world looks to some future, however near or bounded it may be; and
every power we perfect, every capacity we acquire, every disposition
and spirit we foster, is an earnest of something in that future. Here
is a man who gives himself to the mastery of a trade. He acquires all
its skill, all its methods, all its resources. There is nothing any
tradesman can do that he cannot do as well or better. What is that the
earnest of? What does it ensure, and as it were put into his hand by
anticipation? It is the earnest of constant employment, of good
wages, of respect from fellow-workmen, perhaps of wealth. Here, again,
is a man with the scientific spirit. He is keenly inquisitive about
the facts and laws of the world in which we live. Everything is
interesting to him--astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, history.
What is this the earnest of? It is the earnest, probably, of
scientific achievements of some kind, of intellectual toils and
intellectual victories. This man will enter into the inheritance of
science; he will walk through the kingdoms of knowledge in the length
of them and the breadth of them, and will claim them as his own. And
so it is wherever we choose to take our illustrations. Every spirit
that dwells in us, and is cultivated and cherished by us, is an
_earnest_, because it fits and furnishes us for some particular thing.
_God's_ Spirit also is an earnest of an inheritance which is
incorruptible, undefiled, imperishable: can we assure ourselves that
we have anything in our souls which promises, because it matches with,
an inheritance like this? When we come to die, this will be a serious
question. The faculties of accumulation, of mechanical skill, of
scientific research, of trade on a great or a small scale, of
agreeable social intercourse, of comfortable domestic life, may have
been brought to perfection in us; but can we console ourselves with
the thought that _these_ have the earnest of immortality? Do they
qualify us for, and by qualifying assure us of, the incorruptible
kingdom? Or do we not see at once that a totally different equipment
is needed to make men at home there, and that nothing can be the
earnest of an eternal life of blessedness with God except that Holy
Spirit with which He seals His own, and through which He makes them,
even here, partakers of the divine nature?
We cannot study these words without becoming conscious of the immense
enlargement which the Christian religion has brought to the human
mind, of the vast expansion of hope which is due to the Gospel, and at
the same time of the moral soundness and sobriety with which that hope
is conceived. The promises of God were first really apprehended in
Jesus Christ; in Him as He lived and died and rose again from the
dead, in Him especially as He lives in immortal glory, men first saw
what God was able and willing to do for them, and they saw this in its
true relations. They saw it under its moral and spiritual conditions.
It was not a future unconnected with the present, or connected with it
in an arbitrary or incalculable way. It was a future which had its
earnest in the present, a guarantee not alien to it, but akin--the
Spirit of Christ implanted in the heart, the likeness of Christ sealed
upon the nature. The glorious inheritance was the inheritance, not of
strangers, but of sons; and it still becomes sure as the Spirit of
sonship is received, and fades into incredibility when that Spirit is
extinguished or depressed. If we could live in the Spirit with the
completeness of Christ, or even of St. Paul, we should feel that we
really had an earnest of immortality; the glory of heaven would be as
certain to us as the faithfulness of God to His promise.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Observe the play on the words in βεβαιῶν εἰς Χ ρ ι σ τ ό ν and
Χ ρ ί σ α ς.
[11] When we consider the New Testament use of this idea (cf. Rom. iv.
11; Rev. vii. 2 ff.; Eph. i. 13 f., and this passage), and remember
that Paul and John can have had nothing to do with the Greek
mysteries, it will be apparent that to adduce the ecclesiastical use
of σφραγίς as a proof that the conceptions current in these mysteries
had a powerful influence from the earliest times on the Christian
conception of baptism is beside the mark. One of the earliest examples
outside the New Testament is in the Shepherd of Hermas, _Simil._,
viii. 6: οἱ πιστεύσαντες καὶ εἰληφότες τὴν σφραγῖδα καὶ τεθλακότες
αὐτὴν καὶ μὴ τηρήσαντες ὑγιῆ. This figure of _breaking the seal_, by
falling into sin and losing what baptism confers, is common. Sometimes
it is varied: "Keep the flesh pure, καὶ τὴν σφραγῖδα ἄσπιλον," in 2
Clem. viii. 6. This may be made to carry superstition, but there is
nothing superstitious or unscriptural in it to begin with.
