Τῇ Ἐκκλησίᾳ τᾐ ἀξιομακαρτατῳ τῇ οὔσῃ ἐν Ἐφέσῳ τῆς Ασίας.—IGNAT. adEph.i.
“Nulla Epistola Pauli tanta habet mysteria tam reconditis sensibus involuta.”—JER. inEph.iii.
Ἕν σῶμα καὶ ἕν πνεῦμα.—EPH. 4:4.
THE polemical speciality of the Epistle to the Colossians, compared with the far more magnificent generality of the great truths which occupy the earlier chapters of the Epistle to “the Ephesians,”1 seems (as we have already observed) to furnish a decisive proof that the latter, to some extent, sprang out of the former, and that it was written because the Apostle desired to utilise the departure of Tychicus with the letter which had been evoked by the heresies of Colossæ.
Of the genuineness of the Epistle, in spite of all the arguments which have been brought against it, I cannot entertain the shadow of a doubt. I examine the question without any conscious bias. If the arguments against its Pauline authorship appeared valid, I am aware of no prepossession which would lead me to struggle against their force, nor would the deepest truths of the Epistle appear to me the less profound or sacred from the fact that tradition had erred in assigning its authorship.2
To the arguments which endeavoured to show that the Phaedo had not been written by Plato it was thought almost sufficient to reply— εἴ με Πλάτων οὐ γράψε δύω ἐγένοντο Πλάτωνες.
Certainly if St. Paul did not write the Epistle to “the Ephesians,” there must have been two St. Pauls. Baur speaks contemptuously of such an objection;3 but can any one seriously believe that a forger capable of producing the Epistle to the Ephesians could have lived and died unheard of among the holy, but otherwise very ordinary, men and mediocre writers who attracted notice in the Church of the first century? It is true that De Wette, and his followers,4 treat the Epistle de haut en bas as a verbose and colourless reproduction, quite inferior to St. Paul’s genuine writings, and marked by poverty of ideas and redundance of words. We can only reply that this is a matter of taste. The colour red makes no impression on the colour–blind; and to some readers this Epistle has seemed as little colourless as is the body of heaven in its clearness. Chrysostom—no bad judge surely of style and rhetoric—spoke of the lofty sublimity of its sentiments. Theophylact dwells on the same characteristics as suitable to the Ephesians. Grotius says St. Paul here equals the sublimity of his thoughts with words more sublime than any human tongue has ever uttered. Luther reckoned it among the noblest books of the New Testament. Witsius calls it a divine Epistle glowing with the flame of Christian love, and the splendour of holy light, and flowing with fountains of living water. Coleridge said of it, “In this, the divinest composition of man, is every doctrine of Christianity: first, those doctrines peculiar to Christianity; and secondly, those precepts common to it with natural religion.” Lastly, Alford calls it “the greatest and most heavenly work of one whose very imagination is peopled with things in the heavens, and even his fancy rapt into the visions of God.” Pfleiderer, though he rejects the genuineness of the Epistle, yet says that “of all the forms which Paulinism went through in the course of its transition to Catholicism, that of the Epistle to the Ephesians is the most developed and the richest in dogma.”
The close resemblance in expression, and in many of the thoughts, to the Epistle to the Colossians, when combined with the radical differences5 which separate the two Epistles, appears to me an absolutely irresistible proof in favour of the authenticity of both, even if the external evidence were weaker than it is. Roughly speaking, we may say that the style of Colossians shows a “rich brevity;” that of Ephesians a diffuser fulness. Colossians is definite and logical; Ephesians is lyrical and Asiatic. In Colossians, St. Paul has the error more prominently in view; in Ephesians he has the counteracting truth. In Colossians he is the soldier; in Ephesians the builder. In Colossians he is arguing against a vain and deceitful philosophy; in Ephesians he is revealing a heavenly wisdom. Colossians is “his caution, his argument, his process, and his work–day toil;” Ephesians is instruction passing into prayer, a creed soaring into the loftiest of Evangelic Psalms. Alike the differences and the resemblances are stamped with an individuality of style which is completely beyond the reach of imitation.6 A forger might indeed have sat down with the deliberate purpose of borrowing words and phrases and thoughts from the Epistle to the Colossians, but in that case it would have been wholly beyond his power to produce a letter which, in the midst of such resemblances, conveyed so different an impression in a style so characteristic and so intensely emotional.7 Even if we could regard it as probable that any one could have poured forth truths so exalted, and moral teaching so pure and profound, in an Epistle by which he deliberately intended to deceive the Church and the world,8 it is not possible that one actuated by such a purpose should successfully imitate the glow and rush of feeling which marks the other writings of the Apostle, and expresses itself in the to–and–fro–conflicting eddies of thought, in the one great flow of utterance and purpose. The style of St. Paul may be compared to a great tide ever advancing irresistibly towards the destined shore, but broken and rippled over every wave of its broad expanse, and liable at any moment to mighty refluences as it foams and swells about opposing sandbank or rocky cape.9 With even more exactness we might compare it to a river whose pure waters, at every interspace of calm, reflect as in a mirror the hues of heaven, but which is liable to the rushing influx of mountain torrents, and whose reflected images are only dimly discernible