Charles Gore

“ Paul's mind is full of the idea of predestination. He delights to contemplate the eternal purpose of God as lying behind what seems to us the painfully slow method by which divine results are actually won. What age-long processes have been necessary both among the Jews and among the Gentiles before this young church, this divine society of man with God has become possible! What slow working through 'times of ignorance,' what infinite delay in the divine forbearance—as we should now say, what age-long processes of developement! ”

“ Thus in acknowledging the messiahship of that Jesus whom the chosen people had rejected and surrendered to be crucified, he was abandoning utterly and for ever the standing-ground of Jewish pride: he was acknowledging that the only divine function of the law was to convince men of sin, and of their need of pardon and salvation: he was taking his stand as a sinner among the Gentiles, and humbly welcoming the unmerited boon of pardon and acceptance from the hand of the divine mercy in Christ Jesus. ”

“ Paul, following his Master, is quite certain that the root of true enlightenment lies in the will and heart. The love of the light is first of all simply the pure desire for goodness; and anything that is not this first of all is a counterfeit and a sham. And the true enlightenment is thus not the privilege of a few, but is open to all who will come to Christ. 'Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? ”

“ He sees nothing incongruous in finding in the yet young and limited societies of Christian disciples the consummation of the divine purpose for the world, for these societies represent the breaking down of all barriers and the bringing of all men to unity with one another through a recovered unity with God, through Christ and in His Spirit. Therefore the work which the Church is to accomplish is nothing less than a universal work, a work not even limited to humanity; it is the bringing back of all things visible or invisible into that unity which lies in God's original purpose of creation. ”

“ The Christian stands awake and in the light. He has a vantage-ground of spiritual knowledge, and the opportunity afforded by this vantage-ground he is to use. He is not to live at random but is to fashion his life with deliberate circumspection and prudence in order to make the best of the spiritual opportunity, just as the merchant cleverly seizes and uses to his own advantage a particular commercial situation. What gives the Christian his spiritual opportunity is the corruption which surrounds him. Of that corruption St. Paul has already said enough. ”

“ And is the greatness of this exaltation and knowledge vouchsafed to the Church to be a renewed occasion of pride—that spiritual pride, the fatal results of which had already become apparent through the rejection of the Jews? No: unless through a complete mistake, the very opposite must be the result. The strength of human pride, as St. Paul had seen long ago, lay in the idea that man could have merit of his own, face to face with God: could have good works which were his own and not God's, and which gave him a claim upon God. ”

“ Our Christianity is apt to be of a very 'dutiful' kind. We mean to do our duty, we attend church and go to our communions. But our hearts are full of the difficulties, the hardships, {84} the obstacles which the situation presents, and we go on our way sadly, downhearted and despondent. We need to learn or learn anew from St. Paul that true Christianity is inseparable from deep joy; and the secret of that joy lies in a continual looking away from all else—away from sin and its ways, and from the manifold hindrances to the good we would do—up to God, His love, His purpose, His will. ”

“ He creates nothing. It is not that man does something and then God does the rest. The truth is that when we track man's good action to its root in his will, we find for certain that God has been beforehand with him. The good he does is in correspondence with moral and physical laws and forces of the universe, or, in other words, with divine powers and purposes lent and suggested to him. To attempt independence of God, to have schemes and plans absolutely one's own, is to work arbitrarily and ignorantly, and ultimately to fail and to know that one has failed. ”

“ What is this 'unity of Spirit?' says Chrysostom. 'As in a body it is spirit which holds all together, and makes that to be a unity which consists of different limbs, so it is in the Church. For the Spirit was given for this purpose that He might unify those who differ in race and variety of habits.' This inward life is no doubt, as we shall see, imparted, maintained and perfected through outward means or institutions—baptism, the eucharist, human offices and ministries; but none the less it is the inward life which makes the Church one. ”

“ Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things; to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in him. ”

