FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[139]See Dr. Maclaren’s admirable words on this subject inColossians and Philemon(Expositor’s Bible), pp. 336–40; and Dr. Dale’sLectures on Ephesians, Lect. xix., “Wives and Husbands.”[140]In verse 24 St Paul resumes withἀλλά, thebutof opposition and not mere contrast, indicating a case where the claims of husband and Saviour may, conceivably, be in competition.

[139]See Dr. Maclaren’s admirable words on this subject inColossians and Philemon(Expositor’s Bible), pp. 336–40; and Dr. Dale’sLectures on Ephesians, Lect. xix., “Wives and Husbands.”

[140]In verse 24 St Paul resumes withἀλλά, thebutof opposition and not mere contrast, indicating a case where the claims of husband and Saviour may, conceivably, be in competition.

“The Christ is the head of the Church,beingHimself the Saviour of the body.... The Church is subject to the Christ in everything....“The Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present the Church to Himself a gloriousChurch, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and without blemish....“The Christ [nourisheth and cherisheth] the Church; because we are members of His body. ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the Church.”—Eph. v. 23–32.

“The Christ is the head of the Church,beingHimself the Saviour of the body.... The Church is subject to the Christ in everything....

“The Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present the Church to Himself a gloriousChurch, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and without blemish....

“The Christ [nourisheth and cherisheth] the Church; because we are members of His body. ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the Church.”—Eph. v. 23–32.

We have extracted from the apostle’s homily upon marriage the sentences referring to Christ and His Church, in order to gather up their collective import. The main topic of the epistle here again asserts itself; and under the figure of marriage St Paul brings to its conclusion his doctrine on the subject of the Church. This passage answers, theologically, a purpose similar to that of the allegory of Hagar and Sarah in the epistle to the Galatians: it lights up for the imagination the teaching and argument of the former part of the epistle; it shows how the doctrine of Christ and the Church has its counterpart in nature, as the struggle between the legal and evangelical spirit had its counterpart in the patriarchal history.The three detached paragraphs present us three considerations, of which we shall treat the second first in order of exposition: Christ’slove to the Church; Hisauthority over the Church; andthe mystery of the Church’s origin in Him.

I. “Husbands, love your wives, even as the Christ also loved the Church, and gave up Himself for her.” This is parallel to the declaration of Galatians ii. 20: “He loved me; He gave up Himself for me.” The sacrifice of the cross has at once its personal and its collective purpose. Both are to be kept in mind.

On the one hand, we must value infinitely and joyfully assert our individual part in the redeeming love of the Son of God; but we must equally admit the sovereign rights of the Church in the Redeemer’s passion. Our souls bow down before the glory of the love with which He has from eternity sought her for His own. There is in some Christians an absorption in the work of grace within their own hearts, an individualistic salvation-seeking that, like all selfishness, defeats its end; for it narrows and impoverishes the inner life thus sedulously cherished. The Church does not exist simply for the benefit of individual souls; it is an eternal institution, with an affiance to Christ, a calling and destiny of its own; within that universal sphere our personal destiny holds its particular place.

It is “the Christ” who stands, throughout this context (vv. 23–29), over against “the Church” as her Lover and Husband; whereas in the context of Galatians ii. 20 we read “Christ”—the bare personal name—repeated again and again without the distinguishing article.Christis the Person whom the soul knows and loves, with whom it holds communion in the Spirit.The Christis the same regarded in the widescope of His nature and office,—the Christ of humanity and of the ages. “The Christ” of this epistle expands the Saviour’s title to its boundless significance, and gives breadth and length to that which in “Christ” is gathered up into a single point.[141]

This Christ “gave Himself up for the Church,”—yielded Himself to the death which the sins of His people merited and brought upon Him. Under the same verb, the apostle says in Romans iv. 25: He “was deliveredbecause of our trespasses, and raised up because of our justification”—the sacrifice being there regarded on its passive side. Here, as in Galatians ii. 20, the act is made His own,—a voluntary surrender. “No man taketh my life from me,” He said (John x. 18). In His case alone amongst the sons of men, death was neither natural nor inevitable. His surrender of life was an absolute sacrifice. He “laid down His life for His friends,” as no other friend of man could do—the One who died for all. The love measured by this sacrifice is proportionately great.

