FOOTNOTES:

“Humana ante oculos fœde cum vita jaceret,In terris oppressa gravi sub religione,Quæ caput e cœli regionibus ostendebatHorribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,Primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contraEst oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra.”[116]De Rerum Natura: Bk. I., 62–67.

How alienated from the life of God were those who conceived such sentiments, and those whose creed excited this repugnance. And when amongst ourselves, as it occurs in some unhappy instances, a similar bitterness is cherished, it is matter of double sorrow,—of grief at once for the alienation prompting thoughts so dark and unjust towards our God and Father, and for the misshapen guise in which our holy religion has been presented to make this aversion possible.

The phrase “alienated from the life of God” denotes an objective position rather than a subjective disposition,the state and place of the man who is far from God and and his true life. God exiles sinners from His presence. By a necessary law, their sin acts as a sentence of deprivation. Under its ban they go forth, like Cain, from the presence of the Lord. They can no longer partake of the light of life which streams forth evermore from God and fills the souls that abide in His love.

And this banishment was due to the cause already described,—to the radical perversion of the Gentile mind, which is re-affirmed in the double prepositional clause of verse 18: “because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart.” The repeated preposition (because of) attaches the two parallel clauses to the same predicate. Together they serve to explain this sad estrangement from the Divine life; the secondbecausesupplements the first. It is the ingrained “ignorance” of men that excludes them from the life of God; and this ignorance is no misfortune or unavoidable fate, it is due to a positive “hardening of the heart.”

Ignorance is not the mother of devotion, but of indevotion. If men knew God, they would certainly love and serve Him. St Paul agreed with Socrates and Plato in holding that virtue is knowledge. The debasement of the heathen world, he declares again and again, was due to the fact that it “knew not God.”[117]The Corinthian Church was corrupted and its Christian life imperilled by the presence in it of some who “had not the knowledge of God” (1 Cor. xv. 33, 34). At Athens, the centre of heathen wisdom, he spoke of the Pagan ages as “the times of ignorance” (Acts xvii. 30); and found in this want of knowledge a measure ofexcuse. But the ignorance he censures is not of the understanding alone; nor is it curable by philosophy and science. It has an intrinsic ground,—“existinginthem.”

Since the world’s creation, the apostle says, God’s unseen presence has been clearly visible (Rom. i. 20). Yet multitudes of men have always held false and corrupting views of the Divine nature. At this present time, in the full light of Christianity, men of high intellect and wide knowledge of nature are found proclaiming in the most positive terms that God, if He exists, is unknowable. This ignorance it is not for us to censure; every man must give account of himself to God. There may be in individual cases, amongst the enlightened deniers of God in our own days, causes of misunderstanding beyond the will, obstructing and darkening circumstances, on the ground of which in His merciful and wise judgement God may “overlook” that ignorance, even as He did the ignorance of earlier ages. But it is manifest that while this veil remains, those on whose heart it lies cannot partake in the life of God. Living in unbelief, they walk in darkness to the end, knowing not whither they go.

The Gentile ignorance of God was attended, as St Paul saw it, with aninduration of heart, of which it was at once the cause and the effect. There is a wilful stupidity, a studied misconstruction of God’s will, which has played a large part in the history of unbelief. The Israelitish people presented at this time a terrible example of such guilty callousness (Rom. xi. 7–10, 25). They professed a mighty zeal for God; but it was a passion for the deity of their partial and corrupt imagination, which turned to hatred of the true God and Father of men when He appeared in the person of HisSon. Behind their pride of knowledge lay the ignorance of a hard and impenitent heart.

In the case of the heathen, hardness of heart and religious ignorance plainly went together. The knowledge of God was not altogether wanting amongst them; He “left Himself not without witness,” as the apostle told them (Acts xiv. 17). Where there is, amid whatever darkness, a mind seeking after truth and right, some ray of light is given, some gleam of a better hope by which the soul may draw nigh to God,—coming whence or how perhaps none can tell. The gospel of Christ finds in every new land souls waiting for God’s salvation. Such a preparation for the Lord, in hearts touched and softened by the preventings of grace, its first messengers discovered everywhere,—a remnant in Israel and a great multitude amongst the heathen.

But the Jewish nation as a whole, and the mass of the pagans, remained at present obstinately disbelieving. They had no perception of the life of God, and felt no need of it; and when offered, they thrust it from them. Theirs was another god, “the god of this world,” who “blinds the minds of the unbelieving” (2 Cor. iv. 3, 4). And their “ungodliness and unrighteousness” were not to be pitied more than blamed. They might have known better; they were “holding down the truth in unrighteousness,” putting out the light that was in them and contradicting their better instincts. The wickedness of that generation was the outcome of a hardening of heart and blinding of conscience that had been going on for generations past.

III. By two conspicuous features the decaying Paganism of the Christian era was distinguished,—its unbelief and itslicentiousness. In his letter to the Romans St Paul declares that the second of thesedeplorable characteristics was the consequence of the former, and a punishment for it inflicted by God. Here he points to it as a manifestation of the hardening of heart which caused their ignorance of God: “Having lost all feeling, they gave themselves up to lasciviousness, so as to commit every kind of uncleanness in greediness.”

Upon that brilliant classic civilization there lies a shocking stain of impurity. St Paul stamps upon it the burning wordAselgeia (lasciviousness), like a brand on the harlot’s brow. The habits of daily life, the literature and art of the Greek world, the atmosphere of society in the great cities was laden with corruption. Sexual vice was no longer counted vice. It was provided for by public law; it was incorporated into the worship of the gods. It was cultivated in every luxurious and monstrous excess. It was eating out the manhood of the Greek and Latin races. From the imperial Cæsar down to the horde of slaves, it seemed as though every class of society had abandoned itself to the horrid practices of lust.

The “greediness” with which debauchery was then pursued, is at the bottom self-idolatry, self-deification; it is the absorption of the God-given passion and will of man’s nature in the gratification of his appetites. Here lies the reservoir and spring of sin, the burning deep within the soul of him who knows no God but his own will, no law above his own desire. He plunges into sensual indulgence, or he grasps covetously at wealth or office; he wrecks the purity, or tramples on the rights of others; he robs the weak, he corrupts the innocent, he deceives and mocks the simple—to feed the gluttonous idol of self that sits upon God’s seat within him. The military hero wading to a thronethrough seas of blood, the politician who wins power and office by the sleights of a supple tongue, the dealer on the exchange who supplants every competitor by his shrewd foresight and unscrupulous daring, and absorbs the fruit of the labour of thousands of his fellow-men, the sensualist devising some new and more voluptuous refinement of vice,—these are all the miserable slaves of their own lust, driven on by the insatiate craving of the false god that they carry within their breast.

