all, these words, this spell, this Name; "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ." Take first a steady look, he seems to say, at your sore need, in the light of God; but then, at once, look off, lookhere. Here is the more than Antithesis to it all. Here is that by which you can be "more than conqueror." Take your iniquities at the worst; this can subdue them. Take your surroundings at the worst; this can emancipate you from their power. It is "the Lord Jesus Christ," and the "putting on" of Him.
Let us remember, as if it were a new thing, that He,the Christ of Prophets, Evangelists, and Apostles, is a Fact. Sure as the existence now of His universal Church, as the observance of the historic Sacrament of His Death, as the impossibility of Galilean or Pharisaic imagination havingcomposed, instead ofphotographed, the portrait of the Incarnate Son, the Immaculate Lamb; sure as is the glad verification in ten thousand blessed lives to-day of all, of all, that the Christ of Scripture undertakes to be to the soul that will take Him at His own terms—so sure, across all oldest and all newest doubts, across allgnosisand allagnosia, lies the present Fact of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Then let us remember that it is a fact that man, in the mercy of God,can"put Him on." He is not far off. He presents Himself to our touch, our possession. He says to us, "Come to Me." He unveils Himself as literal partaker of our nature; as our Sacrifice; our Righteousness, "through faith in His blood"; as the Head and Life-spring, in an indescribable union, of a deep calm tide of life spiritual and eternal, ready to circulate through our being. He invites Himself to "make His abodewithus" (John xiv. 23); yea more, "I will comeinto him; I will dwellinhis heart by faith" (Rev. iii. 20; Eph. iii. 17). In that ungovernable heart of ours, that interminably self-deceptive heart (Jerem. xvii. 9), He engages to reside, to be permanent Occupant, the Master always at home. He is prepared thus to take, with regard to our will, a place of power nearer than all circumstances, and deep in the midst of all possible inward traitors; to keep His eye on their plots, His foot, not ours, upon their necks. Yes, He invites us thus to embrace Him into a full contact; to "put Him on."
May we not say of Him what the great Poet says of Duty, and glorify the verse by a yet nobler application?—
"Thou who art victory and lawWhen empty terrors overawe,From vain temptations dost set free,And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity!"
"Thou who art victory and lawWhen empty terrors overawe,From vain temptations dost set free,And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity!"
"Thou who art victory and law
When empty terrors overawe,
From vain temptations dost set free,
And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity!"
Yes, we can "put Him on" as our "Panoply of Light." We can put Him on as "the Lord," surrendering ourselves to His absolute while most benignant sovereignty and will, deep secret of repose. We can put Him on as "Jesus," clasping the truth that He, our Human Brother, yet Divine, "saves His people from their sins" (Matt. i. 21). We can put Him on as "Christ," our Head, anointed without measure by the Eternal Spirit, and now sending of that same Spirit into His happy members, so that we are indeed one with Him, and receive into our whole being the resources of His life.
Such is the armour and the arms. St Jerome, commenting on a kindred passage (Eph. vi. 13), says that "it most clearly results that by 'the weapons of God'the Lord our Saviouris to be understood."
We may recollect that this text is memorable in connexion with the Conversion of St Augustine. In hisConfessions(viii. 12) he records how, in the garden at Milan, at a time of great moral conflict, he was strangely attracted by a voice, perhaps the cry of children playing: "Take and read, take and read." He fetched and opened again a copy of the Epistles (codicem Apostoli), which he had lately laid down. "I read in silence the first place on which my eyes fell; 'Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.' I neither cared, nor needed, to read further. At the close of the sentence, as if a ray of certainty were poured into my heart, the clouds of hesitation fled at once." His will was in the will of God.
Alas, there falls one shadow over that fair scene. In the belief of Augustine's time, to decide fully for Christ meant, or very nearly meant, so to accept the ascetic idea as to renounce the Christian home. But the Lord read His servant's heart aright through the error, and filled it with His peace. To us, in a surrounding religious light far clearer, in many things, than that which shone even upon Ambrose and Augustine; to us who quite recognize that in the paths of homeliest duty and commonest temptation lies the line along which the blessed power of the Saviour may best overshadow His disciple; the Spirit's voice shall say of this same text, "Take and read, take and read." We will "put on," never to put off. Then we shall step out upon the old path in a strength new, and to be renewed for ever, armed against evil, armed for the will of God, with Jesus Christ our Lord.
[227]Omitte mirari beatæFumum et opes strepitumque Romæ. (Horace.)[228]Προέκοψε: literally, "made progress." The aorist may refer to the event of the First Advent, when our eternal Sun was heralded by Himself the Morning Star. But perhaps it is best represented by the English perfect, as in the A.V. and above.[229]Περιπατήσωμεν: perhaps the aorist suggests a new outset in the "walk."[230]From this point to the close of the chapter the writer has used, with modifications, passages from a Sermon (No. iii.) in his volume entitledChrist is All.
[227]
Omitte mirari beatæFumum et opes strepitumque Romæ. (Horace.)