The sayings of verses 25–27 set the glory of the vicarious death in a vivid light. Of such worth was the person of the Christ, of such significance and moral value His sacrificial death, that it weighed against the trespass, not of a man—Paul or any other—but of a world of men. He “purchased through His own blood,” said Paul to the Ephesian elders, “the Church of God” (Acts xx. 28)—the whole flock that feeds in the pastures of the Great Shepherd, that has passed or will pass through the gates of His fold. Great was the honour and glory with which he was crowned, when led as victim to the altar of the world’s atonement (Heb. ii. 9). Who will not say, as the meekSon of man treads so willingly His mournful path to Calvary, “Worthy is the Lamb!” Is not the heavenly Bridegroom worthy of the bride, that He consents to win by the sacrifice of Himself!

He is worthy; andshe must be made worthy. “He gave up Himself, that He might sanctify her,—that He might Himself present to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind,—that she may be holy and without blemish.” The sanctification of the Church is the grand purpose of redeeming grace. This was the design of God for His sons in Christ before the world’s foundation, “that we should be holy and unblemished before Him” (i. 4). This, therefore, was the end of Christ’s mission upon earth; this was the intention of His sacrificial death. “For their sakes,” said Jesus concerning His disciples, “I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth” (John xvii. 19). His purchase of the Church is no selfish act. To God His Father Christ devotes every spirit of man that is yielded to Him. As the Priest of mankind it was His office thus to consecrate humanity, which is already in purpose and in essence “sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. x. 10).

Only in this passage, where the apostle is thinking of the preparation of the Church for its perfect union with its Head, does he name Christ as ourSanctifier; in 1 Corinthians i. 2 he comes near this expression, addressing his readers as men “sanctified in Christ Jesus.” In the epistle to the Hebrews this character is largely ascribed to Him, being the function of His priesthood. One in nature with the sanctified, Jesus our great Priest “sanctifies us through His own blood,” so that with cleansed consciences we may draw nearto the living God.[142]As Christ the Priest stands towards His people, so Christ the Husband towards His Church. He devotes her with Himself to God. He cleanses her that she may dwell with Him for ever, a spotless bride, dead unto sin and living unto God through Him.

“That He might sanctify her,having cleansed herin the laver of water by the word.” The Church’s purification is antecedent in thought to her sanctification through the sacrifice of Christ; and it is a means thereto. “Ye were washed, ye were sanctified,” writes the apostle in 1 Corinthians vi. 11, putting the two things in the same order. It is the order of doctrine which he has laid down in the epistle to the Romans, where sanctification is built on the foundation laid in justification through the blood of Christ. Through the virtue of the sacrificial death the Church in all her members was washed from the defilements of sin, that she might enter upon God’s service. Of the same initial purification of the heart St John writes in his first epistle (i. 7–9): “The blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.... He is faithful and just, that He should forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” This is “the redemption through Christ’s blood,” for which St Paul in his first words of praise called upon us to bless God (i. 7). It is the special distinction of the New Covenant, which renders possible its other gifts of grace, that “the worshippers once cleansed” need have “no further consciousness of sins” (Heb. x. 2, 14–18). In the theological use here made of the idea ofcleansing, St Paul comes into line with St John and the epistle to the Hebrews. The purification is nothing else than that which he has elsewhere styledjustification. He employs the termssynonymously in the later epistle to Titus (ii. 14; iii. 7).

“Having cleansed” is a phrase congruous with the figure ofthe laver, orbath(comp. again Tit. iii. 5–7),—an image suggested, as one would think, by the bride-bath of the wedding-day in the ancient marriage customs. To this St Paul sees a counterpart in baptism, “the laver of water in the word.” The cleansing and withal refreshing virtues of water made it an obvious symbol of regeneration. The emblem is twofold; it pictures at once the removal of guilt, and the imparting of new strength. One goes into the bath exhausted, and covered with dust; one comes out clean and fresh. Hence the baptism of the new believer in Christ had, in St Paul’s view, a double aspect.[143]It looked backward to the old life of sin abandoned, and forward to the new life of holiness commenced. Thus it corresponded to the burial of Jesus (Rom. vi. 4), the point of juncture between death and resurrection. Baptism served as the visible and formal expression of the soul’s passage through the gate of forgiveness into the sanctified life.

Along with this older teaching, a further and kindred significance is now given to the baptismal rite. It denotes the soul’s affiance to its Lord. As the maiden’s bath on the morning of her marriage betokened the purity in which she united herself to her betrothed, so the baptismal laver summons the Church to present herself “a chaste virgin unto Christ” (2 Cor. xi. 2). It signifies and seals her forgiveness, and pledges her in all her members to await the Bridegroom in garments unspotted from the world, with the pure and faithful love which will not be ashamed before Him at His coming. For this end Christ set up the baptismal laver.Upon our construction of the text, the words “that He might sanctify her” express a purpose complete in itself—viz., that of the Church’s consecration to God. Then follow the means to this sanctification: “having cleansed her in the water-bath through the word,”—which washing, at the same time, has its purpose on the part of the Lord who appointed it—viz., “that He might present her to Himself” a glorious and spotless Church.

