“La foi justifie quand il opère, mais il n’opère que par la charité” (Quesnel).
“Not that God doth require nothing unto happiness at the hands of man save only a naked belief (for hope and charity we may not exclude), but that without belief all other things are as nothing; and it is the ground of those other divine virtues” (Hooker, Eccl.Pol.I. xi. 6).
“Faith doth not shut out repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, to be joined with faith in every man that is justified; but it shutteth them out from the office of justifying” (HomilyofSalvation,pt. ii.).
[It is needless to point out that the sense of the word “faith” in these passages is by no means the Pauline sense of the word.”]
AT this point there is a marked break in the letter, and we feel that the writer has now accomplished the main object for which he wrote. But to this, as to all his letters, he adds those noble practical exhortations, which are thus made to rest, not on their own force and beauty, but on the securer basis of the principles which he lays down in the doctrinal portion. No one felt more deeply than St. Paul that it requires great principles to secure our faithfulness to little duties, and that every duty, however apparently insignificant, acquires a real grandeur when it is regarded in the light of those principles from which its fulfilment springs. Since, then, the mercy and pity of God, as being the source of His free grace, have been dwelt upon throughout the Epistle, St. Paul begins the practical part of it—“I exhort you therefore, brethren, by the compassions of God”—for these, and not the difficult doctrines of election and reprobation, are prominent in his mind—“to present your bodies,” not like the dead offerings of Heathenism or Judaism, but “a livingsacrifice, holy, well–pleasing to God— your reasonable service, and not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed1 in the renewing of your mind, that ye may discriminate what is the will of God, good and acceptable to Him, and perfect.”
This general exhortation is then carried into details, unsystematically indeed, and even unsyntactically, but with an evident rush and glow of feeling which gives to the language a perfection transcending that of conscious art.2 The prevalent thought is the duty of love:—to the brethren, love without dissimulation; to the Church, love without struggling self–assertion; to the civil power, love without fear; to the world, love without despising its rights or mingling with its immoralities.3 First, by the grace given to him, he urges them “not to be high–minded above what they ought to be minded, but to mind to be sober–minded,4 each in proportion to their God–apportioned receptivity of faith;” and he illustrates and enforces this duty of modest simplicity in the fulfilment of their mutual ministries,5 by touching once more on the apologue of the body and the members,6 which he has already applied in his Letter to the Corinthians. The moral of the metaphor is that “Diversity without unity is disorder; unity without diversity is death.”7 Then with a free interchange of participles, infinitives, and imperatives, and with a mixture of general and special exhortations, he urges them to love, kindliness, zeal, hope, patience, prayer, generosity, forgiveness, sympathy, mutual esteem, self–restraint, the steady love of God, the steady loathing of evil, the deliberate victory of virtue over vice. It is clear that the dangers which he most apprehended among the Roman Christians were those exacerbations which spring from an unloving and over–bearing self–confidence; but he gives a general form to all his precepts, and the chapter stands unrivalled as a spontaneous sketch of the fairest graces which can adorn the Christian life.8
The first part of the thirteenth chapter has a more obviously special bearing. It is occupied by a very earnest exhortation to obedience towards the civil power, based on the repeated statements that it is ordained of God; that its aim is the necessary suppression of evil; that it was not, under ordinary circumstances, any source of terror to a blameless life; and that it should be obeyed and respected, not of unwilling compulsion, but as a matter of right and conscience.9 This was, indeed, the reason why they paid taxes,10 and why the payment of them should be regarded as a duty to God.11
The warmth with which St. Paul speaks thus of the functions of civil governors may, at first sight, seem surprising, when we remember that a Helius was in the Præfecture, a Tigellinus in the Prætorium, a Gessius Florus in the provinces, and a Nero on the throne. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that the Neronian persecution had not yet broken out; and that the iniquities of individual emperors and individual governors, while it had free rein in every question which affected their greed, their ambition, or their lust, had not as yet by any means destroyed the magnificent ideal of Roman Law. If there were bad rulers, there were also good ones. A Cicero as well as a Verres had once been provincial governors; a Barea Soranus as well as a Felix. The Roman government, corrupt as it often was in special instances, was yet the one grand power which held in check the anarchic forces which but for its control were “nursing the impatient earthquake.” If now and then it broke down in minor matters, and more rarely on a large scale, yet the total area of legal prescriptions was kept unravaged by mischievous injustice. St. Paul had himself suffered from local tyranny at Philippi, but on the