For the light-hearted Greeks, lovers of beauty and of laughter, self was deified as Aphrodité, goddess of fleshly desire, who was turned by their worship intoAselgeia,—she of whom of old it was said, “Her house is the way to Sheol.” Not such as the chaste wife and house-keeping mother of Hebrew praise, but Laïs with her venal charms was the subject of Greek song and art. Pure ideals of womanhood the classic nations had once known—or never would those nations have become great and famous—a Greek Alcestis and Antigoné, Roman Cornelias and Lucretias, noble maids and matrons. But these, in the dissolution of manners, had given place to other models. The wives and daughters of the Greek citizens were shut up to contempt and ignorance, while the priestesses of vice—hetæræthey were called, orcompanionsof men—queened it in their voluptuous beauty, until their bloom faded and poison or madness ended their fatal days.

Amongst the Jews whom our Lord addressed, the choice lay between “God and Mammon”; in Corinth and Ephesus, it was “Christ or Belial.” These ancient gods of the world—“mud-gods,” as Thomas Carlyle called them—are set up in the high places of our populous cities. To the slavery of business and the pride ofwealth men sacrifice health and leisure, improvement of mind, religion, charity, love of country, family affection. How many of the evils of English society come from this root of all evil!

Hard by the temple of Mammon stands that of Belial. Their votaries mingle in the crowded amusements of the day and rub shoulders with each other. Aselgeia flaunts herself, wise observers tell us, with increasing boldness in the European capitals. Theatre and picture-gallery and novel pander to the desire of the eye and the lust of the flesh. The daily newspapers retail cases of divorce and hideous criminal trials with greater exactness than the debates of Parliament; and the appetite for this garbage grows by what it feeds upon. It is plain to see whereunto the decay of public decency and the revival of the animalism of pagan art and manners will grow, if it be not checked by a deepened Christian faith and feeling.

Past feelingsays the apostle of the brazen impudicity of his time. The loss of the religious sense blunted all moral sensibility. The Greeks, by an early instinct of their language, had one word formodestyandreverence, for self-respect and awe before the Divine. There is nothing more terrible than the loss of shame. When immodesty is no longer felt as an affront, when there fails to rise in the blood and burn upon the cheek the hot resentment of a wholesome nature against things that are foul, when we grow tolerant and familiar with their presence, we are far down the slopes of hell. It needs only the kindling of passion, or the removal of the checks of circumstance, to complete the descent. The pain that the sight of evil gives is a divine shield against it. Wearing this shield, the sinless Christ fought our battle, and bore the anguish of our sin.

FOOTNOTES:[112]“The persons here denounced,” says Lightfoot on Phil. iii. 18, “are not the Judaizing teachers, but the antinomian reactionists.... The stress of Paul’s grief lies in the fact that they degraded the true doctrine of liberty, so as to minister to their profligate and worldly living.” Comp. 1 Peter iv. 3, 4; 2 Peter ii. 18–22.[113]Comp. Col. ii. 20–iii. 4; Gal. vi. 14, 15.[114]Phæao: § xxxv.[115]See p. 129.[116]“When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth, crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face” (Munro).[117]1 Thess. iv. 5; 2 Thess. i. 8; Gal. iv. 8, 9.

[112]“The persons here denounced,” says Lightfoot on Phil. iii. 18, “are not the Judaizing teachers, but the antinomian reactionists.... The stress of Paul’s grief lies in the fact that they degraded the true doctrine of liberty, so as to minister to their profligate and worldly living.” Comp. 1 Peter iv. 3, 4; 2 Peter ii. 18–22.

[113]Comp. Col. ii. 20–iii. 4; Gal. vi. 14, 15.

[114]Phæao: § xxxv.

[115]See p. 129.

[116]“When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth, crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face” (Munro).

[117]1 Thess. iv. 5; 2 Thess. i. 8; Gal. iv. 8, 9.

“But ye did not so learn the Christ; if so be that ye heard Him, and were taught in Him, even as truth is in Jesus: that ye put away, as concerning your former manner of life, the old man, which waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”—Eph.iv. 20–24.

But as for you!—The apostle points us from heathendom to Christendom. From the men of blinded understanding and impure life he turns to the cleansed and instructed. “Not thus didyoulearn the Christ”—not to remain in the darkness and filth of your Gentile state.

The phrase is highly condensed. The apostle, in this letter so exuberant in expression, yet on occasion is as concise as in Galatians. One is tempted, as Beza suggested[118]and Hofmann insists, to put a stop at this point and to read: “But with you it is not so:[119]you learned the Christ!” In spite of its abruptness, this construction would be necessary, if it were only “the Gentiles” of verse 17 with whose “walk” St Paul means to contrast that of his readers. But, as wehave seen, he has before his eye a third class of men, unprincipled Christian teachers (ver. 14), men who had in some sense learnt of Christ and yet walked in Gentile ways and were leading others back to them.[120]Verse 20, after all, forms a coherent clause. It points an antithesis of solemn import. There are genuine, and there are supposed conversions; there are true and false ways of learning Christ.

Strictly speaking, it is notChrist, butthe Christwhom St Paul presumes his readers to have duly learnt.[121]The words imply a comprehending faith, that knows who and what Christ is and what believing in Him means, that has mastered His great lessons. To such a faith, which views Christ in the scope and breadth of His redemption, this epistle throughout appeals; for its impartation and increase St Paul prayed the wonderful prayer of the third chapter. When he writes not simply, “You have believed in Christ,” but “You havelearned the Christ,” he puts their faith upon a high level; it is the faith of approved disciples in Christ’s school. For such men the “philosophy and vain deceit” of Colossæ and the plausibilities of the new “scheme of error” will have no charm. They have found the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are hidden in Christ.

