The Foreshadowings of a New Day

We have now arrived at a point in Paul’s spiritual history in which we seem to have reached a culmination. We have seen his Christian consciousness ripening from its dawn to its maturity. We have marked the growth of his spirit from its environment amid the Arabian solitudes to its emergence into the life and light of religious liberty. We have observed the process by which his mind passed from a Judaic into a Gentile Christianity, from the vision of a kingdom still in the future to the realisation of the truth that he was in possession of that kingdom here and now. We have considered the transition by which he advanced from the desire of personal reconciliation to the desire of being a personal reconciler, from the gazing on Christ’s image to the participation in that image, from the justification by faith to the sanctification by love. And now the question which suggests itself is this, What more remains? Would it not seem as if the man had climbed his highest, as if there were no further height to gain? Can there be any deeper depth of Christianity than the bearing of Christ’s image, and, if a man has consciously reached that, can he get nearer to the root of life? In the epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, we have seen Paul attaining this goal. What further progress can any future writing reveal? Must he not henceforth be content simply to hold his own, to occupy the ground he has possessed, and dwell in the light he has already conquered?

And yet, a moment’s reflection will convince us that the most important stage of Paul’s development is still to come. If we were to express the matter epigrammatically, and in language itself Pauline, we should say that Paul had now reached the length and depth of Divine love but not yet the breadth of it. He had reached the length of Divine love; he had recognised the fact that the purpose of God in Christ had stretched back beyond the limits of historical Christianity, and had embraced the history of the Old Testament. He had reached the depth of Divine love; he had realised the truth that, in order to be a follower of Christ, it was not enough to be a partaker of His benefits, it was necessary to be a distributer of His benefits. But there was one fact he had not yet seen, and that was a vital fact — the necessity that Christ’s kingdom should be a power embracing everything. He had felt its power within himself; he had become conscious that he was animated by the identical spirit which dwelt in the Master. But the very consciousness of this animation made him feel bound to “be an ascetic. Bis first Christian hope, as we have seen, had been the hope of a new world, and this implied a despair of the old one. This earlier form of asceticism had, indeed, passed away. He had awakened to the truth that a man might enter into Christ’s life without dying, and become a citizen of heaven while yet he trod the earth. But to the mind of Paul this new thought was as yet only the exchange of one form of asceticism for another. It seemed to him that, having entered into the life of Christ, he was by that very fact separated in the meantime from the life of the world as a world. He no longer looked forward to an absorption in a future kingdom, but he had found an equally complete absorption in a kingdom which had already come. He no longer dwelt on the thought of a time when the world and its works would be burned up; but if so, it was only because to him the world and its works had been virtually burned up already. The deepening of the new Christian life had come to him with somewhat of the same effect which had been produced upon his physical eye by the shining of the light from heaven: it had left in shadow a great portion of that earthly scenery which of old had been to him the glory of the universe.

The truth is, Christ to Paul did not yet “fill all things.” He filled Paul’s own world, but Paul’s own world was as yet a very small thing; it did not stretch beyond the experiences of his religious consciousness. He had learned to sympathise with those beneath him; he had learned to make allowance for the wants of his weak brother. So far the life of Christ had to him been great gain. But it had not yet occurred to him that, to see Christ in all His fulness, he would require to reach a wide as well as deep sympathy. It had not yet occurred to him that, if Christ was to be all in all, he would require to seek Him not only in the meagre faith of his weak brother but in that secular life of the world which to immediate perception revealed no faith at all. It was one thing, and a very grand thing, to have a spirit of Divine imputation whereby he was able to live in the experience of a brother less enlightened than himself, and to recognise beneath his shortcomings the glimmerings of a larger life; butjt was another and a much higher thing to pass beyond the limits of what had hitherto been regarded as the realm of Christian brotherhood, and to recognise in the secular movements of a pagan world the preparation of many mansions in the house of the Father.

This was the day which was now about to dawn on the eyes of the Gentile apostle. He was about to enter into a new environment. Hitherto he had been environed successively by the atmosphere of Jerusalem and the atmosphere of Antioch; he was now to be drawn within the influence of a larger atmosphere. The course of his journey was leading him step by step into proximity with that great city which constituted the centre of all civilisation — the metropolis of the Roman empire. As the shadow of that city broke upon his view, there broke also on his view another shadow — the vision of a kingdom which’should incorporate all things. The vision of such a kingdom was inevitably suggested by the empire of the Caesars. The design of that empire

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was incorporation. It aimed at universal dominion, but it aimed at a dominion whose universality should not crush the individual lives within its range. Its object was rather to appropriate than to annihilate the possessions of its enemies. It was willing to take within its Pantheon the gods of conquered nations, provided that these would submit to draw their inspiration from the Roman state. And the effect of this policy justified the expectation. The gods of conquered lands did not long occupy the Roman Pantheon without becoming Roman. In due time they lost their foreign character, became acclimatised to the soil on which they were bidden to dwell, and breathed the atmosphere of that empire to which originally their only attitude was subservience.