in ten thousand fragments of quivering colour, when its surface is swept by ruffling winds. If we make the difficult concession that any other mind than that of St. Paul could have originated the majestic statement of Christian truth which is enshrined in the doctrinal part of the Epistle, we may still safely assert, on literary grounds alone, that no writer, desirous to gain a hearing for such high revelations, could have so completely merged his own individuality in that of another as to imitate the involutions of parentheses, the digressions at a word, the superimposition of a minor current of feeling over another that is flowing steadily beneath it, the unconscious recurrence of haunting expressions, the struggle and strain to find a worthy utterance for thoughts and feelings which burst through the feeble bands of language, the dominance of the syllogism of emotion over the syllogism of grammar—the many other minute characteristics which stamp so ineffaceable an impress on the Apostle’s undisputed works. This may, I think, be pronounced with some confidence to be a pyschological impossibility. The intensity of the writer’s feelings is betrayed in every sentence by the manner in which great truths interlace each other, and are yet subordinated to one main and grand perception, Mannerisms of style may be reproduced; but let any one attempt to simulate the language of genuine passion, and every reader will tell him how ludicrously he fails. Theorists respecting the spuriousness of some of the Pauline Epistles have, I think, entirely underrated the immense difficulty of palming upon the world an even tolerably successful imitation of a style the most living, the most nervously sensitive, which the world has ever known. The spirit in which a forger would have sat down to write is not the spirit which could have poured forth so grand a eucharistic hymn as the Epistle to the Ephesians.10 Fervour, intensity, sublimity, the unifying—or, if I may use the expression, esemplastic—power of the imagination over the many subordinate truths which strive for utterance; the eagerness which hurries the Apostle to his main end in spite of deeply important thoughts which intrude themselves into long parentheses and almost interminable paragraphs—all these must, from the very nature of literary composition, have been far beyond the reach of one who could deliberately sit down with a lie in his right hand to write a false superscription, and boast with trembling humility of the unparalleled spiritual privileges entrusted to him as the Apostle of the Gentiles.
A strong bias of prejudice against the doctrines of the Epistle may perhaps, in some minds, have overborne the sense of literary possibilities. But is there in reality anything surprising in the developed Christology of St. Paul’s later years? That his views respecting the supreme divinity of Christ never wavered will hardly, I think, be denied by any candid controversialist. They are as clearly, though more implicitly, present in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians as in the Second Epistle to Timothy. No human being can reasonably doubt the authenticity of the Epistle to the Romans; yet the Pauline evangel logically argued out in that Epistle is identical with that which is so triumphantly preached in this. They are not, as Reuss has observed, two systems, but two methods of exposition. In the Romans, Paul’s point of view is psychologic, and his theology is built on moral facts—the universality of sin, and the insufficiency of man, and hence salvation by the grace of God, and union of the believer with the dead and risen Christ. But in the Ephesians the point of view is theologic—the idea of God’s eternal plans realised in the course of ages, and the unity in Christ of redeemed humanity with the family of heaven. “The two great dogmatic teachers of the sixteenth century, both essentially disciples of St. Paul, have both, so to speak, divided between them the inheritance of their master. The manual of Melancthon attaches itself to the Epistle to the Romans; the ‘Institutes’ of Calvin follow the direction marked out in that to the Ephesians; party spirit will alone be able to deny that, in spite of this difference of method, the system of the two writers has, after all, been one and the same.”11 Is there a word respecting Christ’s exaltation in the Epistle to the Ephesians which implies a greater or diviner Being than Him of whom St. Paul has spoken as the Final Conqueror in the 15th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians?
We can imagine that when he began to dictate this circular letter to the churches of Asia, the one overwhelming thought in the mind of the Apostle was the ideal splendour and perfectness of the Church of Christ, and the consequent duty of holiness which was incumbent on all its members. The thought of Humanity regenerated in Christ by an eternal process, and the consequent duty of all to live in accordance with this divine enlightenment—these are the double wings which keep him in one line throughout his rapturous flight. Hence the Epistle naturally fell into two great divisions, doctrinal and practical; the idea and its realisation; pure theology and applied theology; the glorious unity of the Church in Christ its living head, and the moral exhortations which sprang with irresistible force of appeal from this divine mystery. But as he was in all his doctrine laying the foundations of practice, and throughout founded the rules of practice on doctrine, the two elements are not so sharply divided as not to intermingle and coalesce in the general design. The glory of the Christian’s vocation is inseparably connected with the practical duties which result from it, and which it was directly intended to educe. Great principles find their proper issue in the faithful performance of little duties.
It is naturally in the first three chapters that St. Paul is most overpowered by the grandeur of his theme. Universal reconciliation in Christ as the central Being of the Universe is the leading thought both of the Ephesians and the Colossians, and it is a deeper and grander thought than that of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which only sees this unity in Christ’s priesthood, or that of the Pseudo–Clementines, which sees it in Christ as the Prophet of Truth.12 St. Paul is endeavouring to impress upon the minds of all Christians that they have entered upon a new œon of God’s dispensations—the œonof God’s ideal Church, which is to comprehend all things in heaven and earth. Round this central conception, as round a nucleus of intense light, there radiate the considerations which he wishes them specially to bear in mind:—namely, that this perfected idea is the working out of a purpose eternally conceived; that the œconomy—i.e., the Divine dispensation13—of all the past circumstances of history has been fore–ordained before all ages to tend to its completion; that it is a mystery—i.e., a truth hidden from previous ages, but now revealed; that each Person of the Blessed Trinity has taken direct part therein; that this plan is the result of free grace; that it is unsurpassable in breadth and length, and height and depth, being the exhibition of a love of which the wealth is inexhaustible and passes knowledge; that the benefits of it extend alike to Jew and Gentile; that it centres in the person of the risen Christ; and that to the Apostle himself, unworthy as he is, is entrusted the awful responsibility of preaching it among the Gentiles.
The incessant recurrence of leading words connected withthesedifferentthoughtsis a remarkable feature of the first three chapters.14 Thus, in the endeavour to express that the whole great scheme of redemptive love is part of the Divine “Will” and “Purpose,” those two words are frequently repeated. Grace (χάρις) is so prominent in the Apostle’s mind that the word is used thirteen times, and may be regarded as the key–note of the entire Epistle.15 The writer’s thoughts are so completely with the risen and ascended Christ as the head, the centre, the life of the Church, that he six times uses the expression “the heavenlies” without any limitation of time or place.16 He feels so deeply the necessity of spiritual insight to counteract the folly of fancied wisdom, that the work of the Spirit of God in the spirit of man is here peculiarly prominent.17 The words “wealth,”18 and “glory,”19 and “mystery,”20 and “plenitude,”21 show also the dominant chords which are vibrating in his mind, while the frequent compounds in ὑπὲρ, πρὸ and σύν,22 show how deeply he is impressed with the loftiness, the fore–ordainment, and the result of this Gospel in uniting the Jew and Gentile within one great spiritual Temple, of which the middle wall has been for ever broken down. “It would, indeed,” says Mr. Maurice, “amply repay the longest study to examine the order in which these details are introduced, in what relation they stand to each other, how they are all referred to one ground, the good pleasure of His will, and to one end, the gathering up of all things in Christ.23 But however desirable the minute investigation is, after the road has been travelled frequently, the reader must allow the Apostle to carry him along at his own speed on his own wings, if he would know anything of the height from which he is descending and to which he is returning.”24
After his usual salutation to the saints that are in— (perhaps leaving a blank to be filled up by Tychicus at the places to which he carried a copy of the letter), he breaks into the rapturous sentence which is “not only the exordium of the letter, but also the enunciation of its design.”
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ, even as He chose us out in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him, in love; fore–ordaining us to adoption by Jesus Christ into Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, forthepraiseofthegloryof His grace wherewith He graced us in the beloved.”25
This leads him to a passage in which the work of the Son in this great fore–ordained plan is mainly predominant.
“In whom we have our redemption through His blood, the remission of transgressions, according to the wealth of His grace, wherewith He abounded towards us, in all wisdom and discernment, making known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, with a view to the dispensation of the fulness of the seasons—to sum up all things in Christ, both the things in the heavens and the things on the earth—in Him. In whom we also were made an inheritance, being fore–ordained according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things according to the counsel of His will, that we should be tothepraiseofHisglory who have before hoped in Christ.”26
This repetition of the phrase “to the praise of His glory,” introduces the work of the Third Person of the blessed Trinity.