“ But they must recognize that the only Christian method of 'convicting the world of sin' is by 'convicting it of righteousness.' Innocence has a power which sometimes is strangely underrated.
We may pause for a moment longer to dwell on the beauty of St. Paul's ideal of Christianity {201} as a life in the light. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by disclosure. It has no need to cloak itself. It can be frank with itself and the world. And, on the other hand, sin is a great fraud and delusion as well as a great disobedience. ”

“ Most assuredly we feel the difficulty of what we have in hand. But we cannot feel it more intensely than St. Paul felt the difficulty involved in the very idea of a human brotherhood in which national distinctions were obliterated. After all, the degree of unity impressed by the Roman Empire upon the different nations it embraced was superficial. On the whole it left men to walk in their own ways. In particular it did not succeed in breaking down the barriers of Jewish isolation. ”

“ Paul's Christianity is a religion of thankfulness. This epistle is a burst of exuberant praise. Yet he was himself a prisoner, and the church of Ephesus, with the other Asiatic churches, was sorely threatened with moral and spiritual perils of all kinds. The secret of this thankfulness is that he looks straight away from himself and his surroundings up to God. He measures the value of human life and work not by what immediate experience suggests, but by what he knows of the purpose of God. ”

“ But the very meaning of divine faith is that we do, in spite of all discouragements, hold that to be practicable which is the will of God; and it is nothing new in the history of Christianity if at a crisis we need 'the blood of martyrs'—or something morally equivalent to their blood—for 'a seed,' the seed of a fresh growth of Christian corporate life. ”

“ And the whole of Christian language is possessed by the symbolism. Christ is 'the light of the world': His disciples are 'the children of light,' they are to be clothed in 'the armour of light,' bathed in 'the light of the glorious Gospel': they are the children of the God who 'dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto': who 'is light and in whom is no darkness at all.'
St. Paul, like St. John, specially loves the metaphor of light. ”

“ There are multitudes of homes where discipline is exercised wisely and lovingly, and children find obedience always a duty and mostly a joy. This is certainly the only divinely appointed method by which we are to be prepared for the obedience and self-discipline required of us when we grow to be what is falsely described as 'our own masters.' And St. Paul's twofold admonition to parents is full of wisdom: they are not to provoke their children so that they become bad-tempered, and they are not to over-stimulate them, by competition or otherwise, so that they become disheartened. ”

“ But the interest of the earliest Church unmixed with the world, its principles fresh, its inspirations strong, its native hue free from discolouring elements, preoccupies us with a fascination which is unrivalled. The divine society is young and inexperienced, but what it is and is meant {4} to be we can see there better than anywhere else. We return, when our minds are aching and our eyes are dim with the complexity and obscurity of our latter-day problem, to learn insight and simplicity again at those pure sources. ”

“ The amount of ambition, insolence, and impatience in the Church has, in fact, been so vast that it remains no longer a matter {162} for astonishment that it should have made the havoc that it has made in the divine household, and should have thwarted, as it has thwarted, the divine intention. But the recognition of this fact lays on us the duty of meditating continually on the divine intention, and by all that lies in our power, by prayer and by every other means, to restore the recognition of the divine principle of unity whether in the narrower or the wider circle of church life. ”

“ If we men are free to choose, how can it be, or can it really be the case at all, that God knows beforehand actually how each individual will behave in each particular case? This is a problem which we cannot fathom any more than we can fathom any of the problems which require for their solution an experience of what an absolute and eternal consciousness can mean. ”

“ Paul emphasizes 'This ye know for certain that fornication or unclean living on the one hand, or the turning of gain into a god on the other, surely excludes a man from the kingdom of Christ and God [1] .' And he reiterates 'let no man deceive you with empty words.' Such vices, being in plain contradiction to the divine will, make men subjects of the divine wrath, and for you this should be startlingly plain. You have been brought out of the realm of darkness of which once you formed a part, into the realm of light, of which you now form a part, the realm whose light is Christ. ”

