Paul and Social Gradations

We have been tracing the development of Paul in its descent from heaven to earth. We have been trying to mark those successive steps by which he came down from the sacred into the secular. We have seen that his beginning, unlike the beginning of the other disciples, was in the heights of the upper air. We have seen that the course of his progress was exactly the antithesis of theirs; that, instead of rising from the ground to the skies, he had to descend from the skies to the ground. We have endeavoured to mark the stages of this progress from the solitudes of the Arabian desert to the chains of the Roman captivity. We have seen how Paul’s interest in secular life was first awakened by the conviction that the leadership of Christ over the Church was intended to be the symbol of all imperialism. We have seen how in that thought the secular world began to be transfigured to his sight. We have marked how first of all it changed to him the aspect of the universe and transformed his view of the nature of Divine government. We have observed next how his altered vision of the universe of nature began to reflect itself in the little empire of the family circle, how the redemption of the outer world was followed by the redemption of home. One sphere still remained — a sphere occupying a yet lower grade, a sphere which, more than all others, had mirrored the despotism of the old regime; I mean the relation of master and servant. It was inevitable that sooner or later Paul in the light of Christianity should be called to face this problem. The occurrence of a comparatively trivial circum stance precipitated the encounter. Nearly at the close of the first Roman captivity there befell a chance, or a providence, which brought the apostle of the Gentiles face to face with that great question which has been ever since the burning question of the social world — the reconciliation of man’s ideal dignity with his position of servitude in a scene of toil.

Reading a little between the lines, it does not seem difficult to reconstruct the elements of the story. The earliest converts to Christianity had been generally made from the poorest class, but there were some notable exceptions. Amongst these was a wealthy citizen of Colossae named Philemon. He had perhaps been brought under Paul’s influence during the apostle’s residence at Ephesus. At all events he was brought under his influence and made by him a convert to the new faith. Like the centurion in the Gospel, he was a man of authority, having retainers or household slaves to whom he said “go” and “come.” He seems, however, to have recognised even for them a right of personal freedom in the highest sphere.

Himself a convert to Christianity, he did not force his retainers to become converts. He appears to have felt that there was in the human soul, even in the soul of a slave, a region which should be held sacred to the liberty of the individual will. He probably commanded his servants to be present at the hours of worship when the apostle happened to officiate in his house. He felt it to be his duty to give his retainers an opportunity of choice between the old faith and the new; but at this point he suspended his authority and left the choice itself to their own decision.

Amongst those household retainers was a youth named Onesimus. He was in the position I have indicated of naving had the alternative placed before him between the setting and the rising sun. He had listened to Paul’s expositions of the new faith. Intellectually and spiritually he was not convinced, but personally he was attracted. There was some thing about it which appealed specially and sooth ingly to his own abject circumstances. That which enlisted his attention was its negative side — the side in which it stood forth as the opponent of man’s bondage. As he heard those words of fire in which the apostle poured forth his denunciations against those who would trammel the rights of man, as he listened to those exhortations in which he called upon his auditors to stand fast in that liberty where with Christ had made them free, as there fell upon his ear those triumphant notes in which the new evangel proclaimed that where the Spirit ot God was there was freedom, it seemed to him as if already the day of his emancipation had dawned. The theory of Christian liberty was as yet too subtle forjiim, but the fact was patent and inspiring. Here was a religion which asserted in the most unqualified terms the equality of all men before God, which declared in the most uncompromising accents that with Him there was no respect of persons, which maintained that in His sight all distinction was abolished between Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, free man and slave. Is it surprising that such a message should have sounded in his ears like strains of sweetest music? Is it wonderful that these negative notes of Christianity should have come to him like the tinkling of fairy bells repeating ever the one refrain, Come and be free ‘?