V
_A PASTOR'S HEART_
"But I call God for a witness upon my soul, that to spare you I
forbare to come unto Corinth. Not that we have lordship over your
faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand. But I
determined this for myself, that I would not come again to you
with sorrow. For if I make you sorry, who then is he that maketh
me glad, but he that is made sorry by me? And I wrote this very
thing, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I
ought to rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy is
_the joy_ of you all. For out of much affliction and anguish of
heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be made
sorry, but that ye might know the love which I have more
abundantly unto you."--2 COR. i. 23-ii. 4 (R.V.).
When Paul came to the end of the paragraph in which he defends himself
from the charge of levity and untrustworthiness by appealing to the
nature of the Gospel which he preached, he seems to have felt that it
was hardly sufficient for his purpose. It might be perfectly true that
the Gospel was one mighty affirmation, with no dubiety or
inconsistency about it; it might be as true that it was a supreme
testimony to the faithfulness of God; but bad men, or suspicious men,
would not admit that its character covered his. Their own
insincerities would keep them from understanding its power to change
its loyal ministers into its own likeness, and to stamp them with its
own simplicity and truth. The mere invention of the argument in vv.
18-20 is of itself the highest possible testimony to the ideal height
at which the Apostle lived; no man conscious of duplicity could ever
have had it occur to him. But it had the defect of being too good for
his purpose; the foolish and the false could see a triumphant reply to
it; and he leaves it for a solemn asseveration of the reason which
actually kept him from carrying out his first intention. "I call God
to witness against my soul, that sparing you I forbore to come[12] to
Corinth." The soul is the seat of life; he stakes his life, as it
were, in God's sight, upon the truth of his words. It was not
consideration for himself, in any selfish spirit, but consideration
for them, which explained his change of purpose. If he had carried out
his intention, and gone to Corinth, he would have had to do so, as he
says in 1 Cor. iv. 21, with a rod, and this would not have been
pleasant either for him or for them.
This is very plain--plain even to the dullest; the Apostle has no
sooner set it down than he feels it is too plain. "To spare us," he
hears the Corinthians say to themselves as they read: "who is he that
he should take this tone in speaking to us?" And so he hastens to
anticipate and deprecate their touchy criticism: "Not that we lord it
over your faith, but we are helpers of your joy; as far as faith is
concerned, your position, of course, is secure."
This is a very interesting aside; the digressions in St. Paul, as in
Plato, are sometimes more attractive than the arguments. It shows us,
for one thing, the freedom of the Christian faith. Those who have
received the Gospel have all the responsibilities of mature men; they
have come to their majority as spiritual beings; they are not, in
their character and standing as Christians, subject to arbitrary and
irresponsible interference on the part of others. Paul himself was the
great preacher of this spiritual emancipation: he gloried in the
liberty with which Christ made men free. For him the days of bondage
were over; there was no subjection for the Christian to any custom or
tradition of men, no enslavement of his conscience to the judgment or
the will of others, no coercion of the spirit except by itself. He had
great confidence in this Gospel and in its power to produce generous
and beautiful characters. That it was capable of perversion also he
knew very well. It was open to the infusion of self-will; in the
intoxication of freedom from arbitrary and unspiritual restraint, men
might forget that the believer was bound to be a law to himself, that
he was free, not in lawless self-will, but only in the Lord.
Nevertheless, the principle of freedom was too sacred to be tampered
with; it was necessary both for the education of the conscience and
for the enrichment of spiritual life with the most various and
independent types of goodness; and the Apostle took all the risks, and
all the inconveniences even, rather than limit it in the least.
