"But unto each one of us was the grace given according to the

measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore He saith: 'When He ascended

on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.' Now

this, 'He ascended,' what is it but that He also descended into the

lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that

ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.

And He gave some _to be_ apostles; and some, prophets; and some

evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of

the saints for work of ministration, for the building up of the body

of Christ."--EPH. iv. 7-12.

In verse 7 the apostle passes from the unities of the Church to its

diversities, from the common foundation of the Christian life to the

variety presented in its superstructure. "To each single one of us was

the grace given." The great gift of God in Christ is manifold in its

distribution. Its manifestations are as various and fresh as the

idiosyncrasies of human personality. There is no capacity of our nature,

no element of human society which the gospel of Christ cannot sanctify

and turn to good account.

All this the apostle keeps in view and allows for in his doctrine of the

Church. He does not merge man in humanity, nor sacrifice the individual

to the community. He claims for each believer direct fellowship with

Christ and access to God. The earnestness with which in his earlier

epistles St Paul insisted on the responsibilities of conscience and on

the personal experience of salvation, leads him now to press the claims

of the Church with equal vigour. He understands well that the person has

no existence apart from the community, that our moral nature is

essentially social and the religious life essentially fraternal. Its

vital element is "the _communion_ of the Holy Spirit." Hence, to gather

the real drift of this passage we must combine the first words of verse

7 with the last of verse 12: "To each single one of us was the grace

given--in order to build up the body of Christ." God's grace is not

bestowed upon us to diffuse and lose itself in our separate

individualities; but that it may minister to one life and work towards

one end and build up one great body in us all. The diversity subserves a

higher unity. Through ten thousand channels, in ten thousand varied

forms of personal influence and action, the stream of the grace of God

flows on to the accomplishment of the eternal purpose.

Like a wise master in his household and sovereign in his kingdom, the

Lord of the Church distributes His manifold gifts. His bestowments and

appointments are made with an eye to the furtherance of the state and

house that He has in charge. As God dispenses His wisdom, so Christ His

gifts "according to plan" (iii. 11). The purpose of the ages, God's

great plan for mankind, determines "the measure of the gift of Christ."

Now, it is to illustrate this _measure_, to set forth the style and

scale of Christ's bestowments within His Church, that the apostle brings

in evidence the words of Psalm lxviii. 18. He interprets this ancient

verse as he cites it, and weaves it into the texture of his argument.

In the original it reads thus:

"Thou hast ascended on high, Thou hast led Thy captivity captive,

Thou hast received gifts among men,--

Yea, among the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell with

them." (R.V.)

Let us go back for a moment to the occasion of the old Hebrew song.

Psalm lxviii, is, as Ewald says, "the greatest, most splendid and

artistic of the temple-songs of Restored Jerusalem." It celebrates

Jehovah's entry into Zion. This culminating verse records, as the

crowning event of Israel's history, the capture of Zion from the rebel

Jebusites and the Lord's ascension in the person of His chosen to take

His seat upon this holy hill. The previous verses, in which fragments of

earlier songs are embedded, describe the course of the Divine Leader of

Israel through former ages. In the beat and rhythm of the Hebrew lines

one hears the footfall of the Conqueror's march, as He "arises and His

enemies are scattered" and "kings of armies flee apace," while nature

trembles at His step and bends her wild powers to serve His

congregation. The sojourn in the wilderness, the scenes of Sinai, the

occupancy of Canaan, the wars of the Judges were so many stages in the

progress of Jehovah, which had Zion always for its goal. To Zion, the

new and more glorious sanctuary, Sinai must now give place. Bashan and

all mountains towering in their pride in vain "look askance at the hill

which God has desired for His abode," where "Jehovah will dwell for

ever." So the day of the Lord's desire has come! From the Kidron valley

David leads Jehovah's triumph up the steep slopes of Mount Zion. A train

of captives defiles before the Lord's anointed, who sits down on the

throne that God gives him and receives in His name the submission of the

heathen. The vanquished chiefs cast their spoil at his feet; it is laid

up in treasure to build the future temple; while, upon this happy day of

peace, "the rebellious also" share in Jehovah's grace and become His

subjects.

In this conquest David "gave to men" rather than "received"--gave even

to his stubborn enemies (witness his subsequent transaction with Araunah

the Jebusite for the site of the temple); for that which he took from

them served to build amongst them God's habitation: "that," as the

Psalmist sings, "the Lord God might dwell with them." St Paul's

adaptation of the verse is both bold and true. If he departs from the

letter, he unfolds the spirit of the prophetic words. That David's

_giving_ signified a higher _receiving_, Jewish interpreters themselves

seem to have felt, for this paraphrase was current also amongst them.

The author of this Hebrew song has in no way exaggerated the importance

of David's victory. The summits of the elect nation's history shine with

a supernatural and prophetic light. The spirit of the Christ in the

unknown singer "testified beforehand of the glory that should follow"

His warfare and sufferings. From this victorious height, so hardly won,

the Psalmist's verse flashes the light of promise across the space of a

thousand years; and St. Paul has caught the light, and sends it on to us

shining with a new and more spiritual brightness. David's "going up on

high" was, to the apostle's mind, a picture of the ascent of Christ, his

Son and Lord. David rose from deep humiliation to a high dominion; his

exaltation brought blessing and enrichment to his people; and the spoil

that he won with it went to build God's house amongst rebellious men.

All this was true in parable of the dispensation of grace to mankind

through Jesus Christ; and His ascension disclosed the deeper import of

the words of the ancient Scripture. "Wherefore God saith" (and St Paul

takes the liberty of putting in his own words _what_ He

saith)--"wherefore He saith: He ascended on high; He led captivity

captive; He gave gifts to men."

* * * * *

The three short clauses of the citation supply, in effect, a threefold

measure of the gifts of Christ to His Church. They are gifts _of the

ascended Saviour_. They are gifts bestowed _from the fruit of His

victory_. And they are gifts _to men_. Measure them, first, by the

height to which He has risen--from what a depth! Measure them, again, by

the spoils He has already won. Measure them, once more, by the wants of

mankind, by the need He has undertaken to supply.--As He is, so He

gives; as He has, so He gives; as He has given, so He will give till we

are filled unto all the fulness of God.

I. Think first, then, of Him. Think of what, and _where_ He is! Consider

"what is the height" of His exaltation; and then say, if you can, "what

is the breadth" of His munificence.

We know well how He gave as a poor and suffering man upon earth--gave,

with what affluence, pity and delight, bread to the hungry thousands,

wine to the wedding-feast, health to the sick, sight to the blind,

pardon to the sinful, sometimes life to the dead! Has His elevation

altered Him? Too often it is so with vain and weak men like ourselves.

Their wealth increases, but their hearts contract. The more they have to

give, the less they love to give. They go up on high as men count it,

and climb to places of power and eminence; and they forget the friends

of youth and the ranks from which they sprang--low-minded men. Not so

with our exalted Friend. "It is not one that went down, and another that

went up," says Theodoret. "He that descended, _it is He_ also that

ascended up far above all the heavens!" (ver. 10). Jesus of Nazareth is

on the throne of God,--"the same yesterday and to-day!" But now the

resources of the universe are at His disposal. Out of that treasure He

can choose the best gifts for you and me.