At the end of verse 27 the sentence doubles back upon itself, in Paul’s characteristic fashion. The twofold aim of Christ’s sacrifice of love on the Church’s behalf—viz., her consecration to God, and her spotless purity fitting her for perfect union with her Lord—is restated in the final clause, by way of contrast with the “spots and wrinkles and such-like things” that are washed out: “but that she may be holy and without blemish.”

We passed by, for the moment, the concluding phrase of verse 26, with which the apostle qualifies his reference to the baptismal cleansing; we are by no means forgetting it. “Having cleansed her,” he writes, “by the laver of waterin[the]word.” This adjunct is deeply significant. It impresses on baptism a spiritual character, and excludes every theurgic conception of the rite, every doctrine that gives to it in the least degree a mechanical efficacy. “Without the word the sacrament could only influence man by magic, outward or inward” (Dorner). The “word” of which the apostle speaks,[144]is that of chapter vi. 17, “God’s word—the Spirit’s sword”; of Romans x. 8, “the word of faith which we proclaim”; of Luke i. 37, “the word from God which shall not be powerless”; ofJohn xvii. 8, etc., “the words” that the Father had given to the Son, and the Son in turn to men. It is the Divine utterance, spoken and believed. In this accompaniment lies the power of the laver. The baptismal affusion is the outward seal of an inward transaction, that takes place in the spirit of believing utterers and hearers of the gospel word. This saving word receives in baptism its concrete expression; it becomes theverbum visibile.

The “word” in question is defined in Romans x. 8, 9: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thy heart that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!” Let the hearer respond, “I do so confess and believe,” on the strength of this confession he is baptized, and in the conjoint act of faith and baptism—in theobedienceof faith signified by his baptism—he is saved from his past sins and made an heir of life eternal. The rite is the simplest and most universal in application one can conceive. In heathen countries baptism recovers its primitive significance, as the decisive act of rupture with idolatry and acceptance of Christ as Lord, which in our usage is often overlaid and forgotten.

This interpretation gives a key to the obscure text of St Peter upon the same subject (1 Ep. iii. 21): “Baptism saves you—not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the questioning with regard to God of a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The vital constituent of the rite is not the application of water to the body, but the challenge which the word makes therein to the conscience respecting the things of God,—the inquiry thus conveyed, to which a sincere believer in the resurrection of Christ makes joyful and ready answer. It is, infine,the appeal to faithcontained in baptism that gives to the latter its saving worth.

The “word” that makes Christian ordinances valid, is not the past utterance of God alone, which may remain a dead letter, preserved in the oracles of Scripture or the official forms of the Church, but that word alive and active, re-spoken and transmitted from soul to soul by the breath of the Holy Spirit. Without this animating word of faith, baptism is but the pouring or sprinkling of so much water on the body; the Lord’s Supper is only the consumption of so much bread and wine.

All the nations will at last, in obedience to Christ’s command, be baptized into the thrice-holy Name; and the work of baptism will be complete. Then the Church will issue from her bath, cleansed more effectually than the old world that emerged with Noah from the deluge. Every “spot and wrinkle” will pass from her face: the worldly passions that stained her features, the fears and anxieties that knit her brow or furrowed her cheek, will vanish away. In her radiant beauty, in her chaste and spotless love, Christ will lead forth His Church before His Father and the holy angels, “as a bride adorned for her husband.” From eternity He set His love upon her; on the cross He won her back from her infidelity at the price of His blood. Through the ages He has been wooing her to Himself, and schooling her in wise and manifold ways that she might be fit for her heavenly calling. Now the end of this long task of redemption has arrived. The message goes forth to Christ’s friends in all the worlds:“Come, gather yourselves to the great supper of God! The marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready! He hath given her fine linen bright and pure, that she may array herself. Let us rejoice and exult, and give to Him the glory!” Through what cleansing fires, through what baptisms even of blood she has still to pass ere the consummation is reached, He only knows who loved her and gave Himself for her. He will spare to His Church nothing, either of bounty or of trial, that her perfection needs.

II. Concerning Christ’s lordlyauthorityover His Church we have had occasion to speak already in other places. A word or two may be added here.