This passage shows us one of the inconveniences. The newly
enfranchised are mightily sensible of their freedom, and it is
extremely difficult to tell them of their faults. At the very mention
of authority all that is bad in them, as well as all that is good, is
on the alert; and spiritual independence and the liberty of the
Christian people have been represented and defended again and again,
not only by an awful sense of responsibility to Christ, which lifts
the lowliest lives into supreme greatness, but by pride, bigotry,
moral insolence, and every bad passion. What is to be done in such
cases as these, where liberty has forgotten the law of Christ? It is
certainly not to be denied in principle: Paul, even with the peculiar
position of an apostle, and of the spiritual father of those to whom
he writes (1 Cor. iv. 15), does not claim such an authority over their
faith--that is, over the people themselves in their character of
believers--as a master has over his slaves. Their position as
Christians is secure; it is taken for granted by him as by them; and
this being so, no arbitrary _ipse dixit_ can settle anything in
dispute between them; he can issue no orders to the Church such as the
Roman Emperor could issue to his soldiers. He may appeal to them on
spiritual grounds; he may enlighten their consciences by interpreting
to them the law of Christ; he may try to reach them by praise or
blame; but simple compulsion is not one of his resources. If St. Paul
says this, occupying as he does a position which contains in itself a
natural authority which most ministers can never have, ought not all
official persons and classes in the Church to beware of the claims
they make for themselves? A clerical hierarchy, such as has been
developed and perfected in the Church of Rome, does lord it over
faith; it _legislates_ for the laity, both in faith and practice,
without their co-operation, or even their consent; it keeps the _cœtus
fidelium_, the mass of believing men, which _is_ the Church, in a
perpetual minority. All this, in a so-called apostolic succession, is
not only anti-apostolic, but anti-Christian. It is the confiscation of
Christian freedom; the keeping of believers in leading-strings all
their days, lest in their liberty they should go astray. In the
Protestant Churches, on the other hand, the danger on the whole is of
the opposite kind. We are too jealous of authority. We are too proud
of our own competence. We are too unwilling, individually, to be
taught and corrected. We resent, I will not say criticism, but the
most serious and loving voice which speaks to us to disapprove. Now
liberty, when it does not deepen the sense of responsibility to God
and to the brotherhood--and it does not always do so--is an anarchic
and disintegrating force. In all the Churches it exists, to some
extent, in this degraded form; and it is this which makes Christian
education difficult, and Church discipline often impossible. These are
serious evils, and we can only overcome them if we cultivate the sense
of responsibility at the same time that we maintain the principle of
liberty, remembering that it is those only of whom he says, "Ye were
bought with a price" (and are therefore Christ's slaves), to whom St.
Paul also gives the charge: "Be not ye slaves of men."
This passage not only illustrates the freedom of Christian faith, it
presents us with an ideal of the Christian ministry. "We are not lords
over your faith," says St. Paul, "but we are helpers of your joy." It
is implied in this that joy is the very end and element of the
Christian life, and that it is the minister's duty to be at war with
all that restrains it, and to co-operate in all that leads to it.
Here, one would say, is something in which all can agree: all human
souls long for joy, however much they may differ about the spheres of
law and liberty. But have not most Christian people, and most
Christian congregations, something here to accuse themselves of? Do
not many of us bear false witness against the Gospel on this very
point? Who that came into most churches, and looked at the
uninterested faces, and hearkened to the listless singing, would feel
that the soul of the religion, so languidly honoured, was mere
joy--joy unspeakable, if we trust the Apostles, and full of glory? It
is ingratitude which makes us forget this. We begin to grow blind to
the great things which lie at the basis of our faith; the love of God
in Jesus Christ--that love in which He died for us upon the
tree--begins to lose its newness and its wonder; we speak of it
without apprehension and without feeling; it does not make our hearts
burn within us any more; we have no joy in it. Yet we may be sure of
this--that we can have no joy without it. And he is our best friend,
the truest minister of God to us, who helps us to the place where the
love of God is poured out in our hearts in its omnipotence, and we
renew our joy in it. In doing so, it may be necessary for the minister
to cause pain by the way. There is no joy, nor any possibility of it,
where evil is tolerated. There is no joy where sin has been taken
under the patronage of those who call themselves by Christ's name.
There is no joy where pride is in arms in the soul, and is reinforced
by suspicion, by obstinacy, even by jealousy and hate, all waiting to
dispute the authority of the preacher of repentance. When these evil
spirits are overcome, and cast out, which may only be after a painful
conflict, joy will have its opportunity again,--joy, whose right it is
to reign in the Christian soul and the Christian community. Of all
evangelistic forces, this joy is the most potent; and for that, above
all other reasons, it should be cherished wherever Christian people
wish to work the work of their Lord.