Mere authority, even Omnipotence, could not suffice to save and bless

moral beings like ourselves; nor even the best will joined to

Omnipotence. Christ gained by His humiliation, in some sense, a new

fulness added to the fulness of the Godhead. This gain of His sufferings

is implied in what the apostle writes in Colossians i. 19 concerning the

risen and exalted Redeemer: "It was well-pleasing that _all_ the fulness

should make its dwelling in Him." His plenitude is that of the Ascended

One _who had descended_. "If He ascended, what does it mean but that He

also descended into the under regions of the earth?" (ver. 9). If He

went up, why then He had been down!--down to the Virgin's womb and the

manger cradle, wrapping His Godhead within the frame and the brain of a

little child; down to the home and the bench of the village carpenter;

down to the contradiction of sinners and the level of their scorn; down

to the death of the cross,--to the nether abyss, to that dim populous

underworld into which we look shuddering over the grave's edge! And from

that lower gulf He mounted up again to the solid earth and the light of

day and the world of breathing men; and up, and up again, through the

rent clouds and the ranks of shouting angels, and under the lifted heads

of the everlasting doors, until He took His seat at the right hand of

the Majesty in the heavens.

Think of the regions He has traversed, the range of being through which

the Lord Jesus passed in descending and ascending, "that He might fill

all things." Heaven, earth, hades--hades, earth, heaven again are His;

not in mere sovereignty of power, but in experience and communion of

life. Each He has annexed to His dominion by inhabitation and the right

of self-devoting love, as from sphere to sphere He "travelled in the

greatness of His power, mighty to save." He is Lord of angels; but still

more of men,--Lord of the living, and of the dead. To them that sleep in

the dust He has proclaimed His accomplished sacrifice and the right of

universal judgement given Him by the Father.

Nor did Abraham alone and Moses and Elijah have the joy of "seeing His

day," but all the holy men of old, who had embraced its promise and

"died in faith," who looked forward through their imperfect sacrifices

"which could never quite take away sins" to the better thing which God

provided for us, and for their perfection along with us.[99] On the two

side-posts of the gate of death our great High Priest sprinkled His

atoning blood. He turned the abode of corruption into a sweet and quiet

sleeping chamber for His saints. Then at His touch those cruel doors

swung back upon their hinges, and He issued forth the Prince of life,

with the keys of death and hades hanging from His girdle. From the

depths of the grave to the heaven of heavens His Mastership extends.

With the perfume of His presence and the rich incense of His sacrifice

Jesus Christ has "filled all things." The universe is made for us one

realm of redeeming grace, the kingdom of the Son of God's love.

"So there crowns Him the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown;

And His love fills infinitude wholly, nor leaves up nor down

One spot for the creature to stand in!"[100]

So "Christ is all things, and in all." And we are nothing; but we have

everything in Him.

How, pray, will He give who has thus given Himself,--who has thus

endured and achieved on our behalf? Let our hearts consider; let our

faith and our need be bold to ask. One promise from His lips is enough:

"If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it."

II. A second estimate of the gifts to be looked for from Christ, we

derive from _His conquests already won_. David as he entered Zion's

gates "led captivity captive,"--led, that is in Hebrew phrase, a great,

a notable captivity. Out of the gifts thus received he enriched his

people. The resources that victory placed at his disposal, furnished the

store from which to build God's house. In like fashion Christ builds His

Church, and blesses the human race. With the spoils of His battle He

adorns His bride. The prey taken from the mighty becomes the strength

and beauty of His sanctuary. The prisoners of His love He makes the

servants of mankind.

This "captivity" implies a warfare, even as the ascent of Christ a

previous descending. The Son of God came not into His earthly kingdom as

kings are said to have come sometimes disguised amongst their subjects,

that they might learn better of their state and hear their true mind;

nor as the Greeks fabled of their gods, who wandered unknown on earth

seeking adventure and wearied haply of the cloying felicities of heaven,

suffering contempt and doing to men hard service. He came, the Good

Shepherd, to seek lost sheep. He came, the Mighty One of God, to destroy

the works of the devil, to drive out "the strong one armed" who held the

fortress of man's soul. He had a war to wage with the usurping prince of

the world. In the temptations of the wilderness, in the strife with

disease and demoniac powers, in the debate with Scribes and Pharisees,

in the anguish of Gethsemane and Calvary that conflict was fought out;

and by death He abolished him who holds the power of death, by His blood

He "bought us for God." But with the spoils of victory, He bears the

scars of battle,--tokens glorious for Him, humbling indeed to us, which

will tell for ever how they pierced His hands and feet!

For Him pain and conflict are gone by. It remains to gather in the spoil

of His victory of love, the harvest sown in His tears and His blood. And

what are the trophies of the Captain of our salvation? what the fruit of

His dread passion? For one, there was the dying thief, whom with His

nailed hands the Lord Jesus snatched from a felon's doom and bore from

Calvary to Paradise. There was Mary the Magdalene, out of whom He had

cast seven demons, the first to greet Him risen. There were the three

thousand whom on one day, in the might of His Spirit, the ascended Lord

and Christ took captive in rebel Jerusalem, "lifted from the earth" that

He might draw all men unto Him. And there was the writer of this letter,

once His blasphemer and persecutor. By a look, by a word, Jesus

arrested Saul at the height of his murderous enmity, and changed him

from a Pharisee into an apostle to the Gentiles, from the destroyer into

the wise master-builder of His Church.

St Paul's own case suggested, surely, the application he makes of this

ancient text of the Psalter and lighted up its Messianic import. In the

glory of His triumph Jesus Christ had appeared to make him captive, and

put him at once to service. From that hour Paul was led along

enthralled, the willing bond-slave of the Lord Jesus and celebrant of

His victory. "Thanks be unto God," he cries, "who ever triumphs over us

in the Christ, and makes manifest through us the savour of His knowledge

in every place."[101]

Such, and of such sort are the prisoners of the war of Jesus; such the

gifts that through sinners pardoned and subdued He bestows upon

mankind,--"patterns to those who should hereafter believe." Time would

fail to follow the train of the captives of the love of Christ, which

stretches unbroken and ever multiplying through the centuries to this

day. We, too, in our turn have laid our rebel selves at His feet; and

all that we surrender to Him, by right of conquest He gives over to the

service of mankind.

"His love the conquest more than wins;

To all I shall proclaim:

Jesus the King, the Conqueror reigns;

Bow down to Jesu's name!"

He gives out of the spoil of His war with evil,--gives what He receives.

Yet He gives not _as_ He receives. Everything laid in His hands is

changed by their touch. Publicans and Pharisees become apostles.

Magdalenes are made queens and mothers in His Israel. From the dregs of

our streets He raises up a host of sons to Abraham. From the ranks of

scepticism and anti-Christian hate the Lord Christ wins new champions

and captains for His cause. He coins earth's basest metal into heaven's

fine gold. He takes weak things of the earth and foolish, to strike the

mightiest blows of battle.

What may we not expect from Him who has led captive such a captivity!

What surprises of blessing and miracles of grace there are awaiting us,

that shall fill our mouth with laughter and our tongue with

singing--gifts and succours coming to the Church from unlooked-for

quarters and reinforcements from the ranks of the enemy. And what

discomfitures and captivities are preparing for the haters of the

Lord,--if, at least, the future is to be as the past; and if we may

judge from the apostle's word, and from his example, of the measure of

the gift of Christ.