We acknowledge the Church to be “subject to Christ in everything.” We proclaim ourselves, like the apostle, “slaves of Christ Jesus.” But this subjection is too often a form rather than a fact. In protesting our independence of Popish and priestly lords of God’s heritage, we are sometimes in danger of ignoring our dependence upon Him, and of dethroning, in effect, the one Lord Jesus Christ. Christian communities act and speak too much in the style of political republics. They assume the attitude of self-directing and self-responsible bodies.

The Church is no democracy, any more than it is an aristocracy or a sacerdotal absolutism: it is aChristocracy. The people are not rulers in the house of God; they are the ruled, laity and ministers alike. “One is your Master, even the Christ; and all ye are brethren.” We acknowledge this in theory; but our language and spirit would oftentimes be other than they are, if we were penetrated by the sense of the continual presence and majesty of the Lord Christ in our assemblies. Royalties and nobilities, and the holders of popular power—all whose “names are named in this world,” along with the principalities in heavenly places, when they come into the precincts ofthe Church must lay aside their robes and forget their titles, and speak humbly as in the Master’s presence. What is it to the glorious Church of Jesus Christ that Lord So-and-so wears a coronet and owns half a county? or that Midas can fill her coffers, if he is pleased and humoured? or that this or that orator guides at his will the fierce democracy? He is no more than a man who will die, and appear before the judgement-seat of Christ. The Church’s protection from human tyranny, from schemes of ambition, from the intrusion of political methods and designs, lies in her sense of the splendour and reality of Christ’s dominion, and of her own eternal life in Him.

III. We come now to the profound mystery disclosed, or half-disclosed at the end of this section, that ofthe origination of the Church from Christ, which accounts for His love to the Church and His authority over her. He nourishes and cherishes the Church, we are told in verses 29, 30, “because we are members of His body.”

Now, this membership is, in its origin, as old as creation. God “chose us in Christ before the world’s foundation” (i. 4). We were created in the Son of God’s love, antecedently to our redemption by Him. Such is the teaching of this and the companion epistle (Col. i. 14–18). Christ recovers through the cross that which pertains inherently to Him, which belonged to Him by nature and is as a part of Himself. From this standpoint the connexion of verses 30 and 31 becomes intelligible.[145]It is not, strictly speaking,“on account of this”; but “in correspondence with this”[146]says the apostle, suiting the original phrase to his purpose. The derivation of Eve from the body of Adam, as that is affirmed in the mysterious words of Genesis, is analogous to the derivation of the Church from Christ. The latter relationship existed in its ideal, and as conceived in the purpose of God, prior to the appearance of the human race. In St Paul’s theory, the origin of woman in man which forms the basis of marriage in Scripture, looked further back to the origin of humanity in Christ Himself.

The train of thought that the apostle resumes here he followed in 1 Corinthians xi. 3–12: “I would have you know that the head of every man is the Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.... Man is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.” So it is with Christ and His bride the Church.

“TheLordGod caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof: and the rib which theLordGod had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her to the man. And the man said,

This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh:She shall be called Woman [Isshah], because she was taken out of Man [Ish].Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife:And they shall be one flesh” (Gen. ii. 21–24).

Thus the first father of our race prophesied, and sang his wedding song. In some mystical, but real sense, marriage is areunion, the reincorporation of what had been sundered. Seeking his other self, the complement of his nature, the man breaks the ties of birth and founds a new home. So the inspired author of the passage in Genesis explains the origin of marriage, and the instinct which draws the bridegroom to his bride.

But our apostle sees within this declaration a deeper truth, kept secret from the foundation of the world. When he speaks of “this greatmystery,” he means thereby not marriage itself, butthe saying of Adam about it. This text was a standing problem to the Jewish interpreters. “But for my part,” says the apostle, “I refer it to Christ and to the Church.” St Paul, who has so often before drawn the parallel between Adam and Christ, by the light of this analogy perceives a new and rich meaning in the old dark sentence. It helps him to see how believers in Christ, forming collectively His body, are not only grafted into Him (as he puts it in the epistle to the Romans), but were derived from Him and formed in the very mould of His nature.

What is affirmed in Colossians i. 16, 17 concerning the universe in general, is true in its perfect degree of redeemed humanity: “In Himwere created all things,” as well as “through Him and for Him.” Eve was created in Adam; and Adam in Christ. We are “partakers of a Divine nature,” by our spiritual origin in Him who is the image of God and the root of humanity. The union of the first human pair and every true marriage since, being in effect, as Adam puts it, a restoration and redintegration, symbolizes thefellowship of Christ with mankind. This intention was in the mind of God at the institution of human life; it took expression in the prophetic words of the Book of Genesis, whose deeper sense St Paul is now able for the first time to unfold.

