Chapter I: 8-17 (5)

That light never was or is manifest on the surface of actual experience, and yet it is always latent--the touch of glory in common things, the radiance in even our dim world, 'the master light of all our seeing.' We have almost all of us got to learn the practical power of the Christian imagination, disciplined and spiritually enlightened, to enrich and ennoble actual life. The objects which our imagination should reflect are realities, but realities not yet developed. What our imagination should do for us is to teach us to see things not as they are, but as they are coming to be.

2. 'Life in Christ Jesus,' 'Christ living in me'--there can be no question that these beautiful phrases which, if St. John's witness be true, represent the teaching of Christ Himself[14], express also what is most central in St. Paul's idea of Christianity. It was the great merit of Matthew Arnold's _St. Paul and Protestantism_[15] that it {220} recalled the fact to notice in ordinary educated circles. Recent scientific study of St. Paul has gone in the same direction. The doctrines of atonement and justification are essential to St. Paul's theology, but not central: the doctrine of life in Christ, spiritual and moral identification with Christ, is both essential and central. The maintenance of this life of union is again, as Matthew Arnold teaches us, the final and most developed function of faith--'that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith'; for faith is, or grows to be, such devotion to Christ's person as desires to lose itself and its selfish aims in Him and His work. But Matthew Arnold strangely leaves out of sight the two-sidedness of this relation: we abide in Christ by faith, {221} because Christ first of all abides in us by His loving-kindness and grace. It is His love, always beforehand with us--not merely to forgive us our sins, but to pour itself out in the communicated Spirit--that takes us up within the circle of His own life; it is the act of God incorporating us into Christ which evokes and makes possible the response of our faith to realize His indwelling and make the adhesion mutual. God's gift is prior to our response and the ground of it; and moreover God's gift is permanent and abiding. It would indeed be a thought of despair if the bond between Christ and us depended upon the continuous energy of our faith to maintain it. Nay, it is always there--unintermittent through all our broken efforts and vicissitudes of will--always there for us to recur to. We are to reckon ourselves 'dead to sin and alive to righteousness,' because and only because we are also to reckon ourselves 'in Christ.' That is our permanent state, and it is the function of faith not to create, but to realize it.

It is St. Paul's clear and vivid perception of a divine gift given, a relationship to God established by God's act, not ours, and that at a particular time, which is closely connected with his {222} sacramental teaching. If a divine gift is to be given (1) definite at a definite time, (2) to men of body as well as spirit in a world not only spiritual but material, (3) publicly as to members of a social organization--it is most natural that the gift should be embodied in an outward rite and outward vehicle. So St. Paul appears to think. There is no shrinking about his sacramental language. It can be said with justice that certain forms of sacerdotal or ecclesiastical government which have appeared in Church history would to his mind have savoured, or more than savoured, of bondage to men and bondage to the 'beggarly rudiments' of ceremonial observances. St. Paul is very jealous of maintaining what we may call spiritual individuality and personal liberty. But there is no justification to be found in St. Paul's epistles for saying that he connects sacramentalism--i.e. the idea of necessary spiritual gifts divinely promised on the occasion, and through the medium, of certain outward religious rites of a community--with that 'bondage' to 'beggarly rudiments' of which he has so great a dread. St. Paul's language does not admit of our supposing that he knew of any other way of admission 'into Christ' except through the gate {223} of baptism, or any other means of communion in Christ's body and blood except 'the breaking of the bread.'

3. It will be necessary before we leave this great passage to give some special attention to three phrases.

'_Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father_.' In the New Testament the sacrifice of Christ, the atonement won by Christ, is continually ascribed to the Father, acting through and in the Son--'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.' So also the resurrection is uniformly ascribed to the Father's power acting in the case of the Son[16]. Our current Christian language has in both cases departed too widely from apostolic practice. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity would be more intelligently held, and the worship of the Church more normally offered in the Spirit through the Son to the Father, if we had not fallen into the habit of so speaking of the action of the Son in dying and rising as habitually to leave out of sight the truth that His action, as Son, is and {224} must always be the Father's action through Him; and that reversely our worship of the Son must always be really, and ought to be in our habitual consciousness, the worship of the Father through Him.

'_Our old man was crucified with him_.' As Shelley said that, when Adonais died, ''tis death is dead, not he,' so in an infinitely deeper sense St. Paul says that what was killed upon the cross was (he does not say 'instead of Christ,' but 'with Christ') sin and the 'old man.' The 'old man' means the old way of living, or rather the old way of living considered as having been appropriated by the sinful individual and thus made his own self. Thus it was the old self that was put to death on the cross, and a new self came to life, which was the same in unchanged personality and yet so practically different in all its relationships, that it could assert and claim exemptions from the obligations contracted by the 'old man.'