III. A third line of measurement is supplied in the last word of verse

8, and is drawn out in verses 11 and 12. "He gave gifts _to men_--He

gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and

teachers, with a view to the full equipment of the saints for work of

ministration, for building up of the body of Christ." Yes, and some

martyrs, some missionaries, some Church rulers and Christian statesmen,

some poets, some deep thinkers and theologians, some leaders of

philanthropy and helpers of the poor; all given for the same end--to

minister to the life of His Church, to furnish it with the means for

carrying on its mission, and to enable every saint to contribute his

part to the commonwealth of Christ according to the measure of Christ's

gift to each.

Comparison with verse 16 that follows and with verse 7 that precedes,

seems to us to make it clear that we should read, without a comma, the

second and third clauses of verse 12 as continuations of the first. The

"work of ministering" and the "building up of the body of Christ" are

not assigned to special orders of ministry as their exclusive calling.

Such honour have all His saints. It is the office of the clergy to see

that the laity do their duty, of "the ministry" to make each saint a

minister of Christ, to guide, instruct and animate the entire membership

of Christ's body in the work He has laid upon it. Upon this plan the

Christian fellowship was organized and officered in the apostolic times.

Church government is a means to an end. Its primitive form was that best

suited to the age; and even then varied under different circumstances.

It was not precisely the same at Jerusalem and at Corinth; at Corinth in

58, and at Ephesus in 66 A.D. That is the best Church system, under any

given conditions, which serves best to conserve and develope the

spiritual energy of the body of Christ.

The distribution of Church office indicated in verse 11 corresponds

closely to what we find in the Pastoral epistles. The apostle does not

profess to enumerate all grades of ministry. The "deacons" are wanting;

although we know from Philippians i. 1 that this order already existed

in Pauline Churches. _Pastors_ (shepherds)--a title only employed here

by the apostle--is a fitting synonym for the "bishops" (_i.e._,

overseers) of whom he speaks in Acts xx. 28, Philippians i. 1, and

largely in the epistles to Timothy and Titus, whose functions were

spiritual and disciplinary as well as administrative. Addressing the

Ephesian elders at Miletus four years before, St Paul bade them

"shepherd the Church of God."

In 1 Peter v. 1, 2 the same charge is laid by the Jewish apostle upon

his "fellow-elders," that they should "shepherd the flock of God, making

themselves examples" to it; Christ Himself he has previously called

"Shepherd and Bishop of souls" (1 Pet. ii. 25). The expression is

derived from the words of Jesus recorded in John x., concerning the true

and false shepherd of God's flock, and Himself the Good Shepherd,--words

familiar and dear to His disciples.

The office of _teaching_, as in 1 Timothy v. 17, is conjoined with that

of shepherding. From that passage we infer that the freedom of teaching

so conspicuous in the Corinthian Church (1 Cor. xiv. 26, etc.) was still

recognized. Teaching and ruling are not made identical, nor inseparable

functions, any more than in Romans xii. 7, 8; but they were frequently

associated, and hence are coupled together here.--Of apostolic

_evangelists_ we have examples in Timothy and the second Philip;[102]

men outside the rank of the apostles, but who, like them, preached the

gospel from place to place. The name apostles (equivalent to our

_missionaries_) served, in its wider sense, to include ministers of this

class along with those directly commissioned by the Lord Jesus.[103]

The _prophets_,[104] like the apostles and evangelists, belonged to the

Church at large, rather than to one locality. But their gift of

inspiration did not carry with it the claim to rule in the Church. This

was the function of the apostles generally, and of the pastor-bishops,

or elders, locally appointed.

The first three orders (apostles, prophets, evangelists) linked Church

to Church and served the entire body; the last two (pastors and

teachers) had charge of local and congregational affairs. The apostles

(the Twelve and Paul), with the prophets, were the founders of the

Church. Their distinctive functions ceased when the foundation was laid

and the deposit of revealed truth was complete. The evangelistic and

pastoral callings remain; and out of them have sprung all the variety of

Christian ministries since exercised. Evangelists, with apostles or

missionaries, bring new souls to Christ and carry His message into new

lands. Pastors and teachers follow in their train, tending the

ingathered sheep, and labouring to make each flock that they shepherd

and every single man perfect in Christ Jesus.

Marvellous were Christ's "gifts for men" bestowed in the apostolic

ministry. What a gift to the Christian community, for example, was Paul

himself! In his natural endowments, so rich and finely blended, in his

training and early experience, in the supernatural mode of his

conversion, everything wrought together to give to men in the apostle

Paul a man supremely fitted to be Christ's ambassador to the Pagan

world, and for all ages the "teacher of the Gentiles in faith and

truth." "A _chosen vessel_ unto me," said the Lord Jesus, "to bear my

name."

Such a gift to the world was St Augustine: a man of the most powerful

intellect and will, master of the thought and life of his time. Long an

alien from the household of faith, he was saved at last as by miracle,

and utterly subdued to the will of Christ. In the awful crisis of the

fifth century, when the Roman empire was breaking up and the very

foundations of life seemed to be dissolved, it was the work of this

heroic man to reassert the sovereignty of grace and to re-establish

faith in the Divine order of the world.

Such another gift to men was Martin Luther, the captive of justifying

grace, won from the monastery and the bondage of Rome to set Germany and

Europe free. What a soul of fire, what a voice of power was his! to

whose lips our Lord Christ set the great trumpet of the Reformation; and

he blew a blast that waked the sleeping peoples of the North, and made

the walls of Babylon rock again to their foundation. Such a gift to

Scotland was John Knox, who from his own soul breathed the spirit of

religion into the life of a nation, and gave it a body and organic form

in which to dwell and work for centuries.

Such a gift to England was John Wesley. Can we conceive a richer boon

conferred by the Head of the Church upon the English race than the

raising up of this great evangelist and pastor and teacher, at such a

time as that of his appearance? Standing at the distance of a hundred

years, we are able to measure in some degree the magnitude of this

bestowment. In none of the leaders and commanders whom Christ has given

to His people was there more signally manifest that combination of

faculties, that concurrence of providences and adjustment to

circumstances, and that transforming and attempering influence of grace

in all--the "effectual working in the measure of each single part" of

the man and his history, which marks those special gifts that Christ is

wont to bestow upon His people in seasons of special emergency and

need.

We are passing into a new age, such as none of these great men dreamed

of, an age as exigent and perilous as any that have gone before it. The

ascendency of physical science, the political enfranchisement of the

masses, the universal spread of education, the emancipation of critical

thought, the gigantic growth of the press, the enormous increase and

aggregation of wealth, the multiplication of large cities, the

world-wide facilities of intercourse,--these and other causes more

subtle are rapidly transforming human society. Old barriers have

disappeared; while new difficulties are being created, of a magnitude to

overtask the faith of the strongest. The Church is confronted with

problems larger far in their dimensions than those our fathers knew.

Demands are being made on her resources such as she has never had to

meet before. Shall we be equal to the needs of the coming times?--Nay,

that is not the question; but will _He_?

There is nothing new or surprising to the Lord Jesus in the progress of

our times and the developments of modern thought, nothing for which He

is not perfectly prepared. He has taken their measure long ere this, and

holds them within His grasp. The government is upon His shoulders--"the

weight of all this unintelligible world"--and He can bear it well. He

has gifts in store for the twentieth century, when it arrives, as

adequate as those He bestowed upon the first or fifth, upon the

sixteenth or the eighteenth of our era. There are Augustines and Wesleys

yet to come. Hidden in the Almighty's quiver are shafts as polished and

as keen as any He has used, which He will launch forth in the war of the

ages at the appointed hour. The need, the peril, the greatness of the

time will be the measure of the gift of Christ.