In our union through grace and faith with Christ crucified, we realize again the original design of our being. Christ has purchased by His blood no new or foreign bride, but her who was His from eternity,—the child who had wandered from the Father’s house, the betrothed who had left her Lord and Spouse. In regard to this “mystery of our coherence in Christ,” Richard Hooker says, in words that suggest many aspects of this doctrine: “The Church is in Christ, as Eve was in Adam. Yea, by grace we are every one of us in Christ and in His Church, as by nature we are in our first parents. God made Eve of the rib of Adam. And His Church He frameth out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of man. His body crucified and His blood shed for the life of the world are the true elements of that heavenly being which maketh us such as Himself is of whom we come. For which cause the words of Adam may be fitly the words of Christ concerning His Church, ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones—a true native extract out of mine own body,’ So that in Him, even according to His manhood, we according to our heavenly being are as branches in that root out of which they grow.”[147]

FOOTNOTES:[141]Compare pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.[142]Heb. ii. 9–12, ix. 14, 15, x. 5–22, xiii. 12.[143]See Rom. vi. 1–11; Col. ii. 11, 12; 1 Cor. x. 2, xii. 13.[144]Ἐν ῥήματι.Λόγοςis word as expressive ofthought.Ῥῆμα, the utterance of a living voice,—asentence,pronouncement,message; it is the Greek term employed in all the passages here cited.[145]The words “of His flesh and of His bones,” following “members of His body” in the A.V., appear to be an ancient gloss adopted by the Greek copyists, which was suggested by Gen. ii. 23. They are unsuitable to the idea of a spiritual union, and interrupt rather than help the apostle’s exposition.[146]St Paul changes theἝνεκεν τούτουof the original toἈντὶ τούτου, which conveys the idea that marriage has its counterpart in the fact that we are members of Christ.[147]Ecclesiastical Polity; v. 56 7.

[141]Compare pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.

[142]Heb. ii. 9–12, ix. 14, 15, x. 5–22, xiii. 12.

[143]See Rom. vi. 1–11; Col. ii. 11, 12; 1 Cor. x. 2, xii. 13.

[144]Ἐν ῥήματι.Λόγοςis word as expressive ofthought.Ῥῆμα, the utterance of a living voice,—asentence,pronouncement,message; it is the Greek term employed in all the passages here cited.

[145]The words “of His flesh and of His bones,” following “members of His body” in the A.V., appear to be an ancient gloss adopted by the Greek copyists, which was suggested by Gen. ii. 23. They are unsuitable to the idea of a spiritual union, and interrupt rather than help the apostle’s exposition.

[146]St Paul changes theἝνεκεν τούτουof the original toἈντὶ τούτου, which conveys the idea that marriage has its counterpart in the fact that we are members of Christ.

[147]Ecclesiastical Polity; v. 56 7.

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. ‘Honour thy father and mother,’ which is a first commandment,givenin promise,—‘that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.’ And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord.“Servants, be obedient to them that according to the flesh are your lords, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto the Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the soul; with good will doing service, as unto the Lord, and not unto men: knowing that whatsoever good thing each one doeth, the same shall he receive again from the Lord, whetherhe bebond or free. And, ye lords, do the same things unto them, and forbear threatening: knowing that both their Lord and yours is in heaven, and there is no respect of persons with Him.”—Eph.vi. 1–9.

“Servants, be obedient to them that according to the flesh are your lords, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto the Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the soul; with good will doing service, as unto the Lord, and not unto men: knowing that whatsoever good thing each one doeth, the same shall he receive again from the Lord, whetherhe bebond or free. And, ye lords, do the same things unto them, and forbear threatening: knowing that both their Lord and yours is in heaven, and there is no respect of persons with Him.”—Eph.vi. 1–9.

The Christian family is the cradle and the fortress of the Christian faith. Here its virtues shine most brightly; and by this channel its influence spreads through society and the course of generations. Marriage has been placed under the guardianship of God; it is made single, chaste and enduring, according to the law of creation and the pattern of Christ’s union with His Church. With parents thus united, family honour is secure; and a basis is laid for reverence and discipline within the house.