[228]Προέκοψε: literally, "made progress." The aorist may refer to the event of the First Advent, when our eternal Sun was heralded by Himself the Morning Star. But perhaps it is best represented by the English perfect, as in the A.V. and above.
[229]Περιπατήσωμεν: perhaps the aorist suggests a new outset in the "walk."
[230]From this point to the close of the chapter the writer has used, with modifications, passages from a Sermon (No. iii.) in his volume entitledChrist is All.
CHRISTIAN DUTY: MUTUAL TENDERNESS AND TOLERANCE:THE SACREDNESS OF EXAMPLE
Romansxiv. 1-23
Ver. 1.toVer. 6.
But him who is weak—we might almost render,him who suffers from weakness(τὸν ἀσθενοῦντα),in his(τῇ)faith(in the sense here not of creed, a meaning ofπίστιςrare in St Paul, but of reliance on his Lord; reliance not only for justification but, in this case, for holy liberty),welcome into fellowship—not for criticisms of his scruples,of hisδιαλογισμοί, the anxious internal debates of conscience.One man believes,has faith, issuing in a conviction of liberty, in such a mode and degree asto eat all kinds of food; but the man in weakness eats vegetablesonly; an extreme case, but doubtless not uncommon, where a convert, tired out by his own scruples between food and food, cut the knot by rejecting flesh-meat altogether.The eater—let him not despise the non-eater[231]; while the non-eater—let him not judge the eater; for our(ὁ)God welcomed him to fellowship,when he came to the feet of His Son for acceptance.You—who are you, thus judging Another's domestic(οἰκέτην)?To his own Lord,his own Master,he stands,in approval,—or,if that must be, falls,under displeasure;but he shall be upheldin approval;for able is that(ὁ)Lord[232]to set himso, to bid him "stand," under His sanctioning smile.One man distinguishes(κρίνει)day above day; while another distinguishes every day;a phrase paradoxical but intelligible; it describes the thought of the man who, less anxious than his neighbour about stated "holy-days," still aims not to "level down" but to "level up" his use of time; to count every day "holy," equally dedicated to the will and work of God.Let each be quite assured in his own mind;using the thinking-power (νοῦς) given him by his Master, let him reverently work the question out, and then live up to his ascertained convictions, while (this is intimated by the emphatic "his ownmind") he respects the convictions of his neighbour.The man who 'minds'(ὁ φρονῶν)the day,the "holy-day" in question, in any given instance,to the Lord he 'minds' it; [and the man who 'minds' not the day, to the Lord he does not 'mind' it][233];both parties, as Christians, in their convictions and their practice, stand related and responsible, directly and primarily, to the Lord; that fact must always govern and qualify their mutual judgments.And[234]the eater,the man who takes food indifferently without scruple,to the Lord he eats, for he gives thanksat his mealto God; and the non-eater, to the Lord he does not eatthe scrupled food,and gives thanks to Godfor that of which his conscience allows him to partake.
The connexion of the paragraph just traversed with what went before it is suggestive and instructive. Thereisa close connexion between the two; it is marked expressly by the "but" (δέ) of ver. 1, a link strangely missed in the Authorized Version. The "but" indicates a difference of thought, however slight, between the two passages. And the difference, as we read it, is this. The close of the thirteenth chapter has gone all in the direction of Christian wakefulness, decision, and the battle-field of conquering faith. The Roman convert, roused by its trumpet-strain, will be eager to be up and doing, against the enemy and for his Lord, armed from head to foot with Christ. He will bend his whole purpose upon a life of open and active holiness. He will be filled with a new sense at once of the seriousness and of the liberty of the Gospel. But then—some "weak brother" will cross his path. It will be some recent convert, perhaps from Judaism itself, perhaps an ex-pagan, but influenced by the Jewish ideas so prevalent at the time in many Roman circles. This Christian, not untrustful, at least in theory, of the Lord alone for pardon and acceptance, is however quite full of scruples which, to the man fully "armed with Christ," may seem, and do seem, lamentably morbid, really serious mistakes and hindrances. The "weak brother" spends much time in studying the traditional rules of fast and feast, and the code of permitted food. He is sure that the God who has accepted him will hide His face from him if he lets the new moon pass like a common day; or if the Sabbath is not kept by the rule, not of Scripture, but of the Rabbis. Every social meal gives him painful and frequent occasion for troubling himself, and others; he takes refuge perhaps in an anxious vegetarianism, in despair of otherwise keeping undefiled. And inevitably such scruples do not terminate in themselves. They infect the man's whole tone of thinking and action. Hequestions and discusses everything, with himself, if not with others. He is on the way to let his view of acceptance in Christ grow fainter and more confused. He walks, he lives; but he moves like a man chained, and in a prison.