'_That the body of sin might be done away_.' The identification of sin with the individual had been specially with his body. His bodily appetites and impulses and parts had been so used to the ways of sin as to become a 'body of sin,' and this, St. Paul says, has to be 'done away' or {225} annulled. It is not that we are to harm the body itself: for the body itself is good, and is to be offered, with all its members, to become the weapon of Christian warfare. There is indeed no material thing as such that is evil. The 'body of sin' means exactly 'the body considered as having become the receptacle of sin': as when our Lord speaks of the 'mammon of unrighteousness[17],' He means money which has become the instrument of unrighteousness, but which the children of light are to convert to profitable uses. 'To annul the body of sin' means, therefore, almost the same as 'to annul sin in the body' and leave the body free; but it emphasizes the fact that sin has got such hold of the body that to annul sin involves annulling the body: as St. Paul says elsewhere, 'I buffet' (or 'distress') 'my body and bring it into bondage[18].'

[1] See Gal. v. 13: 'Only use not your freedom for an occasion of the flesh.' Cf. 2 Pet. iii. 16, and the implications of St. James' Epistle.

[2] 1 Thess. iv. 14.

[3] The meaning of ver. 4 is interpreted in vers. 10, 11.

[4] Ver. 4; cf. John xi. 40. 'The glory of God' is specially manifest in the resurrection of the dead.

[5] This is the original suggestion of the word 'united' in ver. 5.

[6] Cf. Col. ii. 12.

[7] The Greek words represented by 'leave at the disposal of,' 'make an offering to,' are different parts of the same verb. 'The tense of the former expresses continuance, habit; ... of the latter, a single irrevocable act of surrender' (Vaughan, _in loc._).

[8] John xii. 24, 25.

[9] It is one gain of the R.V. that for 'ye are dead' (Col. iii. 3, ii. 20), 'we are dead' (Rom. vi. 2, 8), &c., we read 'ye died,' 'we died,' i.e. at the definite moment of baptism.

[10] Gregory of Tours, _Hist. Franc._ ii. 31: 'To whom (Chlovis) as he enters the font to be baptized, the holy man of God (Remigius) thus eloquently spoke--"Meekly bow thy neck, Sigambrian: adore what thou hast burnt; burn what thou hast adored."'

[11] Baptism by 'affusion' began within the first century, but as the exception, not the rule. See app. note F.

[12] By infant baptism under right conditions, I mean the baptism of infants when there is some real security provided, through their parents or proper sponsors, for their Christian education, according to the intention of the Church. On the primitive origin of infant baptism, see _Ephesians_, pp. 230, 231.

[13] 'Stirb und werde!
Denn so lang du das nicht hast,
Bist du nur ein trueber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde' (quoted by M. Arnold).

[14] John vi. 53-58; xiv. 19, 20; xv. 1-10; xvii. 21-23.

[15] P. 81 (2nd ed.): 'The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, therefore, as popular theology makes them--_calling, justification, sanctification_: they are rather these--_dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ_.' Cf. p. 76: 'How did Paul's faith, working through love, help him [to control appetite and self-will]? It enabled him to reinforce duty by affection. In the central need of his nature, the desire to govern these motives of unrighteousness, it enabled him to say: _Die to them_! _Christ did_. If any man be in Christ, said St. Paul--that is, if any man identifies himself with Christ by attachment, so that he enters into His feelings and lives with His life--he is a new creature; he can do, and does, what Christ did.' It would be truer, surely, to say in the first of these two passages not 'the three _essential_,' &c., but 'the three _central_.' Nothing can be more truly essential to Pauline theology than the terms, calling, justification, atonement; but the two last of them at least do not belong to the central region of religion, but have to do with the removal of preliminary obstacles to our entrance upon it.

[16] The apparent exception is John x. 18; but even there the word rendered 'take' would perhaps be better rendered 'receive.' Christ had the right to lay down His own life and the right to receive it again from the Father. So Hort, _First Ep. of Peter_, pp. 34, 84.

[17] Luke xvi. 9.

[18] 1 Cor. ix. 27.

{226}

DIVISION III. Sec. 4. CHAPTER VI. 15-23.