“In whom (Christ) ye also” (as well as the Jewish Christians who previously had hoped in Christ) “on hearing the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation, in whom (I say), believing, ye too were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the earnest of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of the purchased possession unto the praiseofHisglory.”27
Since, therefore, it is the fixed ordinance, from all eternity, of the Blessed God, that man should be adopted through the redemption of Christ to the praise of the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and should receive the seal of the Spirit as the pledge of full and final entrance into his heritage, St. Paul tells them that, hearing of their faith and love, he ceaselessly prayed that God—the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of the Glory—would grant them a full knowledge28 of Himself, giving them “illuminated eyes in their hearts” to know what their calling means, and the wealth and glory of this heritage, and the surpassing greatness of the power which He had put forth in raising Christ from the dead, and seating Him at His right hand in the heavenlies, as the Supreme Ruler now and for ever of every spiritual and earthly power, and as the Head over all things to the Church,—which is His body, “the Pleroma” (i.e., the filled continent, the brimmed receptacle) “of Him who filleth all things with all things.”29
But for whom were these great privileges predestined, and how were they bestowed? The full answer is contained in the second chapter. They were intended for all, both Jews and Gentiles, and were bestowed by free grace. In this section the leading conception is the unity of mankind, in the heavenlies, in Christ. The Gentiles had been dead in transgressions and sins, absorbed in the temporal and the external,30 showing by their disobedience the influence of the Prince of the power of the air; and the Jews, too, had been occupied with the desires of the flesh, doing the determinations of the flesh and the thoughts, and were by nature children of wrath31 even as the rest; but God in His rich love and mercy quickened both Jews and Gentiles together, while still dead in their transgressions, and raised them together, and seated them, together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus—a name that occurs in verse after verse, being at the very heart of the Apostle’s thoughts. The instrumental cause of this great salvation is solely free grace, applied by faith, that this grace might be manifested to the coming ages in all its surpassing wealth of kindness; and that we, thus created anew in Christ, and so prevented from any boast32 that we achieved by good works our own salvation, might still walk in good works, to which God predestined us.33 The Gentiles, then, were to remember that their former uncircumcision, so far as it was of any importance, was that spiritual uncircumcision which consisted in utter alienation from Christ, His kingdom, and His promises. But now in Christ, by the blood of Christ, the once afar have been made near. For He is our Peace; He has broken down the separating partition—the enmity between the two members of His great human family—by doing away with the law of ordinances and decrees,34 that He might create the two—Jew and Gentile—into one fresh human being, making peace; and might reconcile them both in one body to God by the cross, slaying thereby the enmity between them both, and between them and God. The result, then, of His advent is peace to the far–off and to the nigh; for throught Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. The Gentiles are no longer aliens, but fellow–citizens with the saints, built on the corner–stone of Christ which the Apostles and prophets laid—like stones compaginated35 into the ever–growing walls of the one spiritual House of God.36
Then follows a chapter of parentheses, or rather of thoughts leading to thoughts, and linked together, as throughout the Epistle, by relatival connexions.37 Resuming the prayer (1:17) of which the thread had been broken by the full enunciation of the great truths in which he desired them to be enlightened: “For this cause,” he says—namely, because of the whole blessed mystery which he has been expounding, and which results in their corporate union in Christ—“I, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord, on behalf of you Gentiles”—and there once more the prayer is broken by a parenthesis which lasts through thirteen verses. For, remembering that the letter is to be addressed not only to the Ephesians, of whom the majority were so well known to him, but also to other Asiatic churches, some of which he had not even visited, and which barely knew more of him than his name,38 he pauses to dwell on the exalted character of the mission entrusted to him, and to express at the same time his own sense of utter personal unworthiness. Having called himself “the prisoner of the Lord on behalf of you Gentiles,” he breaks off to say—
“Assuming that you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God given me towards you—that by revelation was made known to me the mystery [of the calling of the Gentiles], as I previously wrote to you in brief,39 in accordance with which you can, as you read it, perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ—a mystery which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed to His holy Apostles40 and prophets by the Spirit—(namely) that the Gentiles are41 co–heirs, and concorporate, and comparticipant42 of the promise in Christ Jesus by the Gospel, of which I became a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God given to me according to the working of His power. To me,the less–than–least43 of all saints, was given this grace, to preach among the Gentiles the untrackable44 wealth of Christ; and to enlighten all on the nature of the dispensation of the mystery that has been hidden from the ages in God, who created all things; that now to the principalities and the powers in the heavenlies may be made known by the Church the richly–variegated wisdom of God,45 according to the pre–arrangement of the ages which He made in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have our confidence and our access by faith in Him: wherefore I intreat you not to lose heart in my afflictions on your behalf, seeing that this is your glory. For this cause, then” (and here he resumes the thread of the prayer broken in the first verse) “I bend my knees to the Father,46 from whom every fatherhood47 in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would give you, according to the wealth of His glory, to be strengthened by power through His Spirit into spiritual manhood,48 that Christ may dwell in your hearts by. faith—ye having been rooted and founded in love, that ye may have strength to grasp mentally with all saints what is the length and breadth and depth and height, and to know (spiritually) the knowledge–surpassing love of Christ, that ye may be filled up to all the plenitude of God.”49
“Now to Him that is able above all things to do superabundantly above50 all that we ask or think, according to the power [of the Holy Spirit] which worketh in us, to Him be glory in the Church, in Christ Jesus, to all the generations of the age of the ages. Amen.”51
With this prayer he closes the doctrinal part of the Epistle; the remaining half of it is strictly practical. St. Paul would have felt it no descent of thought to pass from the loftiest spiritual mysteries to the humblest moral duties. He knew that holiness was the essence of God’s Being, and he saw in the holiness of Christians the beautiful result of that predestined purpose, which, after being wrought out to gradual completion in the dispensation of past œons, was now fully manifested and revealed in Christ. He knew that the loftiest principles were the necessary basis of the simplest acts of faithfulness, and that all which is most pure, lovely, and of good report, in the Christian life, is the sole result of all that is most sublime in the Christian’s faith. The lustre of the planets may he faint and poor, but yet it is reflected from the common sun; and so the goodness of a redeemed man, however pale in lustre, is still sacred, because it is a reflexion from the Sun of righteousness. The reflected light of morality is nothing apart from the splendour of that religion from which it is derived. There is little which is admirable in the honesty which simply results from its being the best policy; or in the purity which is maintained solely by fear of punishment; or even in the virtue which is coldly adopted out of a calculation that it tends to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It was not in this way that St. Paul regarded morality. Many of the precepts which he delivers in the practical sections of his Epistles might also have been delivered, and nobly delivered, by an Epictetus or a Marcus Aurelius; but that which places an immeasurable distance between the teachings of St. Paul and theirs, is the fact that in St. Paul’s view holiness is not the imperfect result of rare self–discipline, but the natural outcome of a divine life, imparted by One who is the common Head of all the family of man, and in participation with whose plenitude the humblest act of self–sacrifice becomes invested with a sacred value and a sacred significance. And there are these further distinctions (among many others) between the lofty teachings of Stoicism and the divine exhortations of Christianity. Stoicism made its appeal only to the noble–hearted few, despising and despairing of the vulgar herd of mankind in all ranks, as incapable of philosophic training or moral elevation. Christianity, in the name of a God who was no respecter of persons, appealed to the very weakest and the very worst as being all redeemed in Christ. Again, Stoicism was dimmed and darkened to the very heart’s core of its worthiest votaries by deep perplexity and incurable sadness; Christianity breathes into every utterance the joyous spirit of victory and hope. Even the best of the Stoics looked on the life of men around them with a detestation largely mingled with contempt, and this contempt weakened the sense of reciprocity, and fed the fumes of pride. But St. Paul addresses a revelation unspeakably more majestic, more profound, more spiritual, than any which Stoicism could offer, to men whom he well knows to have lived in the trammels of the vilest sins of heathendom, and barely even yet to have escaped out of the snare of the fowler. He confidently addresses exhortations of stainless purity and sensitive integrity to men who had been thieves and adulterers, and worse; and so far from any self–exaltation at his own moral superiority, he regards his own life as hid indeed with Christ in God, but as so little fit to inspire a feeling of satisfaction that he is lost in the conviction of his own unworthiness as contrasted with the wealth of God’s compassion, and the unspeakable grandeur of the long–hidden mystery which now in due time he is commissioned to set forth. The mingled prayer and pæan of this magnificent Epistle is inspired throughout “by a sense of opposites—of the union of weakness and strength, of tribulation and glory, of all that had been and all that was to be, of the absolute love of God, of the discovery of that love to man in the Mediator, of the working of that love in man through the Spirit, of the fellowship of the poorest creature of flesh and blood on earth with the spirits in heaven, of a canopy of love above and an abyss of love beneath, which encompasses the whole creation.” The Apostle would have delighted in the spirit of those words which a modern poet has learnt from the truths which it was his high mission to reveal:—
“I say to thee, do thou repeat
To the first man thou mayest meet
In lane, highway, or open street,
That he, and we, and all men move
Under a canopy of love
As broad as the blue sky above.”52
“I then,” continues the Apostle—and how much does that word “then” involve, referring as it does to all the mighty truths which he has been setting forth!—“I then, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to walk worthily of the calling in which ye were called.” This is the keynote to all that follows. So little was earthly success or happiness worth even considering in comparison with the exceeding and eternal weight of glory which affliction was working out for them, that while he has urged them not to lose heart in his tribulations, he makes those very tribulations a ground of appeal, and feels that he can speak to them with all the stronger influence as “a prisoner in the Lord,” and “an ambassador in a chain.” And the worthy elevation to the grandeur of their calling was to be shown by virtues which, in their heathen condition, they would almost have ranked with abjectvices—lowliness, meekness, endurance, the forbearance of mutual esteem. The furious quarrels, the mad jealousies, the cherished rancours, the frantic spirit of revenge which characterised their heathen condition, are to be fused by the heat of love into one great spiritual unity and peace. Oneness, the result of love, is the ruling thought of this section (4:3–13). “One body, and one spirit, even as also ye were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.”53 Yet this unity is not a dead level of uniformity. Each has his separate measure of grace given by Him who, ascending in triumph, with Sin and Death bound to His chariot–wheels, “gave gifts for men,”54 having first descended that by ascending “far above all heavens” He might fill all things.Apostles therefore, and Prophets, and Evangelists, and Pastors, and Teachers were all appointed by virtue of the gifts which He gave, with a view to perfect the saints, and so to build up the Church which is the body of Christ, until we all finally attain55 to the unity of the faith, and the full knowledge of the Son of God, to perfect manhood, to the measure of the stature of the Plenitude of Christ.” But to contribute to this perfect growth we must lay aside moral and spiritual childishness; we must keep the hand firmly on the helm that we may not be tossed like dismantled hulks by every wave and storm of doctrine, in that fraudful sleight and craft which many devote to further the deliberate system of error. To be true and to be loving is the secret of Christian growth.56 Sincerity and charity are as the life–blood in the veins of that Church, of which Christ is the Head and Heart, “from whom the whole body being fitly framed and compacted by means of every joint of the vital supply, according to the proportional energy of each individual part, tends to the increase of the body, so as to build itself up in love.”57
After this expansion of the duty of Unity, he returns to his exhortation; and, as before he had urged them to walk worthily of their vocation, he now urges them not to walk, as did the rest of the Gentiles, in the vanity of their mind, having been darkened in their understanding, and utterly alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and the callosity of their hearts,58 seeing that they, having lost all sense of shame or sorrow for sin,59 abandoned themselves to wantonness for the working of all uncleanness, in inordinate desire:60—
“But NOT so did yelearn Christ—assuming that ye heard Him, and were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus,61 that ye put off, as concerns your former conversation, the old man which is ever being corrupted according to the lusts of deceit, and undergo renewal by the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man which after God was created in righteousness and holiness of truth.”62
Then follow the many practical applications which result from this clothing of the soul with the new–created humanity. Put away lying, because we are members of one another.63 Let not just anger degenerate into chronic exasperation, neither give room to the devil. Let honest work, earning sufficient even for charity, replace thievish–ness. For corruption of speech let there be such as is “good for edification of the need64 that it may give grace to the hearers,” since unwholesome impurity is a chronic grief to that Holy Spirit who has sealed you as His own to the day of redemption. Then, returning to his main subject of unity, he says:—
“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you with all malice, and become kind to one another, compassionate, freely forgiving one another, as God also in Christ65 freely forgave you. Become, then, imitators of God as children beloved, and walk in love, even as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God for a savour of sweet smell.”66
Then, proceeding to other practical duties, he forbids every form of impurity or obscenity, in word or deed, with the worldly polish67 which was often nearly akin to it, since they are unsuitable to the Christian character, and they who are addicted to such things have no inheritance in the kingdom of God, and whatever men may say, such things are the abiding source of God’s wrath.68 Let thanksgiving take the place of indecency of speech. For though they were darkness, they are now light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. For the fruit of light69 is in all goodness, and righteousness, and truth. Light is the prevalent conception here, as love was in the last chapter.70 Let them not participate in the unfruitful infamies of secret darkness, “but rather even convict them, for all things on being convicted are illumined by the light, for all that is being illumined is light.”71 And this is the spirit of what is perhaps a Christian hymn:—
Ἔγειρε ὁ καθεύδων
Ἀνάστα ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν
Ἐπιφαύσει σοι ὁ Χριστός.