Such a case as this would be a sore temptation to the "strong" Christian. He would be greatly inclined, of himself, first to make a vigorous protest, and then, if the difficulty proved obstinate, to think hard thoughts of his narrow-minded friend; to doubt his right to the Christian name at all; to reproach him, or (worst of all) to satirize him. Meanwhile the "weak" Christian would have his harsh thoughts too. He would not, by any means for certain, shew as much meekness as "weakness." He would let his neighbour see, in one way or other, that he thought him little better than a worldling, who made Christ an excuse for personal self-indulgence.
How does the Apostle meet the trying case, which must have crossed his own path so often, and sometimes in the form of a bitter opposition from those who were "suffering from weakness in their faith"? It is quite plain that his own convictions lay with "the strong," so far asprinciplewas concerned. He "knew that nothing was unclean" (ver. 14). He knew that the Lord was not grieved, but pleased, by the temperate and thankful use, untroubled by morbid fears, of His natural bounties. He knew that the Jewish festival-system had found its goal and end in the perpetual "let us keep the feast" (1 Cor. v. 3) of the true believer's happy and hallowed life.[235]And accordingly he does, in passing, rebuke"the weak" for their harsh criticisms (κρίνειν) of "the strong." But then, he throws all the more weight, the main weight, on his rebukes and warnings to "the strong." Their principle might be right on this great detail. But this left untouched the yet more stringent overruling principle, to "walk in love"; to take part against themselves; to live in this matter, as in everything else, for others. They were not to be at all ashamed of their special principles. But they were to be deeply ashamed of one hour's unloving conduct. They were to be quietly convinced, in respect of private judgment. They were to be more than tolerant—they were to be loving—in respect of common life in the Lord.
Their "strength" in Christ was never to be ungentle; never to be "used like a giant." It was to be shewn, first and most, by patience. It was to take the form of the calm, strong readiness to understand another's point of view. It was to appear as reverence for another's conscience, even when the conscience went astray for want of better light.
Let us take this apostolic principle out into modern religious life. There are times when we shall be specially bound to put it carefully in relation to other principles, of course. When St Paul, some months earlier, wrote to Galatia, and had to deal with an error which darkened the whole truth of the sinner's way to God as it lies straight through Christ, he did not say, "Let every man be quite assured in his own mind." He said (i. 8), "If an angel from heaven preach any other Gospel, which is not another, let him be anathema."The questiontherewas, Is Christ all, or is He not? Is faith all, or is it not, for our laying hold of Him? Even in Galatia, he warned the converts of the miserable and fatal mistake of "biting and devouring one another" (v. 15). But he adjured them not to wreck their peace with God upon a fundamental error.Here, at Rome, the question was different; it was secondary. It concerned certain details of Christian practice. Was an outworn and exaggerated ceremonialism a part of the will of God, in the justified believer's life? It was not so, as a fact. Yet it was a matter on which the Lord, by His Apostle, rather counselled than commanded. It was not of the foundation. And the always overruling law for the discussion was—the tolerance born of love. Let us in our day remember this, whether our inmost sympathies are with "the strong" or with "the weak." In Jesus Christ, it is possible to realize the ideal of this paragraph even in our divided Christendom. It is possible to be convinced, yet sympathetic. It is possible to see the Lord for ourselves with glorious clearness, yet to understand the practical difficulties felt by others, and to love, and to respect, where there are even great divergences. No man works more for a final spiritualconsensusthan he who, in Christ, so lives.
Incidentally meantime, the Apostle, in this passage which so curbs "the strong," lets fall maxims which for ever protect all that is good and true in that well-worn and often misused phrase, "the right of private judgment." No spiritual despot, no claimant to be the autocratic director of a conscience, could have written those words, "Let every man be quite certain in his own mind"; "Who art thou that judgest Another's domestic?" Such sentences assert not the right so much asthe duty, for the individual Christian, of a reverent"thinking for himself." They maintain a true and noble individualism. And there is a special need just now in the Church to remember,in its place, the value of Christian individualism. The idea of the community, the society, is just now so vastly prevalent (doubtless not without the providence of God) in human life, and also in the Church, that an assertion of the individual, which was once disproportionate, is now often necessary, lest the social idea in its turn should be exaggerated into a dangerous mistake. Coherence, mutuality, the truth of the Body and the Members; all this,in its place, is not only important but divine. The individual must inevitably lose where individualism is his whole idea. But it is ill for the community, above all for the Church, where in the total the individual tends really to be merged and lost. Alas for the Church where the Church tries to take the individual's place in the knowledge of God, in the love of Christ, in the power of the Spirit. The religious Community must indeed inevitably lose where religious communism is its whole idea. It can be perfectly strong only where individual consciences are tender, and enlightened; where individual souls personally know God in Christ; where individual wills are ready, if the Lord call, to stand alone for known truth even against the religious Society;—if there also the individualism is not self-will, but Christian personal responsibility; if the man "thinks for himself"on his knees; if he reverences the individualism of others, and the relations of each to all.
The individualism of Rom. xiv., asserted in an argument full of the deepest secrets of cohesion, is the holy and healthful thing it is because it isChristian. It is developed not by the assertion of self, but by individual communion with Christ.
Now he goes on to further and still fuller statements in the same direction: