Saint James

“ The problem of salvation, for James, must be an essentially individual problem; for nobody else ever faced your need of salvation, or had your personal issues to meet. If you win religious insight, you will have to win it very much as you will have to die--alone. Of course James does not hesitate to test the value of religious {63} experience, in his pragmatic fashion, by its social as well as by its individual consequences. The fruits of the spirit accrue to the general advantage; and the saint, in James's opinion, must indeed undertake to edify, not only himself, but also his brethren. ”

“ It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation. The sentence of saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: ”

“ The view from the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is immense and famous. Paris lies spread before you in dusky vastness, domed and fortified, glittering here and there through her light vapours and girdled with her silver Seine. Behind you is a park of stately symmetry, and behind that a forest where you may lounge through turfy avenues and light-chequered glades and quite forget that you are within half an hour of the boulevards. One afternoon, however, in mid-spring, some five years ago, a young man seated on the terrace had preferred to keep this in mind. ”

“ James of Spain (San Jacopo di Galizia) , and employed M. Jacopo Avanzi to decorate it, who no doubt bestowed his best workmanship on his patron saint. The subjects are thus arranged, beginning with the lunette on the left hand, which is divided into three compartments:
1. Hermogenes sends Philetus to dispute with St. James. 2. St. James in his pulpit converts Philetus. 3. Hermogenes sends his demons to bind St. James and Philetus. 4. Hermogenes brought bound to St. James. 5. He burns his books of magic. 6. Hermogenes and Philetus are conversing in a friendly manner with St. James. 7. St. ”

“ Among all the jewelled shrines and overwrought tabernacles of Italy, I have seen no such magnificent waste of labor, no such glorious synthesis of cunning secrets. As you wander, sweating and blinking, over the changing levels of the edifice, your eye catches at a hundred points the little profile of a little saint, looking out into the dizzy air, a pair of folded hands praying to the bright immediate heavens, a sandalled monkish foot planted on the edge of the white abyss. ”

“ Our experience at Saint Peter and Saint Paul enabled us to judge what might be expected farther north; and upon that ground we had reason to doubt, whether the continents might not in winter be even joined by the ice; and this agreed with the stories we heard in Kamtschatka, that on the Siberian coast they go out from the shore in winter, upon the ice, to greater distances than the breadth of the sea is, in some parts, from one continent to the other. ”

“ The wind freshening from the south-east toward evening, we shaped our course to the north-east by east for the point called in Beering’s chart Tschukotskoi Noss, which we had observed on the 4th of September last year, at the same time that we saw to the south-east the island of Saint Laurence. This Cape and Saint Thadeus’s Noss form the north-east and south-west extremities of the large and deep Gulf of Anadir, into the bottom of which the river of that name empties itself, dividing as it passes, the country of the Koriacs from that of Tschutski. ”

“ He had not been with the twelve during the ministry of Jesus and so could not be a firsthand witness to his words and teachings (Acts 1:22) . Otherwise, we may infer that James would have been a welcome addition to the twelve in the place of Judas. [23]
But the significant fact is that James is present during the wonderful days of this Pentecost and is filled, like the rest, with the Holy Spirit. He enters upon the new task of world evangelization with the new insight and the new influx of divine power. He faces the new day with the light of the sun in his face. ”

“ James is not to prove that the man is a hypocrite, and that his professions are false; but that, on his own showing, he is in a miserable condition. He may plume himself upon the correctness of his Theism; but as far as that goes, he is no better than the demons, to whom this article of faith is a source, not of joy and strength, but of horror.
It is most improbable that, if he had been alluding to the teaching of St. Paul, St. James would have selected the Unity of the Godhead as the article of faith held by the barren Christian. He would have taken faith in Christ as his example. ”

“ His one great weakness was these spells of unaccountable silence.
The outstanding feature of James's personality was his ability to see all sides of a proposition. Of all the twelve, he came the nearest to grasping the real import and significance of Jesus' teaching. He, too, was slow at first to comprehend the Master's meaning, but ere they had finished their training, he had acquired a superior concept of Jesus' message. James was able to understand a wide range of human nature; he got along well with the versatile Andrew, the impetuous Peter, and his self-contained brother John. ”

“ James, though very Jewish in background, is thoroughly Christian. The heart of Christianity, the worship of Jesus as Lord and Saviour, is here, though chronologically the Epistle of James precedes the teaching of Paul and John in their writings. It is like the child and the man (Plummer) , not a retrograde movement. It is the outlook of Jerusalem, not that of Antioch. What James is discussing is not the personal religion of Jesus but the reader’s faith in Jesus.
The third disputed point in the verse is the word “glory.” ”

“ Even the twelve apostles had not risen to the conception of a spiritual Messiah, and they had given up all hope upon the death of Jesus and had to be convinced themselves of the fact of the resurrection of Jesus, a task of much difficulty, particularly in the case of Thomas, though they all at first scoffed at the stories of Mary Magdalene and the other women. So, then, the path of James toward faith was not an easy one, but he took it and came out boldly on the side of the disciples of Christ. ”

“ He had warned his apostles that a man's foes may be they of his own household, but he had hardly realized how near this prediction would come to apply to his own experience. Jesus did not forsake his earth family to do his Father's work—they forsook him. Later on, after the Master's death and resurrection, when James became connected with the early Christian movement, he suffered immeasurably as a result of his failure to enjoy this earlier association with Jesus and his disciples. ”