whole, up to this time, he had some reason to be grateful to the impartiality of Roman law. At Corinth he had been protected by the disdainful justice of Gallio, at Ephesus by the sensible appeal of the public secretary; and not long afterwards he owed his life to the soldier–like energy of a Lysias, and the impartial protection of a Festus, and even of a Felix. Nay, even at his first trial his undefended innocence prevailed not only over all the public authority which could be arrayed against him by Sadducean priests and a hostile Sanhedrin, but even over the secret influence of an Aliturus and a Poppæa. Nor had the Jews any reason to be fretful and insubordinate. If the ferocity of Sejanus and the alarm of Claudius had caused them much suffering at Rome, yet, on the other hand, they had been protected by a Julius and an Augustus, and they were in possession of legal immunities which gave to their religion the recognised dignity of a religiolicita. It may safely be said that, in many a great city, it was to the inviolable strength and grandeur of Roman law that they owed their very existence; because, had it not been for the protection thus afforded to them, they might have been liable to perish by the exterminating fury of Pagan populations by whom they were at once envied and disliked.12
No doubt the force of these considerations would be fully felt by those Jews who had profited by Hellenistic culture. It is obvious, however, that St. Paul is here dealing with religious rather than with political or even theocratic prejudices. The early Church was deeply affected by Essence and Ebionitic elements, and St. Paul’s enforcement of the truth that the civil power derives its authority from God, points to the antithesis that it was not the mere vassalage of the devil. It was not likely that at Rome there should be any of that zealot fanaticism which held it unlawful for a Jew to recognise any other earthly ruler besides God, and looked on the payment of tribute as a sort of apostasy.13 It is far more likely that the Apostle is striving to counteract the restless insubordination which might spring from the prevalence of chiliastic notions such as those which we find in the Clementine Homilies, that “the present world with all its earthly powers is the kingdom of the devil,” and that so far from regarding the civil governor as “the minister of God for good,” the child of the future could only look upon him as the embodied representative of a spiritual enemy. This unpractical and dualistic view might even claim on its side certain phrases alluding to the moral wickedness of the world, which had a wholly different application;14 and therefore Paul, with his usual firmness, lays down in unmistakable terms the rule which, humanly speaking, could alone save the rising Church from utter extinction—the rule, namely, of holding aloof from political disturbances. On the whole, both Jews and Christians had learnt the lesson well, and it was, therefore, the more necessary that the good effects of that faithful fulfilment of the duties of citizenship, to which both Jewish historians and Christians fathers constantly appeal, should not be obliterated by the fanatical theories of incipient Manichees.
The question as to the payment of civil dues leads St. Paul naturally to speak of the payment of other dues. The one debt which the Christian owes to all men is the debt of love—that love which prevents us from all wrong–doing, and is therefore the fulfilment of the law. To this love he invites them in a powerful appeal, founded on the depth of the night and the nearness of the dawn, so that it was high time to put away the works of darkness and put on the arms of light15—nay, more, to put on, as a close–fitting robe, by close spiritual communion, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.16
The fourteenth chapter again reveals the existence of Ebionitic elements in the Roman Church. In a strange city, and especially if he were not free, a scrupulous Jew, uninfluenced by Hellenism, would find it so impossible to fulfil the requirements of the Law respecting clean and unclean meats, and still more the many minute additions which Rabbinic Pharisaism had made to those requirements, that he would be forced either to sacrifice his convictions, or to reduce his diet to the simplest elements. As St. Paul does not allude to the Law, it is probable that he is here dealing with scruples even more deeply seated. His object is to reconcile the antagonistic feelings of two classes of Christians, whom he calls respectively the “strong” and the “weak.” The “strong” regarded all days as equally sacred, or, as the “weak” would have said, as equally profane; whereas the “weak” surrounded the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals with regulations intended to secure their rigid observance.17 Again, the “strong” ate food of every description without the smallest scruple, whereas the “weak” looked on all animal food with such disgust and suspicion that they would eat nothing but herbs.18 It is obvious that in adopting so severe a course they went far beyond the requirements of Levitism, and when we find the very same views and practices existing in Rome during the next century,19 it is hardly possible to avoid the suspicion that the Judaic Christianity of these “weak” brethren was tinged with those Essene, Phrygian, or Pythagorean elements which led them to look on the material and the sensuous as something intrinsically dangerous, if not as positively evil. Epiphanius says that Ebion visited Rome;20 