(“A wake thee, thou that sleepest,
And from the dead arise thou,
And Christ shall shine upon thee.”)72
“Take heed, then, how ye walk carefully, not as unwise but as wise, buying up the opportunity because the days are evil. Do not prove yourselves senseless, but understanding what is the will of the Lord.”73
Thus, mingling special exhortation with universal principles, he proceeds to warn them against drunkenness, and recalling perhaps the thrill of emotion with which he and they have joined in such stirring words as those he has just quoted, he bids them seek rather the spiritual exaltations of that holy enthusiasm which finds vent in the melodies of Christian hymnology, and in the eucharistic music of the heart, while at the same time all are mutually submissive to each other in the fear of God.74
The duty of submissiveness thus casually introduced is then illustrated and enforced in three great social relations.75 Wives are to be submissive to their husbands, as the Church is to Christ; and husbands to love their wives, as Christ loved the Church, to sanctify it into stainless purity, and to cherish it as a part of Himself in inseparable union. Children are to obey their parents, and parents not to irritate their children. Slaves are to render sincere and conscientious service, as being the slaves of their unseen Master, Christ, and therefore bound to fulfil all the duties of the state of life in which He has placed them; and masters are to do their duty to their slaves, abandoning threats, remembering that they too have a Master in whose sight they all are equal.76
Having thus gone through the main duties of domestic and social life as contemplated in the light of Christ, he bids them finally “grow strong in the Lord and in the might of His strength.”77 The exhortation brings up the image of armour with which the worn and aged prisoner was but too familiar. Daily the coupling–chain which bound his right wrist to the left of a Roman legionary clashed as it touched some part of the soldier’s arms. The baldric, the military boot, the oblong shield, the cuirass, the helmet, the sword of the Prætorian guardsman were among the few things which he daily saw. But we cannot doubt that, with his kindly human interest in life and youth, the Apostle, who knew that heathendom too was redeemed in Christ, whose boyhood had been passed in a heathen city, who loved man as man because he saw a vision of all humanity in God—would have talked often to the weary soldiers who guarded him; would have tried by wholesome and courteous and profitable words to dissipate their tedium, until we can well imagine that the legionaries who had to perform the disagreeable task would, in spite of intense national repugnances, prefer to be chained to Paul the Jewish prisoner than to any whom caprice, or justice, or tyranny consigned to their military charge. Doubtless the soldiers would tell him in what countries they had been stationed, what barbarians they had helped to subdue. He would ask them in what tumult they had got that fracture in the helmet, in what battle that dint upon the shield, by what blow they had made that hack in the sword.78 They would tell him of the deadly wrestle with foes who grappled with them in the mêlée, and of the falaricae,79 the darts wrapped round with flaming tow, from which their shields had saved them in the siege. And thinking of the sterner struggle against deadlier enemies, even against the world–rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual powers of wickedness in the heavenlies,80 in which all God’s children are anxiously engaged, he bids the Christian converts assume, not “the straw–armour of reason,” but the panoply of God, that they may be able to withstand in the evil day. Let spiritual truth be their baldric or binding girdle;81 moral righteousness their breastplate; zealous alacrity in the cause of the Gospel of Peace their caligaeof war;82 and in addition to these, let faith be taken up as their broad shield83 against the darts of the evil one, however fiercely ignited. Their one weapon of offence is to be the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.84 Prayer and watchfulness is to be their constant attitude; and in their prayers for all saints he begs also for their prayers on his own behalf, not that his chains may be loosed, but that he may boldly and aptly make known the mystery of the Gospel, on behalf of which he is an ambassador—not inviolable, not splendid, but—“an ambassador in a coupling–chain.”85
He sends no news or personal salutations because he is sending the faithful and beloved Tychicus, who will tell them, as well as other cities, all his affairs; but he concludes with a blessing of singular fulness:
“Peace to the brethren and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruption.”86
A wide multi-column table is printed here in the source volume (pages 1185). It does not reflow into a single web column; the readable content of the source table is given elsewhere in this edition.
We have now examined all the Epistles of St.Paul except the last group of all—the three addressed to Timothy and Titus. These are usually known as the Pastoral Epistles, because they sketch the duties of the Christian Pastor. Of the Epistle to the Hebrews I have said nothing, because I hope to speak of it hereafter, and because, for reasons which appear to me absolutely convincing, I cannot regard it as a work of St. Paul’s. But even if the Epistle to the Hebrews be accepted as having been written by the Apostle, it adds nothing to our knowledge of his history. But for the preservation of the Pastoral Epistles, we should not know a single additional fact about him, except such as we can glean from vague and wavering traditions.