There is a danger, however, in waiting for great leaders and in looking

for signal displays of Christ's power amongst men. His "kingdom comes

not with observation," so that men should say, Lo here! or Lo there! It

steals upon us unforeseen; it is amongst us before we know. "We looked,"

says Rutherford, "that He should take the higher way along the

mountains; and lo, He came by the lower way of the valleys!" While men

listen to the earthquake and the wind rending the mountains, a still,

small voice speaks the message of God to prepared hearts. Rarely can we

measure at the first the worth of Christ's best gifts. When the fruit

appears, after long patience, the world will haply discover when and how

the seed was sown. But not always then.

"The sower, passing onward, was not known;

And all men reaped the harvest as their own."

Those who are most ready to appraise their fellows are constantly at

fault. Our last may prove Christ's first; our first His last! "Each of

us shall give account of himself to God": each must answer for his own

stewardship, and the grace that was given to each. "Let us not therefore

judge one another any more." But let every man see to it that his part

in the building of God's temple is well and faithfully done. Soon the

fire will try every man's work, of what sort it is.

FOOTNOTES:

[99] Comp. Hebrews x. 1, 2, 10-14 with xi. 13-16, 39, 40, xii. 23, 24;

also vi. 12.

[100] The words of David in Browning's _Saul_, turned from the future

tense into the present.

[101] 2 Cor. ii. 14; comp. Eph. ii. 6, 7.

[102] 2 Tim. iv. 5; Acts viii. 26-40, xxi. 8.

[103] In Acts xiv. 4, 14, _Barnabas and Paul_ are "apostles"; 1 Thess.

ii. 6, _Paul and Silas and Timothy_. Comp. Rom. xvi. 7; 2 Cor. viii. 23,

xi. 13; Phil. ii. 25; Rev. ii. 2.

[104] Comp. ch. ii. 20, iii. 5 for the association of _prophets_ with

_apostles_.

CHAPTER XVIII.

_THE GROWTH OF THE CHURCH._

"Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the full

knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure

of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we may be no more

children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of

doctrine in the sport of men, in craftiness, unto the scheme of

error; but dealing truly, in love may grow up in all things into

Him, which is the head, _even_ Christ; from whom all the body fitly

framed and knit together, through that which every juncture

supplieth, according to the working in _due_ measure of each several

part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself

in love."--EPH. iv. 13-16.

We must spend a few moments in unravelling this knotty paragraph and

determining the relation of its involved clauses to each other, before

we can expound it. This passage is enough to prove St Paul's hand in the

letter. No writer of equal power was ever so little of a literary

craftsman. His epistles read, as M. Renan says, like "a rapid

conversation stenographed." Sometimes, as in several places in

Colossians ii., his ideas are shot out in disjointed clauses, hardly

more continuous than shorthand notes; often, as in this epistle, they

pour in a full stream, sentence hurrying after sentence and phrase

heaped upon phrase with an exuberance that bewilders us. In his spoken

address the interpretation of tone and gesture, doubtless, supplied the

syntactical adjustments so often wanting in Paul's written composition.

The gifts pertaining to special office in the Church were bestowed to

promote its corporate efficiency and to further its general growth (vv.

11, 12). Now, the purpose of these endowments sets a _limit_ to their

use. "Christ gave apostles, prophets," and the rest--"_till we all

arrive_ at our perfect manhood and reach the stature of His fulness."

Such is the connexion of verse 13 with the foregoing context. The aim of

the Christian ministry is to make itself superfluous, to raise men

beyond its need. Knowledge and prophesyings, apostolates and pastorates,

the missions of the evangelist and the schools of the teacher will one

day cease; their work will be done, their end gained, when all believers

are brought "to the unity of faith, to the full knowledge of the Son of

God." The work of Christ's servants can have no grander aim, no further

goal lying beyond this. Verse 14, therefore, does not disclose an

ulterior purpose arising out of that affirmed in the previous sentence;

it restates the same purpose. To make men of us (ver. 13) and to prevent

our being children (ver. 14) is the identical object for which apostles,

prophets, pastors, teachers are called to office. The goal marked out

for all believers in the knowledge and the moral likeness of Christ

(ver. 13), is set up that it may direct the Church's course through

dangers shunned and enemies vanquished (ver. 14) to the attainment of

her corporate perfection (vv. 15, 16). The whole thought of this section

turns upon the idea of "the perfecting of the saints" in verse 12. Verse

16 looks backward to this; verse 7 looked forward to it.

So much for the general construction of the period. As to its particular

words and phrases, we must observe:--

(1) The "perfect [full-grown] man" of verse 13 is the _individual_, not

the generic man, not "the one [collective] new man" of chapter ii. 15.

The Greek words for _man_ in these two places differ.[105] The apostle

proposes to the Christian ministry the end that he was himself pursuing,

viz., to "present _every man_ perfect in Christ."[106]

(2) "_Sleight_ of men" (A.V. and R.V.) does not seem to us to express

the precise meaning of the word so translated in verse 14. _Kubeia_

(from _kubos_, a cube, or die) occurs only here in the New Testament; in

classical Greek it appears in its literal sense of _dice-play_,

_gambling_. The interpreters have drawn from this the idea of

_trickery_, _cheating_--the common accompaniment of gambling. But the

kindred verb (_to play dice_, _to gamble_) has another well-established

use in Greek, namely, _to hazard_: this supplies for St Paul's noun the

signification of _sport_ or _hazarding_, preferred by Beza among the

older expositors and by von Soden amongst the newest. _In the sport of

men_, says von Soden: "conduct wanting in every kind of earnestness and

clear purpose. These men _play_ with religion, and with the welfare of

Christian souls." This metaphor accords admirably with that of the

restless waves and uncertain winds[107] just preceding it; while it

leads fittingly to the further qualification "in craftiness," which is

almost an idle synonym after "sleight."

(3) Another rare word is found in this verse, not very precisely

rendered as "wiles"--a translation suiting it better in chapter vi. 11.

Here the noun is singular in number: _methodeia_. It signifies

_methodizing_, _reducing to a plan_; and then, in a bad sense,

_scheming_, _plotting_. "Error" is thus personified: it "schemes," just

as in 2 Thessalonians ii. 7 it "works." Amid the restless speculations

and the unscrupulous perversions of the gospel now disturbing the infant

faith of the Asian Churches, the apostle saw the outline of a great

system of error shaping itself. There was a method in this madness.

_Unto the scheme of error_--into the meshes of its net--those were being

driven who yielded to the prevailing tendencies of speculative thought.

With all its cross currents and capricious movements, it was bearing

steadily in one direction. Reckless pilots steered ignorant souls this

way and that over the wind-swept seas of religious doubt; but they

brought them at last to the same rocks and quicksands.

(4) As the contrast between manhood and childhood links verses 13 and

14, so it is by the contrast of error and craftiness with _truth_ that

we pass from verse 14 to verse 15. "_Speaking_ truth" insufficiently

renders the opening word of the latter verse. The "_dealing_ truly" of

the Revised margin is preferable. In Galatians iv. 16 the apostle

employs the same verb, signifying not truth of speech alone, but of deed

and life (comp. Eph. v. 9). The expression resembles that of 1 John iii.