After this little digression on the freedom of the faith, and on joy as
the element of the Christian life, Paul returns to his defence. "To
spare you I forbore to come; for I made up my own mind on this, not to
come to you a second time in sorrow." Why was he so determined about
this? He explains in the second verse. It is because all his joy is
bound up in the Corinthians, so that if he grieves them he has no one
left to gladden him except those whom he has grieved--in other words, he
has no joy at all. And he not only made up his mind definitely on this;
he wrote also in exactly this sense: he did not wish, when he came, to
have sorrow from those from whom he ought to have joy. In that desire to
spare himself, as well as them, he counted on their sympathy; he was
sure that his own joy was the joy of every one of them, and that they
would appreciate his motives in not fulfilling a promise, the fulfilment
of which in the circumstances would only have brought grief both to them
and him. The delay has given them time to put right what was amiss in
their Church, and has ensured a joyful time to them all when his visit
is actually accomplished.
There are some grammatical and historical difficulties here which claim
attention. The most discussed is that of the first verse: what is the
precise meaning of τὸ μὴ πάλιν ἐν λύπῃ πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐλθεῖν? There is no
doubt that this is the correct order of the words, and just as little, I
think, that the natural meaning is that Paul had once visited Corinth in
grief, and was resolved not to repeat such a visit. So the words are
taken by Meyer, Hofmann, Schmiedel, and others. The visit in question
cannot have been that on occasion of which the Church was founded; and
as the connexion between this passage and the last chapter of the First
Epistle is as close as can be conceived (see the Introduction), it
cannot have fallen between the two: the only other supposition is, that
it took place before the First Epistle was written. This is the opinion
of Lightfoot, Meyer, and Weiss; and it is not fatal to it that no such
visit is mentioned elsewhere--_e.g._, in the book of Acts. Still, the
interpretation is not essential; and if we can get over chap. xiii. 2,
it is quite possible to agree with Heinrici that Paul had only been in
Corinth once, and that what he means in ver. 1 here is: "I determined
not to carry out my purpose of revisiting you, in sorrow."
There is a difficulty of another sort in ver. 2. One's first thought
is to read καὶ τίς ὁ εὐφραίνων με κ.τ.λ., as a real singular, with a
reference, intelligible though indefinite, to the notorious but
penitent sinner of Corinth. "I vex you, I grant it; but where does my
joy come from--the joy without which I am resolved not to visit
you--except from one who is vexed by me?" The bad man's repentance had
made Paul glad, and there is a worthy considerateness in this
indefinite way of designating him. This interpretation has commended
itself to so sound a judge as Bengel, and though more recent scholars
reject it with practical unanimity, it is difficult to be sure that it
is wrong. The alternative is to generalise the τίς, and make the
question mean: "If I vex you, where can I find joy? All my joy is in
you, and to see you grieved leaves me absolutely joyless."
A third difficulty is the reference of ἔγραψα τοῦτο αὐτὸ in ver. 3.
Language very similar is found in ver. 9 (εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ καὶ ἔγραψα),
and again in chap. vii. 8-12 (ἐλύπησα ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἐπιστολῇ). It is very
natural to think here of our First Epistle. It served the purpose
contemplated by the letter here described; it told of Paul's change
of purpose; it warned the Corinthians to rectify what was amiss, and
so to order their affairs that he might come, not with a rod, but in
love and in the spirit of meekness; or, as he says here, not to have
sorrow, but, what he was entitled to, joy from his visit. All that is
alleged against this is that our First Epistle does not suit the
description given of the writing in ver. 4: "out of much affliction
and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears." But when those
parts of the First Epistle are read, in which St. Paul is not
answering questions submitted to him by the Church, but writing out of
his heart upon its spiritual condition, this will appear a dubious
assertion. What a pain must have been at his heart, when such
passionate words broke from him as these: "Is Christ divided? Was Paul
crucified for you?--What is Apollos, and what is Paul?--With me it is
a very little thing to be judged by you.--Though ye have ten thousand
instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ
Jesus I begot you through the Gospel.--I will know, not the speech of
them that are puffed up, but the power." Not to speak of the fifth and
sixth chapters, words like these justify us in supposing that the
First Epistle may be, and in all probability is, meant.[13]
Putting these details aside, as of mainly historical interest, let us
look rather at the spirit of this passage. It reveals, more clearly
perhaps than any passage in the New Testament, the essential
qualification of the Christian minister--a heart pledged to his
brethren in the love of Christ. That is the only possible basis of an
authority which can plead its own and its Master's cause against the
aberrations of spiritual liberty, and there is always both room and
need for it in the Church. Certainly it is the hardest of all
authorities to win, and the costliest to maintain, and therefore
substitutes for it are innumerable. The poorest are those that are
merely official, where a minister appeals to his standing as a member
of a separate order, and expects men to reverence that. If this was
once possible in Christendom, if it is still possible where men
secretly wish to shunt their spiritual responsibilities upon others,
it is not possible where emancipation has been grasped either in an
anarchic or in a Christian spirit. Let the great idea of liberty, and
of all that is cognate with liberty, once dawn upon their souls, and
men will never sink again to the recognition of anything as an
authority that does not attest itself in a purely spiritual way.