I. Thus the apostle turns, in the opening words of chapter vi., from the husband and wife to thechildrenof the household. He addresses them as present in the assembly where his letter is read. St Paul accounted the children “holy,” if but one parent belonged to the Church (1 Cor. vii. 14). They were baptized, as we presume, with their fathers or mothers, and admitted, under due precautions,[148]to the fellowship of the Church so far as their age allowed. We cannot limit this exhortation to children of adult age. The “discipline and admonition of the Lord” prescribed in verse 4, belong to children of tender years and under parental control.

Obedienceis the law of childhood. It is, in great part, the child’s religion, to be practised “in the Lord.” The reverence and love, full of a sweet mystery, which the Christian child feels towards its Saviour and heavenly King, add new sacredness to the claims of father and mother. Jesus Christ, the Head over all things, is the orderer of the life of boys and girls. His love and His might guard the little one in the tendance of its parents. The wonderful love of parents to their offspring, and the awful authority with which they are invested, come from the source of human life in God.

The Latinpietasimpressed a religious character upon filial duty. This word signified at once dutifulness towards the gods, and towards parents and kindred. In the strength of its family ties and its deep filial reverence lay the secret of the moral vigour and the unmatched discipline of the Roman commonwealth.The history of ancient Rome affords a splendid illustration of the fifth commandment.

For this is right, says the apostle, appealing to the instincts of natural religion. The child’s conscience begins here. Filial obedience is the primary form of duty. The loyalties of after life take their colour from the lessons learnt at home, in the time of dawning reason and incipient will. Hard indeed is the evil to remove, where in the plastic years of childhood obedience has been associated with base fear, with distrust or deceit, where it has grown sullen or obsequious in habit. From this root of bitterness there spring rank growths of hatred toward authority, jealousies, treacheries, and stubbornness. Obedience rendered “in the Lord” will be frank and willing, careful and constant, such as that which Jesus rendered to the Father.

St Paul reminds the children of the law of the Ten Words, taught to them in their earliest lessons from Scripture. He calls the command in question “a first[orchief] commandment”—just as the great rule, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” isthefirst commandment; for this is no secondary rule or minor precept, but one on which the continuance of the Church and the welfare of society depend. It is a law fundamental as birth itself, written not on the statute-book alone but on the tables of the heart.

Moreover, it is a “commandin promise”—that takes the form of promise, and holds out to obedience a bright future. The two predicates—“first” and “in promise”—as we take it, are distinct. To merge them into one blunts their meaning. This commandment is primary in its importance, and promissory in its import. The promise is quoted from Exodus xx. 12, as it standsin the Septuagint, where the Greek Christian children would read it. But the last clause is abbreviated; St Paul writes “uponthe earth” in place of “the good land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” This blessing is the heritage of dutiful children in every land. Those who have watched the history of godly families of their acquaintance, will have seen the promise verified. The obedience of childhood and youth rendered to a wise Christian rule, forms in the young nature the habits of self-control and self-respect, of diligence and promptitude and faithfulness and kindliness of heart, which are the best guarantees for happiness and success in life. Through parental nurture “godliness” secures its “promise of the life that now is.”

Children are exhorted to submission: fathers togentleness. “Do not,” the apostle says, “anger your children”; in the corresponding place in Colossians, “Do not irritate your children, lest they be disheartened” (ch. iii. 21). In these parallel texts two distinct verbs are rendered by the one English word “provoke.” The Colossian passage warns against the chafing effect of parental exactions and fretfulness, that tend to break the child’s spirit and spoil its temper. Our text warns the father against angering his child by unfair or oppressive treatment. From this verb comes the noun “wrath” (or “provocation”) used in chapter iv. 26, denoting that stirring of anger which gives peculiar occasion to the devil.

Not that the father is forbidden to cross his child’s wishes, or to do anything or refuse anything that may excite its anger. Nothing is worse for a child than to find that parents fear its displeasure, and that it will gain its ends by passion. But the father must not beexasperating, must not needlessly thwart the child’s inclinations and excite in order to subdue its anger, as some will do even of set purpose, thinking that in this way obedience is learnt. This policy may secure submission; but it is gained at the cost of a rankling sense of injustice.

Household rule should be equally firm and kind, neither provoking nor avoiding the displeasure of its subjects, inflicting no severity for severity’s sake, but shrinking from none that fidelity demands. With much parental fondness, there is sometimes in family government a want of seriousness and steady principle, an absence in father or mother of the sense that they are dealing with moral and responsible beings in their little ones, and not with toys, which is reflected in the caprice and self-indulgence of the children’s maturer life. Such parents will give account hereafter of their stewardship with an inconsolable grief.