Time passed, and Paul departed for Jerusalem and for Rome. But absence does not melt the influence of that which once has had dominion over us. A great modern writer has said that the love of the heart for an object grows as much when it is separated from that object as when it dwells in its presence. So was it with Onesimus in his incipient attraction towards Christianity. Long after the voice ol the preacher was withdrawn, its echoes remained in his ear uttering the old refrain of freedom. He had received for the first time a sense of the inherent dignity of man, of the dignity which belonged to a human soul irrespective of caste or circumstances. It did not occur to him that this very fact made it impossible for caste or circumstances to derogate from his dignity; that was a truth which he could only learn when he had exchanged the negative for the positive side of the Christian faith. Meantime he was still a pagan in heart, with a pagan’s ideal of greatness. All that he had yet learned from Christianity was his right as a man to the essential privilege of manhood. He did not yet know that the essential privilege of manhood is not freedom but service, and that freedom is only valuable as the threshold to a voluntary service. And so, he chafed at the chain of whose binding he had been hitherto unconscious. That which was once tolerable to him became intolerable. The actual grievances of his position were exaggerated, imaginary grievances were added, and real compensations were ignored. The two ideas, of his own bondage and Christianity’s promised emancipation, took joint possession of his heart and brain, until at last his place in the house of Philemon became to him as unbearable as if he had been the object of despotic tyranny.

One day, near the conclusion of Paul’s first Roman period, the apostle was surprised by an apparition in the flesh of the slave Onesimus. He had fled from his master Philemon, and he came to justify his action by throwing himself into the arms of Paul and of the new religion. His meeting with the apostle must have been private, because the secret which he had to divulge would have been no secret in the presence of a Roman soldier. This proves, even if other evidence were not forthcoming,1 that the restraint of Paul’s first captivity had been latterly much mitigated. Onesimus communicated to the

1 No man who had not virtually been already acquitted would have written Philemon ‘2’2.

Paul and Social Gradations. 25 T

apostle the fact of his flight from the house of Philemon. It never occurred to him, it would never have occurred to any spectator, either Christian or pagan, that Paul woul(J have done anything else than approve. The course taken by Onesimus appeared to be simply a following out of that which lay within the spirit of Christianity. Yet, to the astonishment of the spectators in every age, Paul’s feeling was exactly the opposite. Instead of commending the step of Onesimus as one in accordance with the Christian spirit, he proceeds to reveal to Onesimus that the Christian spirit in his case had pointed in precisely the contrary direction. He shows him the positive side of Christianity as a thing hitherto unknown to him, makes him an actual convert to the new faith, and then sends him back to his master, accompanied by one of the most courteous, high-toned, and large-hearted letters which have ever been addressed by man to man.

The question is, why? What is there in this transaction that has surprised the spectator in every age? It is not the feeling that Paul has done any wrong to Onesimus. When we say that he sent him back we merely describe the transaction as it appears to the eye. Strictly speaking, Onesimus was not sent back but went back. Nothing could be more voluntary than his return to Philemon. All that Paul did was to expel his old nature, to give him a new will. The moment Onesimus became a Christian it became impossible for him to see the matter in any other light than that in which Paul saw it. This in truth is the real mystery. We want to know why Paul and Onesimus together did see the matter in this light, why the fact of their Christianity impelled them to make a concession to slavery. When England liberated her colonial slaves she liberated also her colonial soil; if a slave thenceforth touched her shores, he was by that act and in that instant free. When Christianity proclaimed herself a land of freedom we should have expected a similar result. We should have thought that, if a man fled from the bonds of slavery and threw himself for protection at the feet of a Christian apostle, his act would have been indorsed by that apostle as a preparation for the new evangel, and a sign of that coming freedom for which the human heart was longing.

We may be reminded that Paul was a Jew, and that as such it was natural that he should cherish the traditions of his country. But I must point out that Paul had emerged from the traditions of his country so far as they concerned the rights of man. He had conceived for himself a theory of human relations essentially different from that which had been embraced by his nation. His spiritual ex perience, as we have seen, had found its earliest stage in a vision of the future, its earliest hope in a second coming of the Son of man. Doubtless the picture was to him at first like the picture of the incipient creation in Genesis — without form and vague. But as time grew he filled it up, and by-and-by it became definite. When he had reached the stage’of” his Corinthian epistles there already floated before his mind the image of a glorious republic which should realise all the merits and eliminate all the defects of the ancient Messianic kingdom. It was a republic in which the idea of monarchy was to grow out of the idea of communism, in which there was to be a levelling down preparatory to a new gradation. The preliminary and initial phase was to be the abolition of present distinctions. There was to be a breaking down of the privileges of sex, of the privileges of race, of the privileges of caste, — an abolition of the pre-eminence of the male over the female, of the Jew over the Gentile, of the citizen over the servant. * All men were to start anew upon an equality, unfettered by the restrictions of the past, and unretarded by the distinctions of birth or station. Yet, this apparently commun istic arrangement had its source in an opposite interest. It was not designed to reduce men to one level but to establish a new social grade. Paul knew well that, if society were made a plain to-day, it would be studded again with mountains to-morrow. He knew well that, however equal men might be in rights, they were and would always be very unequal in merits. Accordingly, that state to which he looked forward was not a democracy but an aristocracy; only, it was an aristocracy in which the highest rank was to be taken by the best man. l i Do you not know,” he cries, “that the saints shall judge the world?” 2 The survival of the fittest is to him a matter of course, and the fittest are here not the physically strongest but the morally purest. God’s day of judgment is for him the time when every man shall rise in his own order;3 when every man shall

i Gal. 111. 28. 2 1 Cor. vi. 2. a 1 Cor. xv. 23.

take his place in the social fabric not according to his birth, not according to his nation, not according to his clan, but according to his deed. 1 Divine election is to take the form of natural selection — a selection in which a man is to coine to the front or to fall back into the rear irrespective altogether of whether he be freeman or slave, Gentile or Jew, but simply and entirely in proportion to the native strength that is in him, and on the ground of that suitability to the new environment which he has attained by the development of Christian experience.

It is true that for Paul all this was as yet in the future. It was not only in the future but in a future world. It had not occurred to him that the old and not a new environment might be the scene of his ideal government. In the Corinthian stage of his experience this world as a world was to him simply nil. It had not even reached the significance of being preparatory to a better state of things; it existed as yet to his mind merely as an obstacle to the realisation of that state. The obstacle was one which must be removed by death. It had not yet broken on his mind that it might be removed by life — by the amelioration of the environment itself. Accordingly, in this Corinthian stage we are not surprised to find that he is by no means eager to stand forth as a social reformer. He is willing to let the institutions of the present world alone. He tells the slave to be obedient to his master, to abide in the situation wherein he is called, to regard with indifference the fact of his bondage. But he tells him at the same time the reason why. It is not because slavery is a thing indifferent, but because all the institutions of time are things fleeting and transitory. ’ The time is short, “he says;” it remaineth that they that buy be as though they possessed not.”1 He sees that there is a period rapidly approaching in which, for each individual soul, the distinction of bondman and freeman shall be seen to have been an illusion and a dream. The dissolution of the material chain to be effected by the hour of death shall prove that the bondman’s chain was but one link in that great oppressive environment which has so long circumscribed the liberties of all man kind. Seeing, therefore, that one common emancipation awaits both the bond and the free, it is not worth while for the bond to fret against their separate yoke; rather let them look upon it as only another incentive to the universal longing for the coming of that time when the fashion of this world shall pass away.

All this is perfectly intelligible and clearly logical. As long as a sharp line of separation exists between this world and other worlds, the only possibility of emancipation from present evils is that which lies through the gates of death. If Paul had written his epistle to Philemon at this stage, no one would have been surprised that he counselled Onesimus to re turn. But the epistle to Philemon was not written at this stage; it was the production of a later day. It came not from the Corinthian but from the Ephesian and Colossian period. The transition

i 1 Cor. vii. 29, 30.

from these periods was to Paul the transition into a new world — we might almost say, into the present world. When he stood in the streets of Rome there

seemed to strike a new hour in the clock of time

the hour in which Christ for the first time became King of the secular world. The head of the Christian Church was recognised in a moment to be the head of all principalities and powers. The sharp line of separation which had divided this world from other worlds melted into thin air, and that Divine government which had hitherto been viewed exclusively in its heavenly relations was seen to exist for the sake of the common earth. Slavery could no longer be allowed to rest on the ground that the things of time were indifferent. The things of time had ceased to be indifferent; every secular object had become susceptible of a sacramental relation. Not only had Onesimus a right to freedom, but he had a right to freedom as an inhabitant of the present world. It was not merely something which he was entitled to claim in the sphere of religion; he was entitled to claim it in the sphere of human citizenship, to claim it on the ground of being a man. Why, then, with these changed premisses does Paul still retain the old conclusion? If Onesimus has a right to be free, and if freedom in the present world is no longer a thing indifferent, why does he induce him to return into a surmounted slavery? Why does he not exhort him to claim with his Christian profession that right which he regards as Christianity’s inalienable privilege — the right of a free soul to follow the dictates of its will?