The apostle’s confidence in the Christian knowledge of his readers is, however, qualified in verse 21 in a somewhat remarkable way: “If verily it is He whom you heard, and in Him that you were taught, as truth is in Jesus.” We noted at the outset the bearing of this sentence on the destination of the letter. It would never occur to St Paul to question whether theEphesianChristians were taught Christ’s true doctrine. If there were any believers in the world who, beyond a doubt, had heard the truth as in Jesus in its certainty and fulness, it was those amongst whom the apostle had “taught publicly and from house to house,” “not shunning to declare all the counsel of God” and “for three years night and day unceasingly with tears admonishing each single one” (Acts xx. 18–35). To suppose these words written in irony, or in a modest affectation, is to credit St Paul with something like an ineptitude. Doubt was really possible as to whether all his readers had heard of Christ aright, and understood the obligations of their faith. Supposing, as we have done, that the epistle was designed for the Christians of the province of Asia generally, this qualification is natural and intelligible.

There are several considerations which help to account for it. When St Paul first arrived at Ephesus, eight years before this time, he “found certain disciples” there who had been “baptized into John’s baptism,” but had not “received the Holy Spirit” nor even heard of such a thing (Acts xix. 1–7). Apollos formerly belonged to this company, having preached and “taught carefully the things about Jesus,” while he “knew only the baptism of John” (Acts xviii. 25). One very much desires to know more about this Church of the Baptist’s disciples in Asia Minor. Its existence so far away from Palestine testifies to the power of John’s ministry and the deep impression that his witness to the Messiahship of Jesus made on his disciples. The ready reception of Paul’s fuller gospel by this little circle indicates that their knowledge of Jesus Christ erred only by defect; they had received it from Judæa by a source dating earlier than the day of Pentecost. The partial knowledge of Jesus current for so long atEphesus, may have extended to other parts of the province, where St Paul had not been able to correct it as he had done in the metropolis.

Judaistic Christians, such as those who at Rome “preached Christ of envy and strife,” were also disseminating an imperfect Christian doctrine. They limited the rights of uncircumcised believers; they misrepresented the Gentile apostle and undermined his influence. A third and still more lamentable cause of uncertainty in regard to the Christian belief of Asian Churches, was introduced by the rise of Gnosticizing error in this quarter. Some who read the epistle had, it might be, received their first knowledge of Christ through channels tainted with error similar to that which was propagated at Colossæ. With the seed of the kingdom the enemy was mingling vicious tares. The apostle has reason to fear that there were those within the wide circle to which his letter is addressed, who had in one form or other heard a different gospel and a Christ other than the true Christ of apostolic teaching.

Where does he find the test and touchstone of the true Christian doctrine?—In the historical Jesus: “as there is truthin Jesus.” Not often, nor without distinct meaning, does St Paul use the birth-name of the Saviour by itself. Where he does, it is most significant. He has in mind the facts of the gospel history; he speaks of “the Jesus”[122]of Nazareth and Calvary. The Christ whom St Paul feared that some of his readers might have heard of was not the veritableJesusChrist, but a shadowy and notional Christ, lost amongst the crowd of angels, such as was now being taught to the Colossians. This Christ was neither the image of God, nor the true Son of man. He supplied no sufficient redemption from sin, no ideal of character, no sure guidance and authority to direct the daily walk. Those who followed such a Christ would fall back unchecked into Gentile vice. Instead of the light of life shining in the character and words of Jesus, they must resort to “the doctrines and commandments of men” (Col. ii. 8–23).

Amongst the Gnostics of the second century there was held a distinction between the human (fleshly and imperfect)Jesusand the DivineChrist, who were regarded as distinct beings, united to each other from the time of the baptism of Jesus to His death. The critics who assert the late and non-Pauline authorship of the epistle, assert that this peculiar doctrine is aimed at in the words before us, and that the identification of Christ with Jesus has a polemical reference to this advanced Gnostic error. The verses that follow show that the writer has a different and entirely practical aim. The apostle points us to our true ideal, to “the Christ” of all revelation manifest in “the Jesus” of the gospel. Here we see “the new man created after God,” whose nature we must embody in ourselves. The counteractive of a false spiritualism is found in the incarnate life of the Son of God. The dualism which separated God from the world and man’s spirit from his flesh, had its refutation in “the Jesus” of Paul’s preaching, whom we see in the Four Gospels. Those who persisted in the attempt to graft the dualistic theosophy upon the Christian faith, were in the end compelled to divide and destroy the ChristHimself. They broke up intoJesus and Christthe unity of His incarnate Person.

It is an entire mistake to suppose that the apostle Paul was indifferent to the historical tradition of Jesus; that the Christ he taught was a product of his personal inspiration, of his inward experience and theological reflection. This preaching of an abstract Christ, distinct from the actual Jesus, is the very thing that he condemns. Although his explicit references in the epistles to the teaching of Jesus and the events of His earthly life are not numerous, they are such as to prove that the Churches St Paul taught were well instructed in that history. From the beginning the apostle made himself well acquainted with the facts concerning Jesus, and had become possessor of all that the earlier witnesses could relate. His conception of the Lord Jesus Christ is living and realistic in the highest degree. Its germ was in the visible appearance of the glorified Jesus to himself on the Damascus road; but that expanding germ struck down its roots into the rich soil of the Church’s recollections of the incarnate Redeemer as He lived and taught and laboured, as He died and rose again amongst men. Paul’s Christ was the Jesus of Peter and of John and of our own Evangelists; there was no other. He warns the Church against all unhistorical, subjective Christs, the product of human speculation.

The Asian Christians who held a true faith, had received Jesus as the Christ. So accepting Him, they accepted a fixed standard and ideal of life for themselves. With Jesus Christ evidently set forth before their eyes, let them look back upon their past life; let them contrast what they had been with whatthey are to be. Let them consider what things they must “put off” and what “put on,” so that they may “be found in Him.”

Strangely did the image of Jesus confront the pagan world; keenly its light smote on that gross darkness. There stood the Word made flesh—purity immaculate, love in its very self—shaped forth in no dream of fancy or philosophy, but in the veritable man Christ Jesus, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate,—truth expressed

“In loveliness of perfect deeds,More strong than all poetic thought.”

And this life of Jesus, living in those who loved Him (2 Cor. iv. 11), ended not when He passed from earth; it passed from land to land, speaking many tongues, raising up new witnesses at every step as it moved along. It was not a new system, a new creed, butnew menthat it gave the world in Christ’s disciples, men redeemed from all iniquity, noble and pure as sons of God. It was the sight of Jesus, and of men like Jesus, that shamed the old world, so corrupt and false and hardened in its sin. In vain she summoned the gates of death to silence the witnesses of Jesus. At last

“She veiled her eagles, snapped her sword,And laid her sceptre down;Her stately purple she abhorred,And her imperial crown.She broke her flutes, she stopped her sports,Her artists could not please;She tore her books, she shut her courts,She fled her palaces;Lust of the eye and pride of life—She left it all behind,And hurried, torn with inward strife,The wilderness to find” (Obermann once more).