_The perfect freedom is God's service._

The reiterated mention of the deliverance of the Christian from the yoke of the law--'Ye are not under law, but under grace'--brings up the excuse for licentious living in a new form:--'This very abolition of the strict power of the law in favour of a system of which the ruling principle is God's goodness, at least makes one willing to contemplate any particular act of sin[1], with a good hope of escaping punishment.' St. Paul meets the suggestion with a 'God forbid,' and then gives a deep reason for repudiating it, a reason however which is but a version of our Lord's saying, 'Every one that committeth sin is the slave of sin[2].' Every man is always acting under obedience. What he {227} does in a particular case represents an act of obedience to some master; that is to say, a taking service with him. Moreover it appears on reflection that it must be with one of two masters and cannot be with both, for 'no man can serve two masters.' It is either with sin, whose service ends in spiritual as well as physical death, or with Him to whom obedience is properly due, whose service ends in righteousness. What gives St. Paul reason for thankfulness in thinking of the conversion of the Christians at Rome, is not that those who became Christians became thereby exempt from obedience, but that they changed their allegiance from sin to Christ. At their conversion they gladly submitted to a pattern or standard of teaching--the teaching of Christ--to which they were handed over for the fashioning of their lives--that is to say, they were made free from sin only to become slaves to righteousness. He uses the word slavery because so long as their weak flesh shrinks from divine obedience, they must recognize that the life which is really liberty must be accepted even as a bondage, till it cease to seem so. In old days they offered their limbs as slaves to uncleanness and lawlessness, and the result was a lawless life. {228} Now they must yield their limbs as slaves to righteousness with a view to a consecrated life. And the change of allegiance is surely matter for congratulation. They can recall the days when they were free from the service of righteousness, as being slaves of sin, and they can remember what fruit they enjoyed as the result of experiences which they now blush to bring to mind. Of such experiences death, moral no less than physical, is the result. Now, set free from sin's slavery and made God's slaves, they enjoy the present fruit of consecration to God and the ultimate prospect of eternal life. So long as Sin was their master he would pay them their wages, and the wages which Sin pays is always death. But now that they are surrendered into God's hands, and simply dependent on His loving-kindness, there is no question of wages, but the gift of His bounty is eternal life, in Him whose life includes their own, Jesus Christ their Lord.

What then? shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? God forbid. Know ye not, that to whom ye present yourselves _as_ servants unto obedience, his servants ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But thanks be to God, that, whereas ye were servants of sin, ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching {229} whereunto ye were delivered; and being made free from sin, ye became servants of righteousness. I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye presented your members _as_ servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present your members _as_ servants to righteousness unto sanctification. For when ye were servants of sin, ye were free in regard of righteousness. What fruit then had ye at that time in the things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life. For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

1. St. Paul is here expounding the real meaning of human liberty. It is generally regarded as the power 'to do as one pleases' or a state of independence. But such a state does not exist. There is indeed such a thing as the absence of external control up to a certain point. That is an element of liberty, but it reaches but a little way. The true liberty is the power to realize one's nature and make the best of oneself--the power to be what one ought to be or is meant to be. The instinct of language, as applied to man, recognizes this. When we see a drunkard, we recognize a man the balance of whose nature is upset. The higher part of his nature is being dragged at the chariot-wheels of his lower. So, {230} be he never so free a citizen, we call him a slave--a slave of drink. On the same principle we speak of the slaves of lust or the slaves of money or the slaves of fashion or the slaves of popularity. By these phrases we describe various moral states in which some external or purely animal force dominates a man, and he loses his self-control, and his whole nature becomes disordered. The true order of human nature is that a man's body should be controlled by his will. Then he is self-determined. His whole life is the expression of a rational principle. He makes the best of himself. He is free to be a real man, according to the proper idea of manhood.

But how can this be? Can this reason or rational will in man stand and work of itself? Is it so constructed as to be independent? No. Just as truly as a man's bodily forces are drawn from sources outside himself, so his spiritual being depends on sources and motives beyond himself.

What does man's 'freedom of will' consist of? Speaking exactly, it consists of a power to _direct_ a certain amount of physical force which passes into one's bodily frame, and to let it go out in one or another form of action, deed or word or {231} thought, more or less moral or immoral, spiritual or carnal. And this liberty of direction, when more closely examined, is found to consist in a power which the will has to choose between motives which present themselves as ideas to the mind and to hand itself over to one or the other. Some of these motives are derived from physical or worldly appetites; some are derived through the conscience or faculty of spiritual apprehension. If, in cases where the lower motives conflict with the higher, a man still yields himself to the latter, his life is spiritual; and it is so because it is determined by motives and reinforced by influences which come from beyond himself, and are in fact the motives and forces of the Spirit of God. But in neither case is he independent and free from obedience. He stands at a meeting-point of the spiritual and material world, and must be governed by one or the other. In either case man's life is played upon and dominated by motive-forces, infinitely vaster and mightier than himself. Let him try (as he has tried) to forget his necessary dependence--to detach himself from the higher obedience and to 'be as God,' independent--and he falls necessarily under the dominion of the lower forces, of his flesh or of the world. If he is to cease {232} to live below himself, he must consent to surrender to what is above himself. He must yield his spirit to the divine Spirit, which is its natural master. So he ceases to be carnal, or governed by the flesh, and becomes spiritual, or governed by the divine Spirit. And that is liberty. 'That man,' said Leo the Great, 'has true peace and liberty whose flesh is controlled by the judgement of his mind, as his mind is directed by the government of God[3].' God's service, and that only, is perfect freedom.

Man then is so constructed that he can only cease to fall below himself by being raised above himself. His life cannot fail to be stamped with the impress of sin unless it is stamped with the impress of God. The state of the Christian, surrendered to the fashioning of God, is that true dependence which is the true liberty. Independent of God, man stands at last over against God to get what his independent action has merited; and that is penal death, the inevitable outcome of misused faculties, enslaved to sin. Surrendered to God in faith, on the other hand, he receives into his nature, through all its open portals, the inflooding tide of divine love; and enters, enriched and uplifted, into the life that {233} is eternal, the life which he shares with Jesus, the life that is truly human and really divine.

It is of great practical importance that we should get a just idea of what our freedom consists in. There are men who, under the impulse of a purely materialist science, declare the sense of moral freedom to be an illusion. This is of course a gross error. But what has largely played into the hands of this error is the exaggerated idea of human freedom which is ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by ignoring our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this that we need to have brought home to us. There is an admirable story among George Crabbe's Tales, called 'The Gentleman Farmer.' The hero starts in life resolved that he will not put up with any bondage. The orthodox clergyman, the orthodox physician, and orthodox matrimony--all these alike represent social bondage in different forms, and he will have none of them. So he starts on a career of 'unchartered freedom,'

'To prove that _he alone was king of him_.'

And the last scene of all represents him the weak slave of his mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist--'which things are an allegory.'

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2. The phrase 'a form' or 'pattern of teaching,' is interesting. It suggests the idea of the Church as holding a 'pattern of sound words[4],' a definite body of instruction, which is to form the life of each person who gives himself over to her loving discipline. Christian faith is not a formless impulse; it is self-surrender to a corporate life ruled on a definite model of religious and moral teaching. What St. Paul has here chiefly in mind is moral teaching. But the moral teaching was inseparable from religious facts and motives. Nor is it difficult to ascertain from the allusions of the New Testament what the subjects were in which the first Christians were orally instructed, or, in other words, what constituted 'the tradition' which lies behind the written books of the New Testament. It comprised instruction in (1) the facts of our Lord's life, death, and resurrection[5]; (2) the meaning of sacred rites--baptism, laying on of hands, eucharist[6]--including the Lord's Prayer[7]; (3) the moral duties of 'the way,' and the doctrine 'of the resurrection of {235} the dead and of eternal judgement[8]'; (4) the meaning of 'the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost[9].' On all these subjects the books of the New Testament do not give the primary instruction, but imply that it has been already given.

3. The word rendered 'sanctification' (vers. 19, 22) is one which needs to have its primitive force restored to it[10]. The 'saint' is the person set apart for the worship and service of God. What is here translated 'sanctification' means literally (1) 'the process of being made fit for such worship and service,' that is, consecration as of a priest; or (2) by a slight transition of meaning, the result of such consecration, i.e. 'holiness.'

[1] The tense of the verb in 'shall we sin' appears to indicate an act, not a habit of sin.

[2] John viii. 34.

[3] _Serm._ xxxix. 2.

[4] 2 Tim. i. 13.

[5] Cf. Luke i. 1-4; 1 Cor. xi. 23; xv. 3, 4.

[6] Cf. Rom. vi. 3; Heb. vi. 1-6; 1 Cor. x. 15, 16; xi. 23 ff.; Acts ii. 38.

[7] _Didache_, 8; cf. below, p. 293.

[8] Heb. vi. 1, 2; 1 Thess. iv. 1, 2; v. 2.

[9] See Hort, _First Ep. of Peter_, p. 18, for the fact that 'a recognized belief or idea [of the threefold Name] seems to be everywhere presupposed.'

[10] Cf. above, pp. 31, 32.

{236}

DIVISION III. Sec. 5. CHAPTER VII. 1-6.