"Orders" will mean nothing to them but an arrogant unreality, which in
the name of all that is free and Christian they are bound to contemn.
It will be the same, too, with any authority which has merely an
intellectual basis. A professional education, even in theology, gives
no man authority to meddle with another in his character as a
Christian. The University and the Divinity Schools can confer no
competence here. Nothing that distinguishes a man from his fellows,
nothing in virtue of which he takes a place of superiority apart: on
the contrary, that love only which makes him entirely one with them in
Jesus Christ, can ever entitle him to interpose. If their joy is his
joy; if to grieve them, even for their good, is his grief; if the
cloud and sunshine of their lives cast their darkness and their light
immediately upon him; if he shrinks from the faintest approach to
self-assertion, yet would sacrifice anything to perfect their joy in
the Lord,--then he is in the true apostolical succession; and whatever
authority may rightly be exercised, where the freedom of the spirit is
the law, may rightly be exercised by him. What is required of
Christian workers in every degree--of ministers and teachers, of
parents and friends, of all Christian people with the cause of Christ
at heart--is a greater expenditure of soul on their work. Here is a
whole paragraph of St. Paul, made up almost entirely of "grief" and
"joy"; what depth of feeling lies behind it! If this is alien to us in
our work for Christ, we need not wonder that our work does not tell.
And if this is true generally, it is especially true when the work we
have to do is that of rebuking sin. There are few things which try
men, and show what spirit they are of, more searchingly than this. We
like to be on God's side, and to show our zeal for Him, and we are far
too ready to put all our bad passions at His service. But these are a
gift which He declines. Our wrath does not work His righteousness--a
lesson that even good men, of a kind, are very slow to learn. To
denounce sin, and to declaim about it, is the easiest and cheapest
thing in the world: one could not do less where sin is concerned,
unless he did nothing at all. Yet how common denunciation is. It seems
almost to be taken for granted as the natural and praiseworthy mode of
dealing with evil. People assail the faults of the community, or even
of their brethren in the Church, with violence, with temper, with the
tone, often, of injured innocence. They think that when they do so
they are doing God service; but surely we should have learned by this
time that nothing could be so unlike God, so unfaithful and
preposterous as a testimony for Him. God Himself overcomes evil with
good; Christ vanquishes the sin of the world by taking the burden of
it on Himself; and if we wish to have part in the same work, there is
only the same method open to us. Depend upon it, we shall not make
others weep for that for which we have not wept; we shall not make
that touch the hearts of others which has not first touched our own.
That is the law which God has established in the world; He submitted
to it Himself in the person of His Son, and He requires us to submit
to it. Paul was certainly a very fiery man; he could explode, or flame
up, with far more effect than most people; yet it was not there that
his great strength lay. It was in the passionate tenderness that
checked that vehement temper, and made the once haughty spirit say
what he says here: "Out of much affliction and anguish of heart, I
wrote unto you with many tears, not that you might be grieved, but
that you might know the love which I have more abundantly toward you."
In words like these the very spirit speaks which is God's power to
subdue and save the sinful.