19: "We are _of the truth_, and shall assure our hearts before Him,"

where truth and love are found in the like union.

(5) The last difficulty of this kind we have to deal with, lies in the

connexion of the clauses of verse 16. "Through every joint of supply" is

an incongruous adjunct to the previous clause, "fitly framed and knit

together," although the rendering "joint" gives this connexion a

superficial aptness. The apostle's word means _juncture_ rather than

_joint_.[108] The _points of contact_ between the members of Christ's

body form the channels of supply through which the entire frame receives

nourishment. The clause "through every juncture of the supply"--an

expression somewhat obscure at the best--points forwards, not backwards.

It describes the means by which the Church of Christ, compacted in its

general framework by those larger ligatures which its ministry furnishes

(vv. 11, 12), builds up its inward life,--through a communion wherein

"each single part" of the body shares, and every tie that binds one

Christian soul to another serves to nourish the common life of grace. We

may paraphrase the sentence thus: "Drawing its life from Christ, the

entire body knit together in a well-compacted frame, makes use of every

link that unites its members and of each particular member in his place

to contribute to its sustenance, thus building itself up in love

evermore."

* * * * *

These difficult verses unfold to us three main conceptions: _The goal of

the Church's life_ (ver. 13), _the malady which arrests its development_

(ver. 14), and _the means and conditions of its growth_ (vv. 15, 16).

I. The mark at which the Church has to arrive is set forth, in harmony

with the tenor of the epistle, in a twofold way,--in its _collective_

and its _individual_ aspects. We must all "unitedly attain the oneness

of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God"; and we must attain,

each of us, "a perfect manhood, the measure of the stature of the

fulness of Christ."

The "one faith" of the Church's foundation (ver. 5) is, at the same

time, its end and goal. The final unity will be the unfolding of the

primal unity; the implicit will become explicit; the germ will be

reproduced in the developed organism. "The faith" is still, in St Paul,

the _fides qua credimus_, not _quam credimus_; it is the living faith of

all hearts in the same Christ and gospel.[109] When "we all" believe

heartily and understandingly in "the word of truth, the gospel of our

salvation," the goal will be in sight. All our defects are, at the

bottom, deficiencies of faith. We fail to apprehend and appropriate the

fulness of God in Christ. Faith is the essence of the heart's life: it

forms the common consciousness of the body of Christ.

While faith is the central organ of the Church's life, _the Son of God_

is its central object. The dangers assailing the Church and the

divisions threatening its unity, touched His Person; and whatever

touches the Head, vitally affects the health of the body and the

well-being of every member in it. Many had believed in Jesus as the

Christ and received blessing from Him, whose knowledge of Him as the Son

of God was defective. This ignorance exposed their faith to perversion

by the plausible errors circulating in the Churches of Asia Minor.[110]

The haze of speculation dimmed His glory and distorted His image.

Dazzled by the "philosophy and empty deceit" of specious talkers, these

half-instructed believers formed erroneous or uncertain views of Christ.

And a divided Christ makes a divided Church. We may hold divergent

opinions upon many points of doctrine--in regard to Church order and the

Sacraments, in regard to the nature of the future judgement, in regard

to the mode and limits of inspiration, in regard to the dialect and

expression of our spiritual life--and yet retain, notwithstanding, a

large measure of cordial unity and find ourselves able to co-operate

with each other for many Christian purposes. But when our difference

concerns the Person of Christ, it is felt at once to be fundamental.

There is a gulf between those who worship and those who do not worship

the Son of God.

"Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in

him and he in God" (1 John iv. 15). This is the touchstone of catholic

truth that the apostles have laid down; and by this we must hold fast.

The kingship of the Lord Jesus is the rallying-point of Christendom. In

His name we set up our banners. There are a thousand differences we can

afford to sink and quarrels we may well forget, if our hearts are one

towards Him. Let me meet a man of any sect or country, who loves and

worships my Lord Christ with all his mind and strength, he is my

brother; and who shall forbid us "with one mind and one mouth to glorify

the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ"? It is nothing but our

ignorance of Him, and of each other, that prevents us doing this

already. Let us set ourselves again to the study of Christ. Let us

strive "all of us" to "attain to the full knowledge of the Son of God";

it is the way to reunion. As we approach the central revelation, and the

glory of Christ who is the image of God shines in its original

brightness upon our hearts, prejudices will melt away; the opinions and

interests and sentiments that divide us will be lost in the transcendent

and absorbing vision of the one Lord Jesus Christ.

"Names and sects and parties fall:

Thou, O Christ, art all in all!"

The second and third _unto_ of verse 13 are parallel with the first, and

with each other. A truer faith and better knowledge of Christ uniting

believers to each other, at the same time develope in each of them a

riper character. Jesus Christ was the "perfect man." In Him our nature

attained, without the least flaw or failure, its true end,--which is to

glorify God. In His fulness the plenitude of God is embodied; it is made

human, and attainable to faith. In Jesus Christ humanity rose to its

ideal stature; and we see what is the proper level of our nature, the

dignity and worth to which we have to rise. We are "predestinated to be

conformed to the image of God's Son." All the many brethren of Jesus

measure themselves against the stature of the Firstborn; and they will

have to say to the end with St Paul: "Not as though I had attained,

either were already perfect. I follow after; I press towards the mark."

A true heart that has seen perfection, will never rest short of it.

"Till we arrive--till we _all_ arrive" at this, the work of the

Christian ministry is incomplete. Teachers must still school us, pastors

shepherd us, evangelists mission us. There is work enough and to spare

for them all--and will be, to all appearance, for many a generation to

come. The goal of the regenerate life is never absolutely won; it is hid

with Christ in God. But there is to be a constant approximation to it,

both in the individual believer and in the body of Christ's people. And

a time is coming when that goal will be practically attained, so far as

earthly conditions allow. The Church after long strife will be reunited,

after long trial will be perfected; and Christ will "present her to

Himself" a bride worthy of her Lord, "without spot or wrinkle or any

such thing." Then this world will have had its use, and will give place

to the new heavens and earth.

II. The goal that the apostle marked out, did not appear to him to be in

immediate prospect. The childishness of so many Christian believers

stood in the way of its attainment. In this condition they were exposed

to the seductions of error, and ready to be driven this way and that by

the evil influences active in the world of thought around them. So long

as the Church contains a number of unstable souls, so long she will

remain subject to strife and corruption. When he says in verse 14, "that

we may be _no longer children_ tossed to and fro," etc., this implies

that many Christian believers at that time were of this childish sort,

and were being so distracted and misled. The apostle writes on purpose

to instruct these "babes" and to raise them to a more manly style of

Christian thought and life.[111]

It is a grievous thing to a minister of Christ to see those who for the

time ought to be teachers, fit for the Church's strong meat and the

harder tasks of her service, remaining still infantile in their

condition, needing to be nursed and humoured, narrow in their views of

truth, petty and personal in their aims, wanting in all generous feeling

and exalted thought. Some men, like St Paul himself, advance from the

beginning to a settled faith, to a large intelligence and a full and

manly consecration to God. Others remain "babes in Christ" to the end.

Their souls live, but never thrive. They suffer from every change in the

moral atmosphere, from every new wind of doctrine. These invalids are

objects full of interest to the moral pathologist; they are marked not

unfrequently by fine and delicate qualities. But they are a constant

anxiety to the Church. Till they grow into something more robust they

must remain to crowd the Church's nursery, instead of taking part in her

battle like brave and strenuous men.