The Galilean conquered! The new man was destined to convict and destroy the old. “God sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. viii. 3). When Jesus lived, died, and rose again, an inconceivable revolution in human affairs had been effected. The cross was planted on the territory of the god of this world; its victory was inevitable. The “grain of wheat” fell into the ground to die: there might be still a long, cruel winter; many a storm and blight would delay its growth; but the harvest was secure. Jesus Christ was the type and the head of a new moral order, destined to control the universe.

To see the new and the old man side by side was enough to assure one that the future lay with Jesus. Corruption and decrepitude marked every feature of Gentile life. It was gangrened with vice,—“wasting away in its deceitful lusts.”

St Paul had before his eyes, as he wrote, a conspicuous type of the decaying Pagan order. He had appealed as a citizen of the empire toCæsaras his judge. He was in durance asNero’sprisoner, and was acquainted with the life of the palace (Phil. i. 13). Never, perhaps, has any line of rulers dominated mankind so absolutely or held in their single hand so completely the resources of the world as did the Cæsars of St Paul’s time. Their name has ever since served to mark the summit of autocratic power. It was, surely, the vision of Tiberius sitting at Rome that Jesus saw in the wilderness, when “the devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and said, All this hath been delivered to me, and to whomsoever I will I give it.” The Emperor was the topstone of the splendid edifice of Pagan civilization, that had beenrearing for so many ages. And Nero was the final product and paragon of the Cæsarean house!

At this epoch, writes M. Renan,[123]“Nero and Jesus, Christ and Antichrist, stand opposed, confronting each other, if I may dare to say so, like heaven and hell.... In face of Jesus there presents itself a monster, who is the ideal of evil as Jesus of goodness.... Nero’s was an evil nature, hypocritical, vain, frivolous, prodigiously given to declamation and display; a blending of false intellect, profound wickedness, cruel and artful egotism carried to an incredible degree of refinement and subtlety.... He is a monster who has no second in history, and whose equal we can only find in the pathological annals of the scaffold.... The school of crime in which he had grown up, the execrable influence of his mother, the stroke of parricide forced upon him, as one might say, by this abominable woman, by which he had entered on the stage of public life, made the world take to his eyes the form of a horrible comedy, with himself for the chief actor in it. At the moment we have now reached [when St Paul entered Rome], Nero had detached himself completely from the philosophers who had been his tutors. He had killed nearly all his relations. He had made the most shameful follies the common fashion. A large part of Roman society, following his example, had descended to the lowest level of debasement. The cruelty of the ancient world had reached its consummation.... The worldhad touched the bottom of the abyss of evil; it could only reascend.”

Such was the man who occupied at this time the summit of human power and glory,—the man who lighted the torch of Christian martyrdom and at whose sentence St Paul’s head was destined to fall, the Wild Beast of John’s awful vision. Nero of Rome, the son of Agrippina, embodied the triumph of Satan as the god of this world. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, reigned only in a few loving and pure hearts. Future history, as the scroll of the Apocalypse unfolded it, was to be the battle-field of these confronting powers, the war of Christ with Antichrist.

Could it be doubtful, to any one who had measured the rival forces, on which side victory must fall? St Paul pronounces the fate of the whole kingdom of evil in this world, when he declares that “the old man” is “perishing, according to the lusts of deceit.” It is an application of the maxim he gave us in Galatians vi. 8: “He that soweth to his own flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.” In its mad sensuality and prodigal lusts, the vile Roman world he saw around him was speeding to its ruin. That ruin was delayed; there were moral forces left in the fabric of the Roman State, which in the following generations re-asserted themselves and held back for a time the tide of disaster; but in the end Rome fell, as the ancient world-empires of the East had fallen, through her own corruption, and by “the wrath” which is “revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” For the solitary man, for the household, for the body politic and the family of nations the rule is the same. “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”

The passions which carry men and nations to theirruin are “lustsof deceit.” The tempter is the liar. Sin is an enormous fraud. “You shall not die,” said the serpent in the garden; “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be as God!” So forbidden desire was born, and “the womanbeing deceivedfell into transgression.”

“So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraudLed Eve, our credulous mother, to the treeOf prohibition, root of all our woe.”

By its baits of sensuous pleasure, and still more by its show of freedom and power to stir our pride, sin cheats us of our manhood; it sows life with misery, and makes us self-despising slaves. It knows how to use God’s law as an incitement to transgression, turning the very prohibition into a challenge to our bold desires. “Sin taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me.” Over the pit of destruction play the same dancing lights that have lured countless generations,—the glitter of gold; the purple robe and jewelled coronet; the wine moving in the cup; fair, soft faces lit with laughter. The straying foot and hot desires give chase, till the inevitable moment comes when the treacherous soil yields, and the pursuer plunges beyond escape into sin’s reeking gulfs. Then the illusion is over. The gay faces grow foul; the glittering prize proves dust; the sweet fruit turns to ashes; the cup of pleasure burns with the fire of hell. And the sinner knows at last that his greed has cheated him, that he is as foolish as he is wicked.

Let us remember that there is but one way of escape from the all-encompassing deceit of sin. It is in “learning Christ.” Not in learningaboutChrist, butin learningHim. It is a common artifice of the great deceit to “wash the outside of cup and platter.” The old man is improved and civilized; he is baptized in infancy and called a Christian. He puts off many of his old ways, he dresses himself in a decorous garb and style; and so deceives himself into thinking that he is new, while his heart is unchanged. He may turn ascetic, and deny this or thattohimself; and yet never denyhimself. He observes religious forms and makes charitable benefactions, as though he would compound with God for his unforsaken sin. But all this is only a plausible and hateful manifestation of the lusts of deceit. To learn the Christ, is to learn the way of the cross. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me,” He bids us; “for I am meek and lowly in heart.” Till we have done this, we are not even at the beginning of our lesson.