and although it is more than doubtful whether there ever was such a person, yet the statement shows the prevalence of such views. Now one of the Ebionitic principles was that all meat is impure,21 and in the Clementine Homilies the eating of meat is attributed to impure demons and blood–thirsty giants; and the Apostle Peter is made to say to Clement that “he makes use only of bread and olives and (sparingly) of other vegetables”22—a tradition which we also find attached by Clemens of Alexandria to the names of St. Matthew and James the Lord’s brother, and the latter we are told drank no wine or strong drink.23 It is very possible that St. Paul did not see the necessity of formally warning the Roman Christians against the tendency to dualism. This might be the subterranean origin of wrong notions long before it had risen into clear consciousness. What St. Paul didsee was the danger that if “the weak” prevailed, Christianity might be frittered away into a troublesome and censorius externalism; or that the “strong” might treat their weaker brethren with a rough and self–exalting contempt which would either put force on tender consciences, or create a permanent disruption between the different members of the Church.24
He treats the difficulty in the same masterly manner— broad yet sympathetic, inflexible in convictions yet considerate towards prejudices—which he had already displayed in dealing with a similar question in his Epistle to the Corinthians. But the difference between the tone adopted in this chapter and that in the Epistle to the Galatians is very remarkable, and shows the admirable tact and versatility of the Apostle. He is there establishing the rights of Christian freedom against the encroachments of Pharisaism, so that the assertion of the liberty of the Gentiles was a matter of essential importance. He therefore speaks, as it was a duty to speak, with an almost rough contempt of attaching any vital importance to “beggarly elements.” Here his tone is altogether different, because his object is altogether different, as also were his readers. The right to enjoy our liberty he can here in the most absolute manner assume. As to the merit of the particular scrupulosities which were in vogue among the weak, he has no occasion to do more than imply his own indifference. What is here necessary is to warn the “strong” not to be arrogant in their condemnations, and the “weak” not to be supercilious in their self–esteem. He has shown the universality of guilt, and the universality of grace, and he has now to show the sacred duty of unanimity among those thus universally called, defending this unanimity against censoriousness on the one hand, and against disdain on the other.
He does not attempt to conceal the bent of his own sympathies; he declares himself quite unambiguously on the side of the “strong.” The life of the Christian is a life in Christ, and rises transcendantly above the minutiæ of ritual, or the self–torments of asceticism. “The kingdom of God”— such is the great axiom which he lays down for the decision of all such questions— “is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” The “strong,” therefore, in St. Paul’s judgment, were in the right. But, for this very reason, it was necessary to warn them against the contemptuous assertion of their superior wisdom.
i. Let each party follow their own course if they believe it to be the best, but let each abstain from the guilt and folly of condemning the other. God, not man, is the judge, by whose judgment each man stands or falls. Nay, he shall stand, for God is able to make him stand. Conceited illuminism is as deep an offence against charity as saintly self–satisfaction. The first counsel, then, on which he strongly insists is mutual forbearance, the careful avoidance of arguments and discussions about disputed points. Let there be no intolerant scrupulosity, and no uncharitable disdain, but an avoidance of dispute and a reciprocal recognition of honest convictions. These differences are not about essentials, and it is not for any man to adopt a violently dogmatic or uncharitably contemptuous tone towards those who differ from himself respecting them. The party–spirit of religious bodies too often finds the fuel for its burning questions in mere weeds and straw.25
ii. The second counsel is the cultivation of careful consideration which shall not shock tender consciences; it is, in short, condescendence towards the weakness of others, a willingness to take less than our due, and a readiness to waive our own rights,26 and enjoy as a private possession between ourselves and God the confidence of our faith. His own positive and sacred conviction is that these rules about food are unessential; that no food is intrinsically unclean. But if by acting on this conviction we lead others to do the same, in spite of the protest of their consciences, then for a paltry self–gratification we are undoing God’s work, and slaying a soul for which Christ died.27 Rather than do this, rather than place a needless stumbling–block in any Christian’s path, it were well neither to eat meat nor to drink wine, because Christian love is a thing more precious than even Christian liberty.28
iii. His third counsel is the obedience to clear convictions.29 Happy the man who has no scruples as to things intrinsically harmless. But if another cannot emancipate himself from, these scruples, however needless, and exhibits in his own conduct the same freedom in defiance of his scruples, then he stands self–condemned. Why? Because in that case he is acting falsely to that faith which is the ruling principle of his Christian life, and whatsoever is not of faith,—whatsoever involves the life of self, and not the life of Christ—is sin.30