_Freedom from the law by union with Christ._

St. Paul is full of two thoughts. The first is that of life out of death, living by dying. He had lived an old life in which 'those multitudinous motions of appetite and self-will which reason and conscience disapproved, reason and conscience could yet not govern, and had to yield to them. This, as we shall see, is what drove Paul almost to despair[1].' He had passed to a new life in which he found in actual, blessed experience that he could do the thing that he would. He could do all things--through Christ that strengthened him. For it was Christ who had been the means of transferring him from the old life to the new, and that by His own way of dying to live. Christ Himself had lived 'by the Spirit' deliberately and always. He {237} had never failed morally to do the thing that He would. But so violent was the antagonism between His life of divine obedience (with the claims that it involved upon other men) and 'the sinful, wilful, weak world around, that the world could not tolerate His presence in it; and it came to this--that He could only live by the Spirit at the cost of dying to the world, i.e. choosing to be put to death sooner than give up obedience to His Father. He chose to die, and thus dying He lived through death in the life of the Spirit, and was raised again from death in body also. Now Christ had brought St. Paul--as He would bring all men--into union with His new life, and by the same method. St. Paul had had to die to the sinful world in order to live to God. But he, being not only a man but a sinner, was obliged not only, like Christ, to die to sin in the world--he had also to die to sin in himself. In other words, he had to 'crucify his flesh with its affections and lusts'--that is, 'his old man' or old way of living. He had, by the help of Christ's Spirit, to assert his inner self or personality against a false self--a false way of life--which had appropriated him and held him captive. Only by being emancipated from the {238} 'old man' could he come to live 'in Christ.' It is this transference from the 'old man,' or old way of life, to the new, by means of a death that St. Paul here describes under the figure of a second marriage. The man's true self was as a wife married to 'the old man.' The old man was nailed to Christ's cross (vi. 6)--that is, the old way of life was put an end to, even with violence. Thus the wife, the human personality, is, according to the law of marriage, free to contract a second union with Christ, the second Man. This is one of the main thoughts in St. Paul's mind.

But it is entangled with a second. The 'old man' was closely associated with 'the law'--the law which had awakened it out of its life of moral apathy by its stern reminders of the will of God. The law had reminded, instructed, enlightened; but it could not give the inward power needed to obey its requirements. It served but to bring to light the tyranny of sin which made man incapable of yielding obedience to the will of God; it even augmented its power by stimulating it to opposition. The law therefore belonged purely and simply to the old condition of moral impotence--the life 'in the flesh' and not 'in the Spirit.' It fulfilled the {239} only function it could fulfil in awaking the consciousness of sin. Thus to pass from 'the life of the flesh' to 'the life in the Spirit' was to pass out of its dominion. This is the other thought with which St. Paul is occupied in the passage we are just going to read. This too he expresses with the help of the figure of death. Human law only regards a living man. Death acquits him from law by taking him out of the region where it applies. Therefore, when a man dies with Christ to the 'old man,' he passes out of the reach of the law which threatened the old man but had no function beyond that.

Each of these two thoughts is quite distinct and clear; but they are fused in the present passage. St. Paul begins with the second, to show that the 'dead' Christian is free from the law (ver. 1; cf. vi. 7). But marriage law is taken as an example of law, and by this link we pass from the second thought to the first. But the second thought requires the man's _self_ to die with Christ to escape from the region of law. The first thought, on the other hand, requires the 'old man,' or old mode of life, to die, to leave the man's real self free to be married to Christ; and this change of subject {240} introduces confusion into the passage. The attempts to show that there is no confusion are not successful. In ver. 1 the idea plainly is that the self dies, as in vi. 7. In ver. 4 the main idea plainly is that the 'old man' is dead, and has left the self free to contract a new marriage. But the other idea is still sufficiently dominant to cause St. Paul to say 'ye died to the law,' instead of 'your old man was crucified.' Morally, of course, the two phrases mean the same thing; and one who, like St. Paul, is _dictating_ a letter, is specially liable to verbal confusions even when his thought is clear.

After these explanations the analysis shall be made as brief as possible. St. Paul, having, in the latter part of the sixth chapter, shown that the abolition of the power of the law is no excuse for sin, recurs to and develops the principles which he has now guarded from abuse, viz. that the power of the law is past for the Christian. He is writing, he says, to men, whether themselves Jews or not, who understand what law means, and that its dominion over a man ends with his death. It has no jurisdiction beyond the grave. He takes the marriage law ('the law of or {241} 'concerning the husband,' ver. 2) as an illustration. Without noticing the exceptions in the way of possibilities of divorce which the Jewish law admitted, he lays it down generally that 'the law of the husband' binds the wife till death, but death dissolves its power. When her husband is dead she is 'discharged' and free to be married again. (Here we have passed from the idea of a man escaping by death out of the dominion of law to that of his death dissolving the force of law in the interests of another, viz. his wife.) That is the state of the Christian's real self. Christ's body, St. Paul says, was nailed to the cross, and you were put to death there with Him; or rather, your 'old man' was put to death there, and you were left, like wives discharged from the marriage law by the intervention of death, free to be united to the risen Christ, and to see fruits of your new union such as God can approve. There were fruits from the former union with the 'old man,' in the days when you were still under the power of the flesh. The body was subject to feelings and emotions which, under the provocation of the law, became the instruments of sin; and these all at work in our limbs (constituting the 'old man,' and having {242} ourselves for the subject-wife) brought forth the fruits of actions fit only for a kingdom of death. But now we are discharged from the law, like the wife whose husband is dead, having died to that in which we were held captive, and come to life in a new region; so that we can be slaves--that, as we have seen in the last chapter, we must always be, so far as yielding a complete obedience is concerned--only no longer under the old bondage of a written law, but in the new freedom of the empowering Spirit.