“ With James I have had a long chat; he is a good boy, and has learnt much that will bring peace to his mind, while he lives on this earth, and in the world to come it will cause him to see the face of Him who sits on the throne. For my own part, I will teach all your sons. At the same time, said she to them: You must still give heed to all that Christiana can teach you, but more than all, you must read the Book of God's Word, which sent your dear sire on his way to the land of bliss. ”

“ This paragraph is, in fact, simply a continuation of the uncompromising attack upon sham religion which is the main theme throughout a large portion of the Epistle. St. James first shows how useless it is to be an eager hearer of the word, without also being a doer of it. Next he exposes the inconsistency of loving one's neighbour as oneself if he chances to be rich, and neglecting or even insulting him if he is poor. From that he passes on to prove the barrenness of an orthodoxy which is not manifested in good deeds, and the peril of trying to make words a substitute for works. ”

“ James, on the contrary, exhorts us to cut ourselves off, not from the body, but from friendship with the world. If we resist the evil one, who tempts us through our ferocious lusts, he will flee from us. God will give us the grace we need, if we pray for that rather than for pleasures. He will draw nigh to us if we draw nigh to Him; and if we purify our hearts He will make His Spirit to dwell in them. Even in this life the wisdom that is from above is attainable, and where that has found a home factions and fightings cease. ”

“ James does two things—he shows the moral chaos to which the Christian who fails to control his tongue is reduced, and he thereby shows such a man how vain it is for him to hope that the worship which he offers to Almighty God can be pure and acceptable. He has made himself the channel of hellish influences. He cannot at pleasure make himself the channel of heavenly influences, or become the offerer of holy sacrifices. ”

“ The connecting thoughts are religious worship and the treatment of the poor. The conduct which is true devotion is practical benevolence, moral purity, and unworldliness. This conclusion suggests a new subject, worldly respect of persons in public worship. That is the very reverse of pure devotion. To profess {118} one's belief in Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, and at the same time show one's belief in the majesty of mere money, is grievously incongruous. St. James is not making any attack on differences of rank, or asserting that no man is to be honoured above another. ”

“ He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others, but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as the lonely lady of Saint-Germain? ”

“ When many, therefore, even of the rulers were believing, there was a tumult of the Jews and scribes and Pharisees, who said, It looks as if all the people would be expecting Jesus as the Christ. They came together, therefore, and said to James, We pray thee, restrain the people, for it has been led astray after Jesus, as though He were the Christ. We pray thee to persuade all that come to the day of the Passover concerning Jesus; for to thee we all give heed. For we bear witness to thee, and so do all the people, that thou art just, and acceptest not the person of any. ”

“ James tells in three words, which form a climax, what the wisdom on which they plume themselves, in {200} its nature, and sphere, and origin, really is. It belongs to this world, and has no connexion with heavenly things. Its activity is in the lower part of man's nature, his passions and his human intelligence, but it never touches his spirit. And in its origin and manner of working it is demoniacal. Not the gentleness of God's Holy Spirit, but the fierce recklessness of Satan's emissaries, inspires it. ”

“ James, who boasted that he was born in 'the purest church on earth,' and whose courtiers called him 'the Childe of God,' was no doubt highly gratified at this declaration of the devil's hatred, 'because he was his greatest enemie on earth.' This was such a piece of flattery as suited the meridian of the monarch's intellects. ”

“ James the less was a person of great prudence and discretion, and was highly esteemed by the Apostles and other Christians. Such, indeed, was his general reputation for piety and virtue, that, as we learn, from Origen, Eusebius, and Jerom, Josephus thought, and declared it to be the common opinion, that the sufferings of the Jews, and the destruction of their city and temple, were owing to the anger of God, excited by the murder of James. ”

“ James with affectionate humility and persuasiveness includes himself in the judgment—"we shall receive"—by no means proves that the word is here used in a neutral sense. In this he is like St. John, who breaks the logical flow of a sentence in a similar manner, rather than seem not to include himself: "If any man sin, we have an Advocate" (1 John ii. 1) ; he is as much in need of the Advocate as others. So also here, St. James, as being a teacher, shares in the heavier condemnation of teachers. ”

“ If to lead one soul astray is to share the devil's work and incur guilt to which a violent death would be preferable (Matt. xviii. 6; Mark ix. 42; Luke xvii. 2) , to lead one soul back from death is to share Christ's work (2 Cor. vi. 1) by blotting out from God's sight the sins which cry for punishment.
We shall obtain a clearer view of the meaning of St. James in these concluding verses of his Epistle if we begin with the last words of the passage, and from them work back to what precedes.
"Shall cover a multitude of sins." Whose sins? Not the sins of him who converts the erring brother. ”

“ The Royal Law, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, should particularly prevail among men, because of the miserable state to which all are reduced by sin, so that each particularly needs the help of his brother.
Verse 14
What doth it profit - though a man say he hath faith - We now come to a part of this epistle which has appeared to some eminent men to contradict other portions of the Divine records. In short, it has been thought that James teaches the doctrine of justification by the merit of good works, while Paul asserts this to be insufficient, and that man is justified by faith. ”

“ We should be doers of the word, and not hearers merely, lest we resemble those who, beholding their natural face in a glass, when it is removed forget what manner of persons they were, [67] . We should look into the perfect law of liberty, and continue therein, [68] . The nature and properties of pure religion, [69] , [70] .
Verse 1
James, a servant of God - For an account of this person, or rather for the conjectures concerning him, see the preface. He neither calls himself an apostle, nor does he say that he was the brother of Christ, or bishop of Jerusalem ”