From the perishing old man the apostle turns, in verses 23, 24, to the new. These two clauses differ in their form of expression more than the English rendering indicates.[124]When he writes, “that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” it is acontinual rejuvenationthat he describes; the verb is present in tense, and the newness implied is that of recency and youth, newness in point of age. But the “new man” to be “put on” (ver. 24) is of anew kind and order; and in this instance the verb is of the aorist tense signifying an event, not a continuous act. The new man is put on when the Christian way of life is adopted, when we enter personally into the new humanity founded in Christ. We “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. xiii. 14), who covers and absorbsthe old self, even as those who await in the flesh His second advent will “put on the house from heaven,” when “the mortal” in them will be “swallowed up of life” (2 Cor. v. 2–4). Thus two distinct conceptions of the life of faith are placed before our minds. It consists, on the one hand, of a quickening, constantly renewed, in the springs of our individual thought and will; and it is at the same time the assumption of another nature, the investiture of the soul with the Divine character and form of its being.

Borne on the stream of his evil passions, we saw “the old man” in his “former manner of life,” hastening to the gulf of ruin. For the man renewed in Christ the stream of life flows steadily in the opposite direction, and with a swelling tide moves upward to God. His knowledge and love are always growing in depth, in refinement, in energy and joy. Thus it was with the apostle in his advancing age. The fresh impulses of the Holy Spirit, the unfolding to his spirit of the mystery of God, the fellowship of Christian brethren and the interests of the work of the Church renewed Paul’s youth like the eagle’s. If in years and toil he is old, his soul is full of ardour, his intellect keen and eager; the “outward man decays, but the inward man is renewed day by day.”

This new nature had a new birth. The soul reanimating itself perpetually from the fresh springs that are in God, had in God the beginning of its renovated life. We have not to create or fashion for ourselves the perfect life, but toadoptit,—to realize the Christian ideal (ver. 24). We are called to put on the new type of manhood as completely as we renounce the old (ver. 22). The new man is there before our eyes, manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, in whom welive henceforth. When we “learn the Christ,” when we have become His true disciples, we “put on” His nature and “walk in Him.” The inward reception of His Spirit is attended by the outward assumption of His character as our calling amongst men.

Now, the character of Jesus is human nature as God first formed it. It existed in His thoughts from eternity. If it be asked whether St Paul refers, in verse 24, to the creation of Adam in God’s likeness, or to the image of God appearing in Jesus Christ, or to the Christian nature formed in the regenerate, we should say that, to the apostle’s mind, the first and last of these creations are merged in the second. The Son of God’s love is His primeval image. The race of Adam was created in Christ (Col. i. 15, 16). The first model of that image, in the natural father of mankind, was marred by sin and has become “the old man” corrupt and perishing. The new pattern replacing this broken type is the original ideal, displayed “in the likeness of sinful flesh”—wearing no longer the charm of childish innocence, but the glory of sin vanquished and sacrifice endured—in the Son of God made perfect through suffering. Through all there has been only one image of God, one ideal humanity. The Adam of Paradise was, within his limits, what the Image of God had been in perfectness from eternity. And Jesus in His human personality represented, under the changed circumstances brought about by sin, what Adam might have grown to be as a complete and disciplined man.

The qualities which the apostle insists upon in the new man are two: “righteousnessandholiness[orpiety] of the truth.” This is the Old Testament conception of a perfect life, whose realization the devout Zacharias anticipates when he sings how God has “shown mercyto our fathers, in remembrance of His holy covenant, ... that we being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.” Enchanting vision, still to be fulfilled! “Righteousness” is the sum of all that should be in a man’s relations towards God’s law; “holiness” is a right disposition and bearing towards God Himself. This is not St Paul’s ordinary word for holiness (sanctification,sanctity), which he puts so often at the head of his letters, addressing his readers as “saints” in Christ Jesus. That other term designates Christian believers as devoted persons, claimed by God for His own;[125]it signifies holiness as a calling. The word of our text denotes specifically the holiness of temper and behaviour—“that becometh saints.” The two words differ very much asdevotednessfromdevoutness.[126]

A religious temper, a reverent mind marks the true child of grace. His soul is full of the loving fear of God. In the new humanity, in the type of man that will prevail in the latter days when the truth as in Jesus has been learnt by mankind, justice and piety will hold a balanced sway. The man of the coming times will not be atheistic or agnostic: he will be devout. He will not be narrow and self-seeking; he will not be pharisaic and pretentious, practising the world’s ethics with the Christian’s creed: he will be upright and generous, manly and godlike.

FOOTNOTES:[118]Quid si postοὕτωςdistinctionem ascribas?Vos autem non ita(subaudifacere convenit),qui didicistis, etc.[119]Comp. Numb. xii. 7; Ps. i. 4; Luke xxii. 26, for this Hebraistic turn of expression.[120]Comp. Phil. iii. 2, 18; Titus i. 16.[121]See pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.[122]Ἐστὶν ἀληθεία ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ.The article with the proper name is most significant. It points to the definite image of Jesus, in His actual person, that was made familiar by the preaching of Paul and the other apostles.[123]L’Antéchrist, pp. i. ii. 1, 2. This is a powerful and impressive work, of whose value those who know only theVie de Jésuscan have little conception. Renan’s faults are many and deplorable; but he is a writer of genius and of candour. His rationalism teems with precious inconsistencies. One hears in him always the Church bells ringing under the sea, the witness of a faith buried in the heart and never silenced, to which he confesses touchingly in the Preface to hisSouvenirs.[124]ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν, καὶ ἐνδυσασθαι τὸν καίνον ἄνθρωπον, τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα.[125]Comp. pp. 29, 30.[126]It is important to distinguish the Greek adjectivesἅγιοςandὅσιος, with their derivatives. See Cremer’sN. T. Lexiconon these words, and Trench’sN. T. Synonyms, § lxxxviii. Of the latter word, 1 Thess. ii. 10; 1 Tim. i. 9, ii. 8; 2 Tim. iii. 3; Tit. i. 8 are the only examples in St Paul.

[118]Quid si postοὕτωςdistinctionem ascribas?Vos autem non ita(subaudifacere convenit),qui didicistis, etc.

[119]Comp. Numb. xii. 7; Ps. i. 4; Luke xxii. 26, for this Hebraistic turn of expression.

[120]Comp. Phil. iii. 2, 18; Titus i. 16.

[121]See pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.

[122]Ἐστὶν ἀληθεία ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ.The article with the proper name is most significant. It points to the definite image of Jesus, in His actual person, that was made familiar by the preaching of Paul and the other apostles.