Or are ye ignorant, brethren (for I speak to men that know the law), how that the law hath dominion over a man for so long time as he liveth? For the woman that hath a husband is bound by law to the husband while he liveth; but if the husband die, she is discharged from the law of the husband. So then if, while the husband liveth, she be joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if the husband die, she is free from the law, so that she is no adulteress, though she be joined to another man. Wherefore, my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ; that ye should be joined to another, _even_ to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were through the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were holden; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.

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1. If we ask ourselves what is practically meant by St. Paul's idea of the marriage of the redeemed soul to Christ, which supplements his thought of the whole Church as the bride of Christ[2], the answer seems to be that it is made up of a moral and a theological factor. The moral factor is the idea of the devotion of the believer to Christ--'as a young man marrieth a virgin.' The theological idea is that of the risen Christ making the soul of the believer fruitful in good works by infusing into it His own Spirit or life.

2. The conception of the freedom of the redeemed from the moral and ceremonial law is very easily realized by reference to our ideas of civic freedom in connexion with the criminal law. The criminal law exists, and the policemen are among its administrative officers, but the respectable citizen is free in his relation to the criminal law, and passes the policeman without any sense of alarm--not because he is at liberty to break the law, but because he has become accustomed to a way of living with which the agents of the law are not called upon to interfere. It is in a sense like this that St. Paul conceives the Christians to have escaped from the bondage of the Mosaic law.

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3. What is the meaning of the common phrase our 'passions'? It refers to those feelings which we experience without any action of our will. It may be a mere neutral sensation of smell. It may be a feeling of hunger, thirst, desire, anger. These are our 'passions' as opposed to our actions. These appeal to the will as motives, and it appertains to the will to determine whether it will yield to them and so translate passions into voluntary actions. When the will is weak, and passion is allowed to pass into action uncontrolled, the man becomes the slave of sin, and his passions, in themselves innocent or only constituting the material of temptation, become the 'sinful passions' of which St. Paul speaks in this place.

[1] Matthew Arnold, _St. Paul and Protestantism_, p. 76.

[2] Eph. v. 22.

{245}

DIVISION III. Sec. 6. CHAPTER VII. 7-25.

_The function and failure of the law._

The somewhat confused passage just dealt with, in which several moral ideas and metaphors are struggling for the mastery, is followed by a famous passage of luminous power in which St. Paul expounds, with a profound insight into human nature, the function and failure of law.

The close alliance into which St. Paul constantly puts 'the law' with the reign of sin, an alliance hardly suggested by any other New Testament teacher, suggests inevitably the idea that St. Paul, like the later Gnostics, regarded the law itself as 'sin,' that is, as owing its origin to the power of evil and working for its ends. Such an idea he of course repudiates. But all the same it is law, written or proclaimed, and law only, which both awakens the sense of sin in man and stimulates sin itself to put {246} forth its power. Let me take myself, we may imagine St. Paul as saying (for the 'I' of this passage is very far from being strictly autobiographical), as representing man in his moral history. I was alive apart from any law once. That is to say, I lived as suited me best, according to my instincts, asking no moral questions and troubled by no scruples. And all this time sin, considered as a moral tyrant, was as if dead. I had no defined moral ideal and consequently no struggle and no failure. Then comes the law with its 'Thou shalt not covet' (or do this or that). It imposes limits in the name of God on my life of instinct. It cries 'Hands off!' At once I find opposition between me and the law. I do covet this and that which the law says I must not have. I find myself in the eye of the moral law a transgressor. And there is something more than my own lawless desire in opposition to the law. I become conscious of a great power of sin at work in the world and in me--something greater than myself, which intervenes in the struggle and reinforces the opposition to the law. The tyrant Sin rouses himself on the pretext afforded by the hostile commandment, and exercises his power both by stimulating my desires, like Eve's (ver. 8), and {247} deceiving my intelligence, like hers, to believe that good is evil (ver. 11), and so brings me by means of the commandment into a state of flat disobedience to the law, which is death. For the law was given for life--'This do, and thou shalt live'; but there is the necessary converse--'This transgress, and thou shalt die' (vers. 7-11).