It is because he feels that the main distinction of Christianity is the power to sacrifice its rights. He feels that, although Christianity professes to be the life of the world, that profession is not its peculiarity; it shares it with every religion under the sun. Its peculiarity consists precisely in its power to lay down its life, in its consent for the sake of the world to take less than its due. Whenever Christ was realised to be the head of all principalities and powers Paul knew from that moment that the sacred must bend to the secular. If the barren fig-tree was to get a chance at all, it must meantime be preserved even in its barrenness. The lofty ideal of Christianity must consent to pause, must postpone the realisation of that which was the end of its being. Just as the headship of Christ in the religious world found its immediate manifestation in bearing with the imperfections of the bodily members, so the headship of Christ in the secular world must find its immediate manifestation in bearing with the imperfections of existing things. It is in the light of such a thought that one comes to understand that strange conjunction of attributes by which a Christian writer, almost contemporaneous with Paul’s epistle to Philemon, has ventured to describe the nature of the new dominion as “the kingdom and patience of Christ.”1

Let us apply this principle to the case before us. Christianity had a right to proclaim the freedom of man as man. Nothing was simpler than to make such a proclamation. Paul had only to connive at

i Bev. 1. 9.

the flight of Onesimus and to indorse the act by his own imprimatur; it would have been a signal to the whole slave population of the world that the watchword of the new religion was emancipation from servile bonds. What would have been the effect of such a signal? Doubtless it would have instantaneously added to the numerical strength of Christianity; the kingdom of heaven would immediately have been taken by violence. And so would the kingdoms of earth. It is impossible to conceive a more perfect picture of anarchy than would have been created by a sudden and successful insurrection of the slave population. The numerical proportion of the bound to the unbound in the Roman empire is a matter of dispute, probably the bond outnumbered the free. Figure anything approaching to such a proportion, and then to the quantity add the quality. Consider that the slave population represented at its worst that state which we designate by the name of Paganism — a name which embraces as its leading characteristic the predominance of the sensuous over the spiritual. It was paganism without its restraints and without its refinements. What would have been the effect of the emancipation of these millions — the emancipation of an un-Christianised, unhumanised horde impelled by the fanaticism of a new watchword, accomplished in a moment of time and achieved by a stroke of violence? Could it have had any other result than one — the transformation of order into anarchy, the uprooting of that line of civilisation on which Christianity it self had begun to move?

That such a thought passed through Paul’s mind is perfectly manifest from the second epistle to the Thessalonians. So far back as that early writing we find the mind of the apostle perturbed by the spectacle of incipient lawlessness in the Roman empire. Beneath the calm surface he feels that there is brooding a storm. He is conscious that there are under ground forces whose action is only restrained by the powers at the summit, and which, if these powers were removed, would sweep relentlessly over the whole system of law and order. He is not thinking simply of the slave population, but of the masses in general. “Even now,” he says, “the spirit of lawlessness works secretly, only, he that hindereth will hinder until he be taken out of the way.”1 “He that hindereth” is clearly the Roman emperor. The reference is meant to be complimentary. Caesar was not Paul’s hero, and the Roman government was not Paul’s ideal, but he felt that in relation to existing evils both had a remedial mission to perform. He felt that the iron hand of that imperial constitution, however oppressive it might be in its intrinsic nature, was yet achieving a work which no other hand could have achieved. It was keeping down from the surface forces of the most fiery and insubordinate character, forces which had long been burning underground and which only waited an opportunity to make their eruption into the upper air. That sooner or later they would obtain their object Paul had no doubt; he felt that eventually the restraining power of the empire would be taken out of the way.

i 2 These. 7.

Yet it was to him no matter of congratulation. He stood appalled before the picture which his own imagination had created — the picture of a subterranean anarchy let loose by the removal of the world’s outer crust. And if Paul feared this even in those days when he wrote to the Thessalonians — days of ascetic reaction from the present order of things is it likely that he would have feared it less in that period of reconciliation with the present when he wrote the epistle to Philemon? Is it not patent that the same dread of anarchy which had impelled him in the past to deprecate the loosening of the Roman hand, was now impelling him to deprecate any sudden and violent liberation even from that physical slavery which was contrary to the spirit of the new religion?