[123]L’Antéchrist, pp. i. ii. 1, 2. This is a powerful and impressive work, of whose value those who know only theVie de Jésuscan have little conception. Renan’s faults are many and deplorable; but he is a writer of genius and of candour. His rationalism teems with precious inconsistencies. One hears in him always the Church bells ringing under the sea, the witness of a faith buried in the heart and never silenced, to which he confesses touchingly in the Preface to hisSouvenirs.

[124]ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν, καὶ ἐνδυσασθαι τὸν καίνον ἄνθρωπον, τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα.

[125]Comp. pp. 29, 30.

[126]It is important to distinguish the Greek adjectivesἅγιοςandὅσιος, with their derivatives. See Cremer’sN. T. Lexiconon these words, and Trench’sN. T. Synonyms, § lxxxviii. Of the latter word, 1 Thess. ii. 10; 1 Tim. i. 9, ii. 8; 2 Tim. iii. 3; Tit. i. 8 are the only examples in St Paul.

“Wherefore, having put away falsehood, ‘speak ye truth each one with his neighbour’: for we are members one of another.“‘Be ye angry, and sin not’: let not the sun go down upon your provocation: neither give place to the devil.“Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have whereof to give to him that hath need.“Let no worthless speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption.“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, even as the Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet smell.“But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becometh saints; nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not befitting: but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know of a surety, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no man deceive you with empty words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the sons of disobedience.”—Eph.iv. 25—v. 6.

“Wherefore, having put away falsehood, ‘speak ye truth each one with his neighbour’: for we are members one of another.

“‘Be ye angry, and sin not’: let not the sun go down upon your provocation: neither give place to the devil.

“Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have whereof to give to him that hath need.

“Let no worthless speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption.

“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, even as the Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet smell.

“But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becometh saints; nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not befitting: but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know of a surety, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no man deceive you with empty words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the sons of disobedience.”—Eph.iv. 25—v. 6.

The transformation described in the last paragraph (vv. 17–24) has now to be carried into detail. The vices of the old heathen self must be each ofthem replaced by the corresponding graces of the new man in Christ Jesus.

The peculiarity of the instructions given by the apostle for this purpose does not lie in the virtues enjoined, but in the light in which they are set and the motives by which they are inculcated. The common conscience condemns lying and theft, malice and uncleanness; they were denounced with eloquence by heathen moralists. But the ethics of the New Testament differed in many respects from the best moral philosophy: in its direct appeal to the conscience, in its vigour and decision, in the clearness with which it traced our maladies to the heart’s alienation from God; but most of all, in the remedy which it applied, the new principle of faith in Christ. The surgeon’s knife lays bare the root of the disease; and the physician’s hand pours in the healing balm.

Let us observe at the outset that St Paul deals with the actual and pressing temptations of his readers. He recalls what they had been, and forbids them to be such again. The associations and habits of former life, the hereditary force of evil, the atmosphere of Gentile society, and added to all this, as we discover from chapter v. 6, the persuasions of the sophistical teachers now beginning to infest the Church, tended to draw the Asian Christians back to Gentile ways and to break down the moral distinctions that separated them from the pagan world.

Amongst the discarded vices of the forsaken Gentile life, the following are here distinguished:lying,theft,anger,idle speech,malice,impurity,greed. These may be reduced to sins of temper, of word, and of act. Let us discuss them in the order in which they are brought before us.

1. “The falsehood”[127]of verse 25 is the antithesis of “the truth” from which righteousness and holiness spring (ver. 24). In accepting the one, Paul’s Gentile readers “had put off” the other. When these heathen converts became Christians, they renounced the great lie of idolatry, the system of error and deceit on which their lives were built. They have passed from the realm of illusion to that of truth. “Now,” the apostle says, “let your daily speech accord with this fact: you have bidden farewell to falsehood;speaktruth each with his neighbour.” The true religion breeds truthful men; a sound faith makes an honest tongue. Hence there is no vice more hateful than jesuitry, nothing more shocking than the conduct of those who defend what they call “the truth” by disingenuous arts, by tricks of rhetoric and the shifts of an unscrupulous partizanship. “Will you speak unrighteously for God, and talk deceitfully for Him?”As Christ’s truth is in mecries the apostle, when he would give the strongest possible assurance of the fact he wishes to assert.[128]The social conventions and make-believes, the countless simulations and dissimulations by which the game of life is carried on belong to the old man with his lusts of deceit, to the universal lie that runs through allungodliness and unrighteousness, which is in the last analysis the denial of God.

St Paul applies here the words of Zechariah viii. 16, in which the prophet promises to restored Israel better days on the condition that they should “speak truth each with his neighbour, and judge truth and the judgement of peace in their gates. And let none of you,” he continues, “imagine evil in his heart against his neighbour; and love no false oath. For all these things do I hate, saith the Lord.” Such is the law of the New Covenant life. No doubt, St Paul is thinking of the intercourse of Christians with each other when he quotes this command and adds the reason, “For we aremembers one of another.” But the wordneighbour, as Jesus showed, has in the Christian vocabulary no limited import; it includes the Samaritan, the heathen man and publican. When the apostle bids his converts “Follow what is good towards one another, and towards all” (1 Thess. v. 15), he certainly presumes the neighbourly obligation of truthfulness to be no less comprehensive.

Believers in Christ represent a communion which in principle embraces all men. The human race is one family in Christ. For any man to lie to his fellow is, virtually, to lie to himself. It is as if the eye should conspire to cheat the hand, or the one hand play false to the other. Truth is the right which each man claims instinctively from his neighbour; it is the tacit compact that binds together all intelligences. Without neighbourly and brotherly love perfect truthfulness is scarcely possible. “Self-respect will never destroy self-seeking, which will always find in self-interest a side accessible to the temptations of falsehood” (Harless).

2. Like the first precept, the second is borrowedfrom the Old Testament and shaped to the uses of the New. “Be ye angry, and sin not”: so the words of Psalm iv. 4 stand in the Greek version and in the margin of our Revised Bible, where we commonly read, “Stand in awe, and sin not. Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.” The apostle’s further injunction, that anger should be stayed before nightfall, accords with the Psalmist’s words; the calming effect of the night’s quiet the apostle anticipates in the approach of evening. As the day’s heat cools and its strain is relaxed, the fires of anger should die down. With the Jews, it will be remembered, the new day began at evening. Plutarch, the excellent heathen moralist contemporary with St Paul, gives this as an ancient rule of the Pythagoreans: “If at any time they happened to be provoked by anger to abusive language, before the sun set they would take each other’s hands and embracing make up their quarrel.” If Paul had heard of this admirable prescription, he would be delighted to recognize and quote it as one of those many facts of Gentile life which “show the work of the law written in their hearts” (Rom. ii. 15). The passion which outlives the day, on which the angry man sleeps and that wakes with him in the morning, takes root in his breast; it becomes a settled rancour, prompting ill thoughts and deeds.