The law then, it is quite plain, is the expression of the will of God. And the particular commandment is holy and righteous and good. Is the good then my poison? No. But what has happened is this--the expression of the good in the law has brought the tyranny of sin out into the light. It had me in its power before, but I did not know it and I did not struggle. But as soon as the law aroused in me the beginning of moral consciousness, sin used the commandment as its knife to kill me; and so showed its hideous character--which indeed it was the divine intention to uncloak by means of the law (12-13).

For this it is that we must recognize as the true state of the case. On the one hand a spiritual law proclaimed over me. On the other hand a man who in virtue of my fleshly nature have been sold to be a slave of sin, and who as a slave {248} find myself doing acts by force of circumstances, the true nature of which I do not understand, and which, so far from choosing, I hate (vers. 14, 15). For I am not only of this fleshly nature; I have also a conscience which responds to the claim of the law and recognizes it as right. But my wish to obey the law is not strong enough to carry my flesh with it. Thus my actual practice is in flat contradiction to the ideal of my choice. But henceforth my will is on the side of the law, and myself is in my will[1]. What runs so uncontrollably to evil is, it appears, not myself at all, but the alien tyranny of sin which has taken possession of me and made my flesh its haunt and instrument--the haunt and instrument of evil only and not of good. So I can only wish good and practise evil, and become more and more conscious that I am not my own master. The law of God, accepted by my will, becomes the law of my mind or inner being; but when I seek to impose it on my limbs and act accordingly, I find another law--the law of the tyrant Sin--holding sway in my lower nature; my authority is defied and {249} I myself am dragged in humiliating captivity to sin in my lower nature (vers. 16-23). My body has become the death of my spirit. It is my prison-house. I cry out in my misery for deliverance. And it is this deliverance which I praise God for having given me through Jesus Christ our Lord. (By union with Him my higher self is reinforced, and I can control my lower nature and become my own master.) But in my isolated, unassisted self, the best that I can get to is a flat contradiction between the service of the law of God in my mind and the service of sin in my flesh (vers. 24, 25).

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Howbeit, I had not known sin, except through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had said, Thou shall not covet: but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting: for apart from the law sin is dead. And I was alive apart from the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died; and the commandment, which was unto life, this I found _to be_ unto death: for sin, finding occasion, through the commandment beguiled me, and through it slew me. So that the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good. Did then that which is good become death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might be shewn to be sin, by working death to me through that which is good;--that through the commandment sin might become exceeding sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, {250} sold under sin. For that which I do I know not: for not what I would, that do I practise; but what I hate, that I do. But if what I would not, that I do, I consent unto the law that it is good. So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practise. But if what I would not, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. I find then the law[2], that, to me who would do good, evil is present. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself with the mind serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.

i.

St. Paul, as has been said, is constantly in his epistles of this period stating briefly or alluding to the failure of 'the law' to supply man with the moral strength needed to live a good life at peace with God. Thus: 'The power of sin is the law.' 'As many as are of the works of the law are under a curse.' 'The letter (the written law) killeth.' 'Through the law cometh the {251} knowledge of sin.' 'The law worketh wrath.' 'The law came in beside, that the trespass might abound[3].' The first of these sayings, occurring as it does altogether out of apparent connexion with the context, shows us as clearly as anything could how full of the idea his mind was. But only here, in this chapter, does he open his heart to us to show us the experience on which such a strange and original conclusion was based.

We can imagine a youth of intensely susceptible moral and religious nature like Saul of Tarsus passing out of the home of his boyhood into the school of Gamaliel in Jerusalem. The one subject of instruction there was 'the law'--the divine law which was the pride of Israel's race--in all the grand severity of its moral requirement and in all the complexity of its ritual regulations. It was the one topic. And all about him he saw the Pharisees building up the fabric of a meritorious life before God out of their observances. Now, no doubt the most easily self-satisfied Pharisees made much of the principle of compensation--that 'obedience to certain laws' (e.g. the law of the sabbath or 'the law of fringes') 'was as good as obedience to the {252} whole[4].' The Pharisee of our Lord's parable who went up to the temple to pray, satisfied himself because he observed certain practices beyond the requirements of the law. Our Lord bears witness that the Scribes and Pharisees paid tithe of mint and anise and cummin--traditional extensions of the law--and omitted the weightier matters, judgement, mercy, and faith, yet were righteous in their own eyes. On the other hand, the maxim of St. James, 'Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all,' was a commonplace of the Jewish schools.