It may be asked, Was not Onesimus after his con version fit for freedom? Undoubtedly he was, and probably a few hundreds besides. But it was just here that in the view of Paul the Christian principle manifested its most distinctive power. It was of the essence of Christianity that one should die for the people, that the few should give their life as a ransom for the many. The headship of Christ was itself based upon the idea of a membership in which the pains of the whole body were concentrated in a single organ. Could there be a grander occasion for the illustration of this principle than that which had now presented itself? Onesimus had set himself free; he was fit for freedom, and in the sight of God he had a right to freedom. But the vast majority of his class were utterly unfit for such liberation.

What if they should do what Onesinms had doneemancipate themselves by an act of rebellion? And how was such a catastrophe to be averted? Clearly by the sacrifice of Onesimus himself. If his conversion to Christianity were real, his first act as a Christian must be the renunciation of his own right; he must forego his crown and take up his ancient cross. The men of his own class were unripe for the emancipation he had himself attained; let him resign this emancipation. Let him offer himself as an oblation for his people. Let him voluntarily go back into that depressed position from which he had striven to be free. Let him deliberately go down again into that valley of humiliation from which it had been the aspiration of his life to be exalted. So would the valley itself become to him the mountain, and, in the sacrifice of that right to liberty which as a Christian he had the power to claim, he would reach a higher exhibition of the distinctive power of man.

I have tried to reproduce that state of mind which probably dictated to Paul the singular course adopted in the epistle to Philemon. I do not regard this incident as simply a biographical episode in the apostle’s life. To me it is one of the most distinctly marked stages in the development of his spiritual experience. Nowhere in the course of Paul’s history has he hitherto displayed so much deference for the secular institutions of the world. We stand here upon that transition line which leads into the final period of the apostle’s life — a period which is at once antithetical and complementary to the experience of his earlier days. As we see before us the man of the past and the man of the present — the man who wrote the epistles to the Corinthians and the man who wrote the epistle to Philemon, we feel that we have passed to the opposite bank of the river. There is no contradiction, there is no annulling of former sentiments, yet there is a distinct development and the occupation of a position from which the eye can command a larger view. When he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthians his mind was occupied with the problem how much the secular ought to yield to the sacred; when he wrote his epistle to Philemon his mind was engrossed with the question how much the sacred ought to yield to the secular. Both were legitimate problems, both questions were answered in accordance with the Christian spirit, but both were not asked at the same time. The one was put in the days when Paul had just completed his spiritual struggle; the other was suggested in the days when the struggle had faded from his memory and the calm of mellow autumn had come. At the earlier stage he had been confronted by the question whether in their secular feasts the disciples of the new faith might eat the flesh which had been offered to an idol; he had himself no doubt whatever of the lawfulness, but he bowed before the common Christian conscience. 1 Here, in the latter stage, he bows before another tribunal — that of the common heathen conscience. A runaway slave appeals’ to him for freedom on the ground of that very religion whose pioneer he professed to be. The right to

i 1 Cor. viii. 13.

freedom was confessed and undoubted, but the needs of the Gentile world demanded that it should be postponed; Paul yielded to the Gentile need and inspired the runaway to return.

Here is a change of standpoint, not amounting, indeed, to any alteration in principle, yet distinctly exhibiting the fact that Paul had passed over to another side of the truth. How are we to explain the transition? How can we better explain it than by a recognition of that order of development through which the apostle’s life was gradually unfolded? It was not that, as time advanced and as the shadows of age deepened on his path, the ardour of his early fire grew paler; it was rather that his early fire took hold on new objects and extended the range of its ardour. The secular had become to him itself the sacred. The middle wall of partition which so long had divided the kingdom of Christ from the kingdoms of the world had in his sight been broken down, and Christ was recognised not merely as the head of a redeemed humanity but as the head of principalities and powers still heathen. The Gentile world, unknown to itself, had to Paul become a theocracy — a government which, with all its imperfections, was ministering to the ends of the universe. As such, its every institution was by him viewed with reverence — a reverence not unlike to that which he still cherished for the mission of the Jewish law; and even the tare of slavery he would not suffer to be plucked with violence, lest haply in gathering up the tare men should root out also the wheat with it.