It is almost superfluous to insist on the apostle’s exhortation to treat children kindly. For them these are days of Paradise, compared with times not far distant. Never were the wants and the fancies of these small mortals catered for as they are now. In some households the danger lies at the opposite extreme from that of over-strictness. The children are idolized. Not their comfort and welfare only, but their humours and caprices become the law of the house. They are “nourished” indeed, but not “in the discipline and admonition of the Lord.” It is a great unkindness to treat our children so that they shall be strangers to hardship and restriction, so that they shall not know what real obedience means, and have no reverence for age, no habits of deference and self-denial. It is the way to breed monsters of selfishness, pamperedcreatures who will be useless and miserable in adult life.

“Discipline and admonition” are distinguished as positive and negative terms. The first is the “training up of the child in the way that he should go”; the second checks and holds him back from the ways in which he should not go. The former word (paideia)—denoting primarilytreating-as-a-boy—signifies very often “chastisement”;[149]but it has a wider sense, embracing instruction besides.[150]It includes the whole course of training by which the boy is reared into a man.—Admonitionis a still more familiar word with St Paul.[151]It may be reproof bearing upon errors in the past; or it may be warning, that points out dangers lying in the future. Both these services parents owe to their children. Admonition implies faults in the nature of the child, and wisdom in the father to see and correct them.

“Foolishness,” says the Hebrew proverb, “is bound up in the heart of a child.” In the Old Testament discipline there was something over-stern. The “hardness of heart” censured by the Lord Jesus, which allowed of two mothers in the house, put barriers between the father and his offspring that rendered “the rod of correction” more needful than it is under the rule of Christ. But correction, in gentler or severer sort, there must be, so long as children spring from sinful parents. The child’s conscience responds to the kindly and searching word of reproof, to the admonition of love. This faithful dealing with his children wins for the father in the end a deep gratitude, and makeshis memory a guard in days of temptation and an object of tender reverence.

The child’s “obediencein the Lord” is its response to “the discipline and admonitionof the Lord” exercised by its parents. The discipline which wise Christian fathers give their children, is the Lord’s discipline applied through them. “Correction and instruction should proceed from the Lord and be directed by the Spirit of the Lord, in such a way that it is not so much the father who corrects his children and teaches them, as the Lord through him” (Monod). Thus the Father of whom every family on earth is named, within each Christian house works all in all. Thus the chief Shepherd, through His under-shepherds, guides and feeds the lambs of His flock. By the gate of His fold fathers and mothers themselves have entered; and the little ones follow with them. In the pastures of His word they nourish them, and rule them with His rod and staff. To their offspring they become an image of the Good Shepherd and the Father in heaven. Their office teaches them more of God’s fatherly ways with themselves. From their children’s humbleness and confidence, from their simple wisdom, their hopes and fears and ignorances, the elders learn deep and affecting lessons concerning their own relations to the heavenly Father.

St Paul’s instruction to fathers applies to all who have the charge of children: to schoolmasters of every degree, whose work, secular as it may be called, touches the springs of moral life and character; to teachers in the Sunday school, successors to the work that Christ assigned to Peter, of shepherding His lambs. These instructors supply the Lord’s nurture to multitudes of children, in whose homes Christian faith and exampleare wanting. The ideas which children form of Christ and His religion, are gathered from what they see and hear in the school. Many a child receives its bias for life from the influence of the teacher before whom it sits on Sunday. The love and meekness of wisdom, or the coldness or carelessness of the one who thus stands between Christ and the infant soul, will make or mar its spiritual future.

II. From the children of the house the apostle proceeds to address theservants—slaves as they were, until the gospel unbound their chains. The juxtaposition of children and slaves is full of significance; it is a tacit prophecy of emancipation. It brings the slave within the household, and gives a new dignity to domestic service.[152]

The Greek philosophers regarded slavery as a fundamental institution, indispensable to the existence of civilized society. That the few might enjoy freedom and culture, the many were doomed to bondage. Aristotle defines the slave as an “animated tool,” and the tool as an “inanimate slave.” Two or three facts will suffice to show how utterly slaves were deprived of human rights in the brilliant times of the classic humanism. In Athens it was the legal rule to admit the evidence of a slave only upon torture, as that of a freeman was received upon oath. Amongst the Romans, if a master had been murdered in his house, the whole of his domestic servants, amounting sometimes to hundreds, were put to death without inquiry. It was a common mark of hospitality to assign to a guest a female slave for the night, like any other convenience.Let it be remembered that the slave population outnumbered the free citizens of the Roman and Greek cities by many times; that they were frequently of the same race, and might be even superior in education to their masters. Indeed, it was a lucrative trade to rear young slaves and train them in literary and other accomplishments, and then to let them out in these capacities for hire. Let any one consider the condition of society which all this involved, and he will have some conception of the degradation in which the masses of mankind were plunged, and of the crushing tyranny that the world laboured under in the boasted days of republican liberty and Hellenic art.