The appearance of false doctrine in the Asian Churches made their

undeveloped condition a matter for peculiar apprehension to the apostle.

The Colossian heresy, for example, with which he is dealing at this

present moment, would have no attraction for ripe and settled

Christians. But such a "scheme of error" was exactly suited to catch men

with a certain tincture of philosophy and in general sympathy with

current thought, who had embraced Christianity under some vague sense

of its satisfaction for their spiritual needs, but without an

intelligent grasp of its principles or a thorough experience of its

power.

St Paul speaks of "every wind of _the_ doctrine," having in his mind a

more or less definite form of erroneous teaching, a certain "plan of

error." Reading this verse in the light of the companion letter to

Colossae and the letters addressed to Timothy when at Ephesus a few years

later, we can understand its significance. We can watch the storm that

was rising in the Graeco-Asiatic Churches. The characteristics of early

Gnosticism are well defined in the miniature picture of verse 14. We

note, in the first place, its protean and capricious form, half

Judaistic, half philosophical--ascetic in one direction, libertine in

another: "tossed by the waves, and carried about with every wind." In

the next place, its intellectual spirit,--that of a loose and reckless

speculation: "in the hazarding of men,"--not in the abiding truth of

God. Morally, it was vitiated by "craftiness." And in its issue and

result, this new teaching was leading "to the scheme of error" which the

apostle four years ago had sorrowfully predicted, in bidding farewell to

the Ephesian elders at Miletus (Acts xx.). This scheme was no other than

the gigantic Gnostic system, which devastated the Eastern Churches and

inflicted deep and lasting wounds upon them.

The struggle with legalism was now over and past, at least in its

critical phase. The apostle of the Gentiles had won the battle with

Judaism and saved the Church in its first great conflict. But another

strife is impending (comp. vi. 10); a most pernicious error has made its

appearance within the Church itself. St Paul was not to see more than

the commencement of the new movement, which took two generations to

gather its full force; but he had a true prophetic insight, and he saw

that the strength of the Church in the coming day of trial lay in the

depth and reality of her knowledge of the Son of God.

At every crisis in human thought there emerges some prevailing method of

truth, or of error, the resultant of current tendencies, which unites

the suffrages of a large body of thinkers and claims to embody the

spirit of the age. Such a method of error our own age has produced as

the outcome of the anti-Christian speculation of modern times, in the

doctrines current under the names of Positivism, Secularism, or

Agnosticism. While the Gnosticism of the early ages asserted the

infinite distance of God from the world and the intrinsic evil of

matter, modern Agnosticism removes God still further from us, beyond the

reach of thought, and leaves us with material nature as the one positive

and accessible reality, as the basis of life and law. Faith and

knowledge of the Son of God it banishes as dreams of our childhood. The

supernatural, it tells us, is an illusion; and we must resign ourselves

to be once more without God in the world and without hope beyond death.

This materialistic philosophy gathers to a head the unbelief of the

century. It is the living antagonist of Divine revelation. It supplies

the appointed trial of faith for educated men of our generation, and the

test of the intellectual vigour and manhood of the Church.

III. In the midst of the changing perils and long delays of her history,

the Church is called evermore to press towards the mark of her calling.

The conditions on which her progress depends are summed up in verses 15

and 16.

To the craft of false teachers St Paul would have his Churches oppose

the weapons only of _truth and love_. "Holding the truth in love," they

will "grow up in all things into Christ." Sincere believers, heartily

devoted to Christ, will not fall into fatal error. A healthy life

instinctively repels disease. They "have an anointing from the Holy One"

which is their protection (1 John ii. 20-29). In all that belongs to

godliness and a noble manhood, such natures will expand; temptation and

the assaults of error stimulate rather than arrest their growth. And

with the growth and ripening in her fellowship of such men of God, the

whole Church grows.

Next to the moral condition lies the spiritual condition of

advancement,--viz., the full recognition of _the supremacy and

sufficiency of Christ_. Christ assumes here two opposite relations to

the members of His body. He is the Head _into_ (or _unto_) which we grow

in all things; but at the same time, _from_ whom all the body derives

its increase (ver. 16). He is the perfect ideal for us each; He is the

common source of life and progress for us all. In our individual efforts

after holiness and knowledge, in our personal aspirations and struggles,

Jesus Christ is our model, our constant aim: we "grow into Him" (ver.

15). But as we learn to live for others, as we merge our own aims in the

life of the Church and of humanity we feel, even more deeply than our

personal needs had made us do, our dependence upon Him. We see that the

forces which are at work to raise mankind, to stay the strifes and heal

the wounds of humanity, emanate from the living Christ (ver. 16). He is

the head of the Church and the heart of the world.

The third, practical condition of Church growth is brought out by the

closing words of the paragraph. It is _organization_: "all the body

fitly framed [comp. ii. 21] and knit together." Each local _ecclesia_,

or assembly of saints, will have its stated officers, its regulated and

seemly order in worship and in work. And within this fit frame, there

must be the warm union of hearts, the frank exchange of thought and

feeling, the brotherly counsel in all things touching the kingdom of

God, by which Christian men in each place of their assembling are "knit

together." From these local and congregational centres, the Christian

fellowship spreads out its arms to embrace all that love our Lord Jesus

Christ.

A building or a machine is _fitted_ together by the adjustment of its

parts. A body needs, besides this mechanical construction, a pervasive

life, a sympathetic force _knitting_ it together: "knit together in

love," the apostle says in Colossians ii. 2; and so it is "in love" that

this "body builds up itself." The tense of the participles in the first

part of verse 16 is present (continuous); we see a body in process of

incorporation, whose several organs, imperfectly developed and

imperfectly co-operant, are increasingly drawn to each other and bound

more firmly in one as each becomes more complete in itself. The perfect

Christian and the perfect Church are taking shape at once. Each of them

requires the other for its due realization.

The rest of the sentence, following the comma that we place at "knit

together," has its parallel in Colossians ii. 19: "All the body, through

its junctures and bands being supplied and knit together, increaseth

with the increase of God." According to St Paul's physiology, the

"bands" knit the body together, but the "junctures" are its means of

supply. Each point of contact is a means of nourishment to the frame.

In touch with each other, Christians communicate the life flowing from

the common Head. The apostle would make _Christian intercourse a

universal means of grace_. No two Christian men should meet anywhere,

upon any business, without themselves and the whole Church being the

better for it.

"Wherever two or three are met together in my name," said Jesus, "there

am I in the midst." In the multitude of these obscure and humble

meetings of brethren who love each other for Christ's sake, is the grace

supplied, the love diffused abroad, by which the Church lives and

thrives. The vitality of the Church of Christ does not depend so much

upon the large and visible features of its construction--upon Synods and

Conferences, upon Bishops and Presbyteries and the like, influential and

venerable as these authorities may be; but upon the spiritual

intercourse that goes on amongst the body of its people. "Each several

part" of Christ's great body, "according to the measure" of its

capacity, is required to receive and to transmit the common grace.

However defective in other points of organization, the society in which

this takes place fulfils the office of an ecclesiastical body. It will

grow into the fulness of Christ; it "builds up itself in love." The

primary condition of Church health and progress is that there shall be

an unobstructed flow of the life of grace from point to point through

the tissues and substance of the entire frame.

FOOTNOTES:

[105] =Eis hena kaino anthrôpon= (_homo_), ch. ii. 15; similarly in iv.