The Acts of the Apostles ends with the statement that Paul remained a period of two whole years in his own hired lodging, and received all who came in to visit him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence unmolestedly.87 The question why St. Luke deliberately ended his sketch of the Apostle at that point, is one which can never receive a decisive answer. He only related circumstances of which he was an eyewitness, or which he knew from trustworthy information, and for that reason his narrative, in spite of its marked lacunae, is far more valuable than if it had been constructed out of looser materials. It may, however, be safely asserted that since he had been with St. Paul during at least a part of the Roman imprisonment, he brought down his story to the period at which he first wrote his book. A thousand circumstances may have prevented any resumption of his work as a chronicler, but it is inconceivable that St. Paul should have died almost immediately afterwards, by a martyr’sdeath, and St. Luke have been aware of it before his book was published, and yet that he should not have made the faintest allusion to the subject.88 The conjecture that Theophilus knew all the rest, so that it was needless to commit it to writing, is entirely valueless, for whoever Theophilus may have been, it is clear that St. Luke was not writing for him alone. It is also, to say the least, a probable conjecture that soon after the close of those two whole years some remarkable change took place in the condition of the prisoner. That such a change did take place is the almost unanimous tradition of the Church. However slight may be the grounds of direct testimony, it has been generally believed in all ages that (about the beginning of the year A.D. 64) St. Paul was tried, acquitted, and liberated; and that after some two years of liberty, during which he continued to prosecute his missionary labours, he was once more arrested, and was, after a second imprisonment, put to death at Rome. This would, at least, accord with the anticipations expressed in his own undoubted Epistles. Although he was still a prisoner when he wrote the letter to the Philippians, his trial was near at hand, and while promising to send Timothy to inquire about their fortunes, he adds, “But I am confident in the Lord that I myself too shall come speedily;” and this is so far from being a casual hope that he even asks Philemon “to get a lodging ready for him, for he hopes that he shall be granted to them by their prayers.” It is, of course, quite possible that St. Paul’s sanguine expectations may have been frustrated,89 but he certainly would not have expressed them so distinctly without good grounds for believing that powerful friends were at work in his favour. Whether Festus, and Agrippa, and Lysias, and Publius had used their influence on his behalf, or whether he had reason to rely on any favourable impression which he may have made among the Prætorian soldiers, or whether he had received intelligence that the Jews had seen reason to abandon a frivolous and groundless prosecution, it is impossible to conjecture;90 but his strong impression that he would be liberated at least helps to confirm the many arguments which lead us to believe that he actually was. If so, it must have been very soon after the close of that two years’ confinement with which St. Luke so suddenly breaks off.
For in July, A.D. 64, there broke out that terrible persecution against the Christians, from which, had he been still at Rome, it is certain that he could not have escaped. If, therefore, the Pastoral Epistles be forgeries, we have heard the last words of St. Paul, and at the last verse of the Acts the curtain rushes down in utter darkness upon the remainder of his life. Let us, then, consider what tradition says, and whether we can still accept as genuine the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. If the indications derived from these sources are in any degree trustworthy, we have still to hear some further thoughts and opinions of the Apostle. We catch at least a misty glimpse of his final movements, and attain to a sure knowledge of his state of mind up to the moment of his death. If tradition be mistaken, and if the Epistles are spurious, then we must acquiesce in the fact that we know nothing more of the Apostle, and that he perished among that “vast multitude” whom, in the year 64, the vilest of Emperors, nay, almost of human beings, sacrificed to the blind madness which had been instigated against them by a monstrous accusation. If, indeed, St. Paul perished amid that crowd of nameless martyrs, there is but little probability that any regard would have been paid to his claim as a Roman citizen. He may have perished, like them, by crucifixion; or have been covered, like them, in the skins of wild beasts, to be mangled by dogs; or, standing in his tunic of ignited pitch, may with his dying glance have caught sight of the wicked Emperor of triumphant Heathendom, as the living torch of hideous martyrdom cast a baleful glare across the gardens of the Golden House.91 From all this, however, we may feel a firm conviction that, by the mercy of God, he was delivered for a time.92
It is true that, so far as direct evidence is concerned, we can only say that St. Paul’s own words render it probable that he was liberated, and that this probability finds some slight support in a common tradition, endorsed by the authority of some of the Fathers. But this tradition goes little further than the bare fact. If we are to gain any further knowledge of the biography of St. Paul, it must be derived from the Pastoral Epistles, and from them alone. If they be not genuine, we know no single further particular respecting his fortunes.
Now, it must be admitted that a number of critics, formidable alike in their unanimity and their learning, have come to the conclusion that the Epistles to Timothy and Titus were not written by St. Paul.93 Their arguments are entitled to respectful attention, and they undoubtedly suggest difficulties, which our ignorance of all details in the history of those early centuries renders it by no means easy to remove. Nevertheless, after carefully and impartially weighing all that they have urged—of which some account will be found in the Excursus at the end of the volume—I have come to the decided conviction that the Epistles are genuine, and that the first two of them were written during the two years which intervened between St. Paul’s liberation and his martyrdom at Rome.