There is no surer way of tempting the devil to tempt us than to brood over our wrongs. Every cherished grudge is a “place given” to the tempter, a new entrenchment for the Evil One in his war against the soul, from which he may shoot his “fire-tipped darts” (vi. 16). Let us dismiss with each day the day’s vexations, commending as evening falls our cares and griefs to the Divine compassion and seeking, as for ourselves,so for those who may have done us wrong forgiveness and a better mind. We shall rise with the coming light armed with new patience and charity, to bring into the world’s turmoil a calm and generous wisdom that will earn for us the blessing of the peacemakers, who shall be called sons of God.

Still the apostle says: “Be angry, and sin not.” He does not condemn anger in itself, nor wholly forbid it a place within the breast of the saint. Wrath is a glorious attribute of God,—perilous, indeed, for the best of men; but he who cannot be angry has no strength for good. The apostle knew this holy passion, the flame of Jehovah that burns unceasingly against the false and foul and cruel. But he knew its dangers—how easily an ardent soul kindled to exasperation forgets the bounds of wisdom and love; how strong and jealous a curb the temper needs, lest just indignation turn to sin, and Satan gain over us a double advantage, first by the wicked provocation and then by the uncontrolled resentment it excites.

3. From anger we pass totheft.

The eighth commandment is put here in a form indicating that some of the apostle’s readers had been habitual sinners against it. Literally his words read: “Let himthat stealsplay the thief no more.” The Greek present participle does not, however, necessarily imply a pursuit now going on, but an habitual or characteristic pursuit, that by which the agent was known and designated: “Let the thief no longer steal!” From the lowest dregs of the Greek cities—from its profligate and criminal classes—the gospel had drawn its converts (comp. 1 Cor. vi. 9–11). In the Ephesian Church there were converted thieves; and Christianity had to make of them honest workmen.

The words of verse 28, addressed to a company of thieves, vividly show the transforming effect of the gospel of Christ: “Let him toil, working with his hands what is good, that he may have wherewith to give to him that is in need.” The apostle brings the loftiest motives to bear instantly upon the basest natures, and is sure of a response. He makes no appeal to self-interest, he says nothing of the fear of punishment, nothing even of the pride of honest labour. Pity for their fellows, the spirit of self-sacrifice and generosity is to set those pilfering and violent hands to unaccustomed toil. The appeal was as wise as it was bold. Utilitarianism will never raise the morally degraded. Preach to them thrift and self-improvement, show them the pleasures of an ordered home and the advantages of respectability, they will still feel that their own way of life pleases and suits them best. But let the divine spark of charity be kindled in their breast—let the man have love and pity and not self to work for, and he is a new creature. His indolence is conquered; his meanness changed to the noble sense of a common manhood. Love never faileth.

4. We have passed from speech to temper, and from temper to act; in the warning of verses 29, 30 we come back to speech again.

We doubt whethercorrupt talkis here intended. That comes in for condemnation in verses 2 and 3 of the next chapter. The Greek adjective is the same that is used of the “worthlessfruit” of the “worthless[good-for-nothing] tree” in Matthew xii. 33; and again of the “badfish” of Matthew xiii. 48, which the fisherman throws away not because they are corrupt or offensive, but because they are useless for food. So it is againstinane, inept and useless talk that St Paul sets his face.Jesus said that “forevery idle wordmen must give account to God” (Matt. xii. 36).

Jesus Christ laid great stress upon the exercise of the gift of speech. “By thy words,” He said to His disciples, “thou shalt be justified, and by thy words condemned.” The possession of a human tongue is an immense responsibility. Infinite good or mischief lies in its power. (With the tongue we should include the pen, as being the tongue’s deputy.) Who shall say how great is the sum of injury, the waste of time, the irritation, the enfeeblement of mind and dissipation of spirit, the destruction of Christian fellowship that is due to thoughtless speech and writing? The apostle does not simply forbid injurious words, he puts an embargo on all that is not positively useful. It is not enough to say: “My chatter does nobody harm; if there is no good in it, there is no evil.” He replies: “If you cannot speak to profit, be silent till you can.”

Not that St Paul requires all Christian speech to be grave and serious. Many a true word is spoken in jest; and “grace” may be “given to the hearers” by words clothed in the grace of a genial fancy and playful wit, as well as in the direct enforcement of solemn themes. It is the mere talk, whether frivolous or pompous—spoken from the pulpit or the easy chair—the incontinence of tongue, the flux of senseless, graceless, unprofitable utterance that St Paul desires to arrest: “let it not proceed out of your mouth.” Such speech must not “escape the fence of the teeth.” It is an oppression to every serious listener; it is an injury to the utterer himself. Above all, it “grieves the Holy Spirit.”

The witness of the Holy Spirit is the seal of God’s possession in us;[129]it is the assurance to ourselves thatwe are His sons in Christ and heirs of life eternal. From the day it is affixed to the heart, this seal need never be broken nor the witness withheld, “until the day of redemption.” Dwelling within the Church as the guard of its communion, and loving us with the love of God, the Spirit of grace is hurt and grieved by foolish words coming from lips that He has sanctified. As Israel in its ancient rebellions “vexed His Holy Spirit” (Isai. lxiii. 10), so do those who burden Christian fellowship and who enervate their own inward life by speech without worth and purpose. As His fire is quenched by distrust (1 Thess. v. 19), so His love is vexed by folly. His witness grows faint and silent; the soul loses its joyous assurance, its sense of the peace of God. When our inward life thus declines, the cause lies not unfrequently in our own heedless speech. Or we have listened willingly and without reproof to “words that may do hurt,” words of foolish jesting or idle gossip, of mischief and backbiting. The Spirit of truth retires affronted from His desecrated temple, not to return until the iniquity of the lips is purged and the wilful tongue bends to the yoke of Christ. Let us grieve before the Holy Spirit, that He be not grieved with us for such offences. Let us pray evermore: “Set a watch, O Jehovah, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.”