22, 24; Rom. vi. 6; 1 Cor. xv. 45, 47, etc. Here =eis andra teleion=

(_vir_); comp. 1 Cor. xiii. 11; James iii. 2. To call the Church =anêr=

would be highly incongruous, in view of ch. v. 23, etc.; comp. 2 Cor.

xi. 2.

[106] Col. i. 22, 28, 29; 2 Tim. ii. 10.

[107] For this association of metaphor, comp. Shakespeare: _Julius

Caesar_, Act V., Scene 1:--

"Blow, wind; swell, billow; and swim, bark!

The storm is up; and all is on the hazard!"

[108] Vulgate: _per omnem juncturam ministrationis_. St Paul's word here

is =dia pasês haphês=, _through every touching_. See Lightfoot's

valuable note on the medical and philosophical use of the word by Greek

authors, in his Commentary on Colossians (ii. 19).

[109] Comp. ch. i. 13: "in whom you also [Gentiles, along with us Jews]

found hope"; also Rom. iii. 29, 30; Tit. i. 4, "my true child according

to _a common faith_."

[110] See the connexion of thought in Col. ii. 8-10, 18, 19.

[111] Compare 1 Cor. ii. 6, iii. 1-3, xiv. 20, xvi. 13; Gal. iv. 19;

Heb. v. 11-14.

ON CHRISTIAN MORALS.

CHAPTER iv. 17--v. 21.

=En kainotêti zôês peripatêsômen.=--ROM. vi. 4.

CHAPTER XIX.

_THE WALK OF THE GENTILES._

"This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye no longer

walk as the Gentiles also walk, in the vanity of their mind, being

darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God

because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening

of their heart; who being past feeling gave themselves up to

lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness."--EPH. iv.

17-19.

Christ has called into existence and formed around Him already a new

world. Those who are members of His body, are brought into another order

of being from that to which they had formerly belonged. They have

therefore to walk in quite another way--"no longer as the Gentiles." St

Paul does not say "as the other Gentiles" (A.V.); for his readers,

though Gentiles by birth (ii. 11), are now of the household of faith and

the city of God. They hold the franchise of the "commonwealth of

Israel." As at a later time the apostle John in his Gospel, though a

born Jew, yet from the standpoint of the new Israel writes of "the Jews"

as a distant and alien people, so St Paul distinguishes his readers from

"the Gentiles" who were their natural kindred.

When he "testifies," with a pointed emphasis, "that _you_ no longer walk

as do indeed the Gentiles," and when in verse 20 he exclaims, "But

_you_ did not thus learn the Christ," it appears that there were those

bearing Christ's name and professing to have learnt of Him who did thus

walk. This, indeed, he expressly asserts in writing to the Philippians

(ch. iii. 18, 19): "Many walk, of whom I told you oftentimes, and now

tell you even weeping,--the enemies of the cross of Christ; whose god is

their belly, and their glory in their shame, who mind earthly things."

We cannot but associate this warning with the apprehension expressed in

verse 14 above. The reckless and unscrupulous teachers against whose

seductions the apostle guards the infant Churches of Asia Minor,

tampered with the morals as well as with the faith of their disciples,

and were drawing them back insidiously to their former habits of

life.[112]

The connexion between the foregoing part of this chapter and that on

which we now enter, lies in the relation of the new life of the

Christian believer to the new community which he has entered. The old

world of Gentile society had formed the "old man" as he then existed,

the product of centuries of debasing idolatry. But in Christ that world

is abolished, and a "new man" is born. The world in which the Asian

Christians once lived as "Gentiles in the flesh," is dead to them.[113]

They are partakers of the regenerate humanity constituted in Jesus

Christ. From this idea the apostle deduces the ethical doctrine of the

following paragraphs. His ideal "new man" is no mere ego, devoted to

his personal perfection; he is part and parcel of the redeemed society

of men; his virtues are those of a member of the Christian order and

commonwealth.

* * * * *

The representation given of Gentile life in the three verses before us

is highly condensed and pungent. It is from the same hand as the lurid

picture of Romans i. 18-32. While this delineation is comparatively

brief and cursory, it carries the analysis in some respects deeper than

does that memorable passage. We may distinguish the main features of the

description, as they bring into view in turn the _mental_, _spiritual_,

and _moral_ characteristics of the existing Paganism. Man's intellect

was confounded; religion was dead; profligacy was flagrant and

shameless.

I. "The Gentiles walk," the apostle says, "in _vanity of their

mind_"--with reason frustrate and impotent; "being _darkened in their

understanding_"--with no clear or settled principles, no sound theory of

life. Similarly, he wrote in Romans i. 21: "They were frustrated in

their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened." But here he

seems to trace the futility further back, beneath the "reasonings" to

the "reason" (_nous_) itself. The Gentile mind was deranged at its

foundation. Reason seemed to have suffered a paralysis. Man has

forfeited his claim to be a rational creature, when he worships objects

so degraded as the heathen gods, when he practises vices so detestable

and ruinous.

The men of intellect, who held themselves aloof from popular beliefs,

for the most part confessed that their philosophies were speculative and

futile, that certainty in the greatest and most serious matters was

unattainable. Pilate's question, "What is truth?"--no jesting question

surely--passed from lip to lip and from one school of thought to

another, without an answer. Five centuries before this time the human

intellect had a marvellous awakening. The art and philosophy of Greece

sprang into their glorious life, like Athené born from the head of Zeus,

full-grown and in shining armour. With such leaders as Pericles and

Phidias, as Sophocles and Plato, it seemed as though nothing was

impossible to the mind of man. At last the genius of our race had

blossomed; rich and golden fruit would surely follow, to be gathered

from the tree of life. But the blossoms fell, and the fruit proved as

rottenness. Grecian art had sunk into a meretricious skill; poetry was

little more than a trick of words; philosophy, a wrangling of the

schools. Rome towered in the majesty of her arms and laws above the

faded glory of Greece. She promised a more practical and sober ideal, a

rule of world-wide justice and peace and material plenty. But this dream

vanished, like the other. The age of the Caesars was an age of

disillusion. Scepticism and cynicism, disbelief in goodness, despair of

the future possessed men's minds. Stoics and Epicureans, old and new

Academics, Peripatetics and Pythagoreans disputed the palm of wisdom in

mere strife of words. Few of them possessed any earnest faith in their

own systems. The one craving of Athens and the learned was "to hear some

new thing," for of the old things all thinking men were weary. Only

rhetoric and scepticism flourished. Reason had built up her noblest

constructions as if in sport, to pull them down again. "On the whole,

this last period of Greek philosophy, extending into the Christian era,

bore the marks of intellectual exhaustion and impoverishment, and of

despair in the solution of its high problem" (Döllinger). The world

itself admitted the apostle's reproach that "by wisdom it knew not God."

It knew nothing, therefore, to sure purpose, nothing that availed to

satisfy or save it.

Our own age, it may be said, possesses a philosophic method unknown to

the ancient world. The old metaphysical systems failed; but we have

relaid the foundations of life and thought upon the solid ground of

nature. Modern culture rests upon a basis of positive and demonstrated

knowledge, whose value is independent of religious belief. Scientific

discovery has put us in command of material forces that secure the race

against any such relapse as that which took place in the overthrow of

the Graeco-Roman civilization. _Pessimism_ answers these pretensions made

for physical science by her idolaters. Pessimism is the nemesis of

irreligious thought. It creeps like a slow palsy over the highest and

ablest minds that reject the Christian hope. What avails it to yoke

steam to our chariot, if black care still sits behind the rider? to wing

our thoughts with the lightning, if those thoughts are no happier or

worthier than before?

"Civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude.

Man conquers the powers of nature, and becomes in turn their slave" (F.

W. Robertson). Poverty grows gaunt and desperate by the side of lavish

wealth. A new barbarism is bred in what science grimly calls the

_proletariate_, a barbarism more vicious and dangerous than the old,

that is generated by the inhuman conditions of life under the existing

regime of industrial science.

Education gives man quickness of wit and new capacity for evil or good;

culture makes him more sensitive; refinement more delicate in his

virtues or his vices. But there is no tendency in these forces as we

see them now in operation, any more than in the classical discipline, to

make nobler or better men. Secular knowledge supplies nothing to bind

society together, no force to tame the selfish passions, to guard the

moral interests of mankind. Science has given an immense impetus to the

forces acting on civilized men; it cannot change or elevate their

character. It puts new and potent instruments into our hands; but

whether those instruments shall be tools to build the city of God or

weapons for its destruction, is determined by the spirit of the

wielders. In the midst of his splendid machinery, master of the planet's

wealth and lord of nature's forces, the civilized man at the end of this

boastful century stands with a dull and empty heart--without God. Poor

creature, he wants to know whether "life is worth living"! He has gained

the world, but lost his soul.

In vanity of mind and darkness of reasoning men stumble onwards to the

end of life, to the end of time. The world's wisdom and the lessons of

its history give no hope of any real advance from darkness to light

until, as Plato said, "We are able more safely and securely to make our

journey, borne on some firmer vehicle, on some Divine word."[114] Such a

vehicle those who believe in Christ have found in His teaching. The

moral progress of the Christian ages is due to its guidance. And that

moral progress has created the conditions and given the stimulus to

which our material and scientific progress is due. Spiritual life gives

permanence and value to all man's acquisitions. Both of this world and

of that to come "godliness holds the promise." We are only beginning to

learn how much was meant when Jesus Christ announced Himself as "the

light of the world." He brought into the world a light which was to

shine through all the realms of human life.

II. The delusion of mind in which the nations walked, resulted in a

settled state of _estrangement from God_. They were "alienated from the

life of God."

"Alienated from the commonwealth of Israel," St Paul said in chapter ii.

12,[115] using, as he does here, the Greek perfect participle, which

denotes an abiding fact. These two alienations generally coincide.

Outside the religious community, we are outside the religious life. This

expression gathers to a point what was said in verses 11, 12 of chapter

ii., and further back in verses 1-3; it discloses the spring of the

soul's malady and decay in its separation from the living God. When

shall we learn that in God only is our life? We may exist without God,

as a tree cast out in the desert, or a body wasting in the grave; but

that is not _life_.

Everywhere the apostle moved amongst men who seemed to him

dead--joyless, empty-hearted, weary of an idle learning or lost in

sullen ignorance, caring only to eat and drink till they should die like

the beasts. Their so-called gods were phantasms of the Divine, in which

the wiser of them scarcely even pretended to believe. The ancient

natural pieties--not wholly untouched by the Spirit of God, despite

their idolatry--that peopled with fair fancies the Grecian shores and

skies, and taught the sturdy Roman his manfulness and hallowed his love

of home and city, were all but extinguished. Death was at the heart of

Pagan religion; corruption in its breath. Few indeed were those who

believed in the existence of a wise and righteous Power behind the veil

of sense. The Roman augurs laughed at their own auspices; the priests

made a traffic of their temple ceremonies. Sorcery of all kinds was

rife, as rife as scepticism. The most fashionable rites of the day were

the gloomy and revolting mysteries imported from Egypt and Syria. A

hundred years before, the Roman poet Lucretius expressed, with his

burning indignation, the disposition of earnest and high-minded men

towards the creeds of the later classic times:--

"Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret,

In terris oppressa gravi sub religione,

Quae caput e coeli regionibus ostendebat

Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,

Primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra

Est 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 second _because_ supplements 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 of excuse. But

the ignorance he censures is not of the understanding alone; nor is it

curable by philosophy and science. It has an intrinsic

ground,--"existing _in_ them."

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 an

_induration 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 His Son. 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 its _licentiousness_. In his

letter to the Romans St Paul declares that the second of these

deplorable 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 word _Aselgeia

(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 Caesar 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 throne

through 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 into _Aselgeia_,--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--_hetaerae_

they were called, or _companions_ of 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 of wealth 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 feeling_ says 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 for

_modesty_ and _reverence_, 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] _Phaeao_: § 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.

CHAPTER XX.

_THE TWO HUMAN TYPES._

"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 did _you_ learn 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 we have 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 not _Christ_, but _the Christ_ whom 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 have _learned 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 Colossae 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 the _Ephesian_ Christians 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 Judaea by a source dating earlier than the day of Pentecost. The

partial knowledge of Jesus current for so long at Ephesus, 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 Colossae. 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 truth _in 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 veritable _Jesus_ Christ, 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) _Jesus_ and the Divine

_Christ_, 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 Christ Himself. They broke up into _Jesus and Christ_

the 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 what they 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, but _new men_ that 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 to

_Caesar_ as his judge. He was in durance as _Nero's_ prisoner, 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 Caesars

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

been rearing for so many ages. And Nero was the final product and

paragon of the Caesarean 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 world had 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 their ruin are "lusts _of

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 woman _being

deceived_ fell into transgression."

"So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud

Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the tree

Of 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

learning _about_ Christ, but in learning _Him_. 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 that _to_ himself; and yet never deny _himself_. 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 a _continual rejuvenation_ that 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 a _new 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 absorbs

the 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 to _adopt_ it,--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 we live 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:

"_righteousness_ and _holiness_ [or _piety_] 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 mercy to 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 as _devotedness_ from _devoutness_.[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 post =houtôs= distinctionem ascribas? _Vos autem non ita_

(subaudi _facere 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] =Esti alêtheia en tô Iêsou.= 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 the _Vie de Jésus_ can 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 his _Souvenirs_.

[124] =ananeousthai de tô pneumati tou noos hymôn, kai endysasthai to

kainon anthrôpon, to kata Theo ktisthenta.=

[125] Comp. pp. 29, 30.

[126] It is important to distinguish the Greek adjectives =hagios= and

=hosios=, with their derivatives. See Cremer's _N. T. Lexicon_ on these

words, and Trench's _N. 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.

CHAPTER XXI.

_DISCARDED VICES._

"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 of them 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; _speak_ truth 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 me_ cries 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 all ungodliness 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 are _members one of another_." But the word

_neighbour_, 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 borrowed from 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 to _theft_.

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 him _that steals_ play 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 whether _corrupt talk_ is 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 "_worthless_ fruit" of the "_worthless_

[_good-for-nothing_] tree" in Matthew xii. 33; and again of the "_bad_

fish" 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 against _inane_, inept and useless talk that St Paul sets his

face. Jesus said that "for _every idle word_ men 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 that we 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. _Malice_ is 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.

_Bitterness_ is malice sharpened to a point and directed against the

exasperating object. _Wrath_ and _anger_ are 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. _Clamour_ and _railing_ give 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.

_Kindness_ in act, _tenderheartedness_ of 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 the apostle'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 life _an imitation of God_.