There can be no doubt that it must have been the severer teaching that fastened upon young Saul's mind. He acknowledged himself a 'debtor to keep the whole law[5].' And in ritual detail, though no doubt the effort required was immense, he managed to be 'blameless[6].' But in the weightier and deeper matters it was not so. The moral law, enforced and commented upon, continually confronting him with its 'Thou shalt not,' brought to light in him the fact of sin--in desire, we should gather, rather than in act or word. The law said 'Thou shalt not covet' (or {253} lust). And Saul said, 'But I do lust after this and that and the other. My heart and my desires are not in harmony with the law. Nay, the very fact that the law prohibits it seems to make my wrong desire stronger.' So the whole Pharisaic idea of a moral life--the standing over against God and building up a fabric of merits--seemed to be unsatisfactory. The fabric in his own case was full of internal rottenness. It would not bear severe examination. Moreover he could not but observe the lives of those around him who were so well satisfied with their moral edifices, and he recognized that their satisfaction was due to nothing but hypocrisy or shallowness. As he went later to Jewish settlements in various centres, he saw always the picture of a life fair in its own eyes and rotten in fact. His general experience of Jewish life is summed up strongly enough in the second chapter of this epistle. Thus he drew the conclusion that the law could not be really kept--it was only possible to keep it by means of evasions and compensations which made it worse than useless.

Meanwhile there was forming itself in Saul's mind the conviction that the whole attitude of the Pharisees towards God was false. They lived as if God had made a contract or covenant with {254} them, and within the terms of this covenant man could deal with God on an independent basis. God must keep to His covenant and not augment it or change it. And on their side the people of God under the covenant had nothing to do but to keep their part of the bargain and claim their reward with a conscious and proper pride in the merits of their race and of themselves. This was exactly the spirit in which they rejected Jesus as the Christ, as it was also exactly this spirit which He had chosen for His sternest denunciations. But all this idea of merits, all this boasting, must have come to seem to Saul's mind monstrously untrue to the real fundamental relation of man to God. For who maketh thee to differ? and what hast thou, O Jew, that thou didst not receive? And if thou didst receive it, why dost thou boast thyself as if thou hadst not received it? Thus St. Paul's training must not only have made him feel that he could not satisfy himself in keeping the whole law; but it must also have convinced him that law itself as a principle, law as understood and represented among the orthodox Jews, was fundamentally and permanently incompatible with the real relation of man to God. There were many elements in the Old Testament, {255} notably in the Psalms, in which a quite different relation of man to God was indicated--a relation of meek trust as of a son to a father, and of penitence and dependence and peace. But in the teaching St. Paul had received, the law, the legal covenant of man and God, which suggested a quite different moral attitude, was the essential element; and that, we must suppose, he felt increasingly sure was a foundation on which he could not stand.

No doubt these deep questionings about the law, and the growing misery accompanying them, made him at first all the more zealous for it. No doubt they explain his fanaticism against the Christians. No doubt his 'kicking against the goad' represents the rebellion of his heart against anything which seemed to threaten the position of the law of his fathers, and especially against the utter upheaval of foundations involved in accepting for Christ Him whom the leaders of his people had rejected and caused to be crucified. But when he had effected the great transition, when he had found in Jesus Christ all that satisfied his deepest instincts about God and his deepest desires for union with Him, his old experience of the law took shape in a profound theory of its place in the divine {256} education of the human race. Ultimately man is meant to be in such close and harmonious relations to the divine Spirit that he should both know what is right and do it by an inner light and power. But an outward written law was a necessary prelude to this; and that in the main because sin--individual sins and the long tradition of sin--had hardened men's consciences and blinded their eyes, and the divine law as proclaimed through the conscience had become in consequence either utterly inadequate or had even been silenced altogether. A written law therefore, peremptory and explicit, and announcing its sanction in definite penalties, was needed to teach men anew what God really required. It was given in such a mode as threw men on their own independent moral strength, and by that very fact convinced the best among them of their inward weakness and sin; while to many more it appeared rather as involving an impossible effort--as 'a yoke which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear.' In either case it was their 'tutor to bring them to Christ'--with His teaching of God, not as a taskmaster, but as a Father, righteous indeed, but still more loving. And if there were others again, shallow or worthless men, whom the law simply hardened {257} in the superficial self-righteousness of mere 'observances,' or the worst sort of religious hypocrisy, that was only another way of demonstrating its inadequacy. It left the world to choose between the Pharisees and Christ as representing real righteousness.