5. In his previous reproofs the apostle has glanced in various ways at love as the remedy of our moral disorders and defects. Falsehood, anger, theft, misuse of the tongue involve disregard of the welfare of others; if they do not spring from positive ill-will, they foster and aggravate it. It is now time to deal directly with this evil that assumes so many forms, the most various of our sins and companion to every other: “Let all bitterness,and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you, with all malice.”

The last of these terms is the most typical.Maliceis badness of disposition, the aptness to envy and hatred, which apart from any special occasion is always ready to break out in bitterness and wrath.Bitternessis malice sharpened to a point and directed against the exasperating object.Wrathandangerare synonymous, the former being the passionate outburst of resentment in rage, the latter the settled indignation of the aggrieved soul: this passion was put under restraint already in verses 26, 27.Clamourandrailinggive audible expression to these and their kindred tempers. Clamour is the loud self-assertion of the angry man, who will make every one hear his grievance; while the railer carries the war of the tongue into his enemy’s camp, and vents his displeasure in abuse and insult.

These sins of speech were rife in heathen society; and there were some amongst Paul’s readers, doubtless, who found it hard to forgo their indulgence. Especially difficult was this when Christians suffered all manner of evil from their heathen neighbours and former friends; it cost a severe struggle to be silent and “keep the mouth as with a bridle” under fierce and malicious taunts. Never to return evil for evil and railing for railing, but contrariwise blessing,—this was one of the lessons most difficult to flesh and blood.

Kindnessin act,tenderheartednessof feeling are to take the place of malice with its brood of bitter passions. Where injury used to be met with reviling and insult retorted in worse insult, the men of the new life will be found “forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave” them. Here we touch the spring of Christian virtue, the master motive in theapostle’s theory of life. The cross of Jesus Christ is the centre of Pauline ethics, as of Pauline theology. The sacrifice of Calvary, while it is the ground of our salvation, supplies the standard and incentive of moral attainment. It makes lifean imitation of God.

The commencement of the new chapter at this point makes an unfortunate division; for its first two verses are in close consecution with the last verse of chapter iv. By kindness and pitifulness of heart, by readiness to forgive, God’s “beloved children” will “show themselves imitators” of their Father. The apostle echoes the saying of his Master, in which the law of His kingdom was laid down: “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and you shall be called children of the Highest: for He is kind to the thankless and evil. Be ye therefore pitiful, as your Father is pitiful” (Luke vi. 35, 36). Before the cross of Jesus was set up, men could not know how much God loved the world and how far He was ready to go in the way of forgiveness. Yet Christ Himself saw the same love displayed in the Father’s daily providence. He bids us imitate Him who makes His sun shine and His rain fall on the just and unjust, on the evil and the good. To the insight of Jesus, nature’s impartial bounties in which unbelief sees only moral indifference, spoke of God’s compassion; they proceed from the same love that gave His Son to taste death for every man.

In chapter iv. 32–v. 2 the Father’s love and the Son’s self-sacrifice are spoken of in terms precisely parallel. They are altogether one in quality. Christ does not by His sacrifice persuade an angry Father to love His children; it is the Divine compassion inChrist that dictates and carries into effect the sacrifice. At the same time it was “anofferingand asacrificeto God.” God is love; but love is not everything in God. Justice is also Divine, and absolute in its own realm. Law can no more forgo its rights than love forget its compassions. Love must fulfil all righteousness; it must suffer law to mark out its path of obedience, or it remains an effusive, ineffectual sentiment, helpless to bless and save. Christ’s feet followed the stern and strait path of self-devotion; “He humbled Himself and became obedient,” He was “born under law.” And the law of God imposing death as the penalty for sin, which shaped Christ’s sacrifice, made it acceptable to God. Thus it was “an odour of a sweet smell.”

Hence the love which follows Christ’s example, is love wedded with duty. It finds in an ordered devotion to the good of men the means to fulfil the all-holy Will and to present in turn its “offering to God.” Such love will be above the mere pleasing of men, above sentimentalism and indulgence; it will aim higher than secular ideals and temporal contentment. It regards men in their kinship to God and obligation to His law, and seeks to make them worthy of their calling. All human duties, for those who love God, are subordinate to this; all commands are summed up in one: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” The apostle pronounced the first and last word of his teaching when he said:Walk in love, as the Christ also loved us.

6. Above all others, one sin stamped the Gentile world of that time with infamy,—itsuncleanness.

St Paul has stigmatized this already in the burning words of verse 19. There we saw this vice in itsintrinsic loathsomeness; here it is set in the light of Christ’s love on the one hand (ver. 2), and of the final judgement on the other (vv. 5, 6). Thus it is banished from the Christian fellowship in every form—even in the lightest, where it glances from the lips in words of jest: “Fornication and all uncleanness, let it not even be named among you.” Along with “filthiness, foolish talk and jesting” are to be heard no more. Passing from verse 2 to verse 3 by the contrastiveBut, one feels how repugnant are these things to the love of Christ. The perfume of the sacrifice of Calvary, so pleasing in heaven, sweetens our life on earth; its grace drives wanton and selfish passions from the heart, and destroys the pestilence of evil in the social atmosphere. Lust cannot breathe in the sight of the cross.

The “good-for-nothing speech” of chapter iv. 29 comes up once more for condemnation in thefoolish speechandjestingof this passage. The former is the idle talk of a stupid, the latter of a clever man. Both, under the conditions of heathen society, were tainted with foulness. Loose speech easily becomes low speech. Wit, unchastened by reverence, finds a tempting field for its exercise in the delicate relations of life, and displays its skill in veiled indecencies and jests that desecrate the purer feelings, while they avoid open grossness.

St Paul’s word for “jesting” is one of the singular terms of this epistle. By etymology it denotes awell-turnedstyle of expression, the versatile speech of one who can touch lightly on many themes and aptly blend the grave and gay. This social gift was prized amongst the polished Greeks. But it was a faculty so commonly abused, that the word describingit fell into bad odour: it came to signify banter and persiflage; and then, still worse, the kind of talk here indicated,—the wit whose zest lies in its flavour of impurity. “The very profligate old man in theMiles Gloriosusof Plautus (iii. I. 42–52), who prides himself, and not without reason, upon his wit, his elegance and refinement [cavillator lepidus,facetus], is exactly theεὐτράπελος. And keeping in mind thatεὐτραπελία, being only once expressly and by name forbidden in Scripture, is forbidden to Ephesians, it is not a little notable to find him urging that all this was to be expected from him, being as he was an Ephesian by birth:—

Back to Index Next