“ For the very purpose of the one church for all the men of faith in Jesus, is that the necessity for belonging to one body—a necessity grounded on divine appointment—shall force together into a unity men of all sorts and different kinds; and the forces of the new life which they share in common are to overcome their natural repugnance and antipathies, and to make the forbearance and love and mutual helpfulness which corporate life requires, if not easy, at least possible for them. ”

“ Paul's mind the Catholicism of the church is to lead the way to an even wider 'reconciliation.' Through the catholic union of men in the church the whole universe is to come back into unity. The kingdom of God is to be something wider than the church which exists to prepare for it. This principle once recognized secures that the church shall feel and exhibit a constant interest in all departments of knowledge and progress. The universe is one, and redemption is for the whole. ”

“ Paul has just suggested the thought of imitating God by ready forgiveness. And in fact here—in the imitation of God—is one of the greatest of the new ideas and motives which Christianity supplies. God has manifested Himself in Christ under human conditions. He has translated the unimaginable Godhead into terms of our own well-known human nature. For Christ is very man, yet He is the Son of God, truly God, and His character is God's character. For the Christian henceforth in a quite new sense God is imitable: He can become a pattern for actual human life. ”

“ Paul's exhortation to 'buy up the opportunity because the days are evil' finds fresh application in every generation. For each generation the 'days are evil,' and good men always feel them to be so. Not necessarily that they are evil by comparison with other days, for the 'good old times' certainly never existed, and it is not often possible to balance the evils of one age against those of another. ”

“ In fact, if the practical ethics of India and China, or the Turkish Empire and Morocco, are considered side by side with those of Christian Europe, it is impossible to resist the conviction that men's behaviour depends in the long run on what they believe about God.
This obvious conclusion is, in part, veiled from our eyes by two facts. One is that logic works slowly in human life. Take a transverse section of humanity at any particular moment, and it appears a mass of inconsistencies. It might almost suggest that there is no connexion at all between belief and practice. ”

“ Step by step the centre of Christian evangelization had passed toward Rome as its goal. From Jerusalem, which told unmistakably that 'the salvation was of the Jews,' it had moved to Antioch, where in a Greek city Jew met Gentile on equal terms. From Antioch, under St. Paul's leadership, it had passed to Corinth and Ephesus. These were indeed thoroughly Gentile cities, and leading cities of the Empire, but they were provincial. No imperial movement could rest satisfied till it established itself at the centre of the great imperial organization—till it had got to Rome. ”

“ How pitiable it was that, in face of all Christian experience and of the authoritative language of the New Testament, unmarried women should have no prospect opened to them but such as was drearily summed up in the phrase 'old maids.' St. Paul, if in this epistle he is glorifying the married state, certainly also glorifies both for men and women the freedom of the celibate life consecrated to the service of God—the consecration of those who in a special sense are the virgin-brides of Christ. ”

“ Thus when we call a writer of the New Testament 'inspired' we must mean at least this: that the same divine Spirit who put the message of God in the hearts of the prophets of old, and who worked His perfect work without let and hindrance in the manhood of Christ, is here so working upon the will and imagination, the memory and intelligence, of one of Christ's commissioned witnesses as that he shall interpret and not misinterpret the mind and person of his Master. ”

“ Under the new covenant the prohibition of what is wrong passes into the injunction of what is right. Labour of whatever kind, labour directed to produce something good, is required of all. 'If any man will not work, neither let him eat [4] .' The idle man in fact violates the fundamental conditions of the Christian covenant as truly as if he were denying the rudiments of the Christian faith. ”

“ But the convincing demonstration begins at that point where Christianity makes man feel, and see in fact, that it contains in itself the remedy for social evils, because it has the spirit of love: where the Church is so actually presented as that men should feel and know that this is a true human {137} brotherhood. It is the social, human, brotherly power of the Church which is what is at the present moment best calculated to win the consciences and convince the intellects of men. But this actual living spirit of self-sacrificing love—this spirit of real brotherhood—how 'frost-bound' it is! ”