No wonder that the new religion was welcome to the slaves of the Pagan cities, and that they flocked into the Church. Welcome to them was the voice that said: “Come unto me, all ye that are burdened and heavy laden”; welcome the proclamation that made them Christ’s freedmen, “brethren beloved” where they had been “animated tools” (Philem. 16). In the light of such teaching, slavery was doomed. Its re-adoption by Christian nations, and the imposition of its yoke on the negro race, is amongst the great crimes of history,—a crime for which the white man has had to pay rivers of his blood.

The social fabric, as it then existed, was so entirely based upon slavery, that for Christ and the apostles to have proclaimed its abolition would have meant universal anarchy. In writing to Philemon about his converted slave Onesimus, the apostle does not say, “Release him,” though the word seems to be trembling on his lips. In 1 Corinthians vii. 20–24 he even advises the slave who has the chance of manumission to remain where he is, content to be “the Lord’s freedman.”To the Christian slave what mattered it who ruled over his perishing body! his spirit was free, death would be his discharge and enfranchisement. No decree is issued to abolish bond-service between man and man; but it was destroyed in its essence by the spirit of Christian brotherhood. It melted away in the spread of the gospel, as snow and winter melt before the face of spring.

“Ye slaves, obey your lords according to the flesh.” The apostle does not disguise the slave’s subservience; nor does he speak in the language of pity or of condescension. He appeals as a man to men and equals, on the ground of a common faith and service to Christ. He awakens in these degraded tools of society the sense of spiritual manhood, of conscience and loyalty, of love and faith and hope. As in Colossians iii. 22–iv. 1, the apostle designates the earthly master not by his common title (despotēs), but by the very word (kyrios) that is the title of theLordChrist, giving the slave in this way to understand that he has, in common with his master (ver. 9), a higher Lord in the spirit. “Ye are slaves to the Lord Christ!” (Col. iii. 24). St Paul is accustomed to call himself “a slave of Christ Jesus.”[153]Nay, it is even said, in Philippians ii. 7, that Christ Jesus “took the form of a slave!”

How much there was, then, to console the Christian bondman for his lot. In self-abnegation, in the willing forfeiture of personal rights, in his menial and unrequited tasks, in submission to insult and injustice, he found a holy joy. His was a path in which he might closely follow the steps of the great Servant of mankind. His position enabled him to “adorn the Saviour’s doctrine” above other men (Tit. ii. 9, 10).Affectionate, gentle, bearing injury with joyful courage, the Christian slave held up to that hardened and jaded Pagan age the example which it most required. God chose the base things of the world to bring to nought the mighty.

The relations of servant and master will endure, in one shape or other, while the world stands. And the apostle’s injunctions bear upon servants of every order. We are all, in our various capacities, servants of the community. The moral worth of our service and its blessing to ourselves depend on the conditions that are here laid down.

1. There must bea genuine care for our work.

“Obey,” he says, “with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto the Christ.” The fear enjoined is no dread of human displeasure, of the master’s whip or tongue. It is the same “fear and trembling” with which we are bidden to “work out our own salvation” (Phil. ii. 12). The inward work of the soul’s salvation and the outward work of the busy hands labouring in the mine or at the loom, or in the lowliest domestic duties,—all alike are to be performed under a solemn responsibility to God and in the presence of Christ, the Lord of nature and of men, who understands every sort of work, and will render to each of His servants a just and exact reward. No man, whether he be minister of state or stable-groom, will dare to do heedless work, who lives and acts in that august Presence,—

“As ever in the great Task-master’s eye.”

2. The sense of Christ’s Lordship ensureshonesty in work.

So the apostle continues: “Not witheye-service, asmen-pleasers.” Both these are rare compound words,—the former indeed occurring only here and in the companion letter, being coined, probably, by the writer for this use. It is the common fault and temptation of servants in all degrees to observe the master’s eye, and to work busily or slackly as they are watched or not. Such workmen act as they do, because they look to men and not to God. Their work is without conscience and self-respect. The visible master says “Well done!” But there is another Master looking on, who says “Ill done!” to all pretentious doings and works of eye-service,—who sees not as man sees, but judges with the act the motive and intent.

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