The true principle, then, is that we ought not to please ourselves, even as Christ pleased not Himself, but to bear the infirmities of the weak, and aim at mutual edification. This is the lesson of Scripture, and he prays that the God of that patience and comfort which it is the object of Scripture to inspire, may give them mutual unanimity in Jesus Christ. And addressing alike the “weak” Judaizers and the “strong” Gentiles, he concludes his advice with the same general precept with which he began, “Wherefore take one another by the hand, as Christ also took us by the hand for the glory of God.”31
And Christ had thus set His example of love and help to both the great divisions of the Church. He had become the minister of the circumcision on behalf of God’s truth, to fulfil the promise made to the fathers; and to the Gentiles out of compassion. Christ therefore had shown kindness to both, and that the Gentiles were indeed embraced in this kindness—which perhaps, in their pride of liberty they did not always feel inclined to extend to their weaker brethren— he further proves by an appeal to Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms.32 The last citation ends with the words “shall hope,” and he closes this section with yet another prayer that the God of hope would fill them with all joy and peace in believing, that they might abound in hope in the power of the Holy Ghost.
But once more he takes up the pen to assure them of his confidence in them, and to apologise for the boldness of his letter. His plea is that he wished to fulfil to the utmost that ministry to the Gentiles which he here calls a priestly ministry, because he is as it were instrumental in presenting the Gentiles as an acceptable offering to God.33 Of this Apostolate (giving all the glory to God)—of the signs by which it had been accompanied—of the width of its range, from Jerusalem to Illyricum—he may make a humble boast.
And he is still ambitious to preach in regions where Christ has not been named. He will not stay with them, because he has seen enough of the evil caused by those who built on a foundation which they had not laid; but he has often felt a strong desire to visit them on his way to Spain,34 and after a partial enjoyment of their society,35 to be furthered on his journey by their assistance. He has hitherto been prevented from taking that journey, but now—since for the present his duties in the East are over—he hopes to carry it out, and to gratify his earnest desire to see them. At present, however, he is about to start for Jerusalem, to accompany the deputies who are to convey to the poor saints there that temporal gift from the Christians of Macedonia and Achaia which is after all but a small recognition of the spiritual gifts which the Gentiles have received from them. When this task is over he will turn his face towards Spain, and visit them on his way, and he is confident that he shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He, therefore, earnestly entreats their prayers that he may be rescued from the perils which he knows await him from the Jews in Jerusalem, and that the contribution due to his exertions may be favourably received by the saints, that so by God’s will he may come to them in joy, and that they may mutually refresh each other.36 “And the God of peace be with you all Amen.”37
There in all probability ended the Epistle to the Romans. I have already given abundant reason in support of the ingenious conjecture38 that the greater part of the sixteenth chapter was addressed to the Ephesian Church.39 Even a careless reader could scarcely help observing what we should not at all have conjectured from the earlier part of the Epistle that there were schisms and scandals (17–20) in the Roman Church, and teachers who deliberately fomented them, slaves of their own belly, and by their plausibility and flattery deceiving the hearts of the simple.40 Nor, again, can any one miss the fact that the position of the Apostle towards his correspondents in verse 19 is far more severe, paternal, and authoritative than in the other chapters. If—as is surely an extremely reasonable supposition—St. Paul desired other Churches besides the stranger Church of Rome to reap the benefit of his ripest thoughts, and to read the maturest statement of the Gospel which he preached, then several copies of the main part of the Epistle must have been made by the amanuenses, of whom Tertius was one, and whose services the Apostle was at that moment so easily able to procure. In that case nothing is more likely than that the terminations of the various copies should have varied with the circumstances of the Churches, and nothing more possible than that in some one copy the various terminations should have been carefully preserved. We have at any rate in this hypothesis a simple explanation of the three final benedictions (20, 24, 27) which occur in this chapter alone.
The fullest of the Apostle’s letters concludes with the most elaborate of his doxologies.41
“Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my Gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, buried in silence in eternal ages, but manifested now and made known by the prophetic Scriptures, according to the command of the Eternal God unto obedience to the faith to all nations:—To the only wise God, through Jesus Christ—to whom be the glory for ever. Amen.42”