Such was the visible kingdom which first suggested to the mind of Paul the defectiveness which still hovered over his conception of the kingdom of Christ. Why should the empire of Christ be less incorporative than the empire of the Caesars? If an earthly and purely external power had been able not only to incorporate but to acclimatise the foreign elements of the world, ought not a power professedly rooted in the deepest instincts of man’s spiritual nature to manifest the same universal influence? Was not the Messiah to receive the heathen for His inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession? Was it not the prerogative of the kingdom of God that it should rule all things? Did the Roman empire possess a power which was denied to the Spirit of the Highest? If this purely earthly force had been able by purely earthly means to ingraft into itself all other forces of men, ought not the power of the Divine Spirit to find also its perfect manifestation in the union and blending of its life with the lives of outer things?

It must not be imagined that this thought entered the mind of the apostle suddenly or abruptly. The periods of natural development are in no case marked off from each other by a distinct wall or boundary-line. We have dates to indicate the time when winter ends and spring begins, yet these dates are purely artificial. There are days of spring in the heart of winter, messengers which, like John the Baptist, are sent in advance by the coming year. The periods of human life are not abruptly separated from one another. There is a nature of the child and a nature of the man, yet the flashes of the man prefigure themselves in the life of the child. Like the grapes of Eshcol, the fruits of ripened development are born beforehand into the unripe age and exist as specimens of the time that is to be. Spiritual life follows the same law. It too has its seasons, and its fruits appropriate to each, yet the fruits of the coming season always in measure reveal themselves amid the immaturities of the earlier age. It was so with Paul. I have marked out his epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans as distinguishing a special period in his spiritual history — a period riper than the time which went before and more cultured than the time which was coming. Yet, perhaps it may have shown survivals of the past, and it certainly did show anticipations of the future. The latest letter of the group — that to the Romans — though it is still within the boundary of the old, betrays already a glimmering of the new. As the eyes of the apostle became fixed on the great metropolis, the spirit of that metropolis began to exert over him a mesmeric influence. He was fascinated by the gaze, fascinated by the vision of something which seemed to mimic in visible form the ideal of the Messianic kingdom. He beheld the exhibition of a unity and a universality which ought at least to have been paralleled by the empire of Christ’s religion. He was grieved that it had not been so paralleled. He was awakened into regret that Rome occupied alone a position of catholicity which the dominion of Christ should have shared with her. He set him self to inquire into the elements of this imperial greatness, set himself to consider whether such elements were at variance with the Christian ideal, and whether the Christian ideal might not appropriate them as her own.

He found that there were three elements which had fascinated and retained the hearts of the Gentile nations around this great centre of the world — the Roman ideal of law, the Roman ideal of power, and the Roman ideal of glory. Roman law was the most distinctive feature of the imperial greatness — the one feature which the empire has transmitted unimpaired to posterity, and by which she, being dead, yet speaketh. To the eye of Paul, the spectacle it presented must have been specially alluring He saw what must have seemed to him an effort of the secular to imitate the sacred. Nowhere had the Gentile exhibited such a resemblance to the Jew. Rome had actually succeeded in doing what Judea had aspired to do; she had promulgated a series of enactments which were designed to rule the conduct of all the world. The question occurred to Paul in what light this mighty system of jurisprudence was to be regarded. Was not the Jewish law ordained by heaven? If so, could this Roman law be rooted and grounded in justice? Could any system of human morality be allowed to rival the influence of the Divine commandments; if Mount Sinai had received the light, must not the Palatine Hill occupy the shade? But to Paul thus meditating there rose a third alternative. Might not Mount Sinai and the Palatine Hill be both manifestations of a law from heaven? What if the theocratic com mandments of Judea and the imperial enactments of Rome had each come from the same source; what if there was a law deeper than both, which had embraced both and revealed both I Was there not a commandment written in the heart, which was older either than the summit of Mount Sinai or the city on the top of the Palatine, — a commandment which had its origin in the depths of human nature, and derived its credentials from the writing of an invisible hand? It was this inward questioning which led Paul to a very remarkable conclusion, a conclusion which at one time he would certainly have shrunk from arriving at. He had all along recognised the fact of the inward authority of conscience, but he had hitherto recognised that fact only in its relation to Christi-The Foreshadowlngs of a New Day. 187

anity. Here, in this epistle to the Romans, and under the strong influence of the Romans, he was driven to take a wider view. There began to break upon him the conviction that the inward law called conscience had a purpose outside the present circle of Christianity. There began to dawn on him the thought that the Gentile had not, any more than the Jew, been left without God in the world, that to the one as much as to the other there had been a preparatory legal training. He expresses this with unftiltering confidence in his letter to the Christians of the metropolis, l ’ when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts accusing or else excusing one another.”1 In these remarkable words Paul has made a great advance in breadth of sentiment, has revealed himself in a more distinct sense the apostle of the Gentiles than ever he had done before. Hitherto, he had been the Gentile apostle simply in the sense that he proposed to offer them salvation without passing through the gate of Judaism. He here takes a bolder stand. He declares that the Gentiles had received the offer of salvation by no mere act of immediate grace, but on the ground of a historical training. He says that they too, as much as the children of Israel, had been led by the Divine hand through a preparatory wilderness. To them, as to the Jew, there had come a revelation of the

‘Bom. 11. 14. 15.

requirements of God; the only difference had been that while to the Jew it was written on tables of stone, to the Gentile it was inscribed on the tablets of the heart. In this recognition of the inherent and universal authority of conscience, Paul reached at a bound the idea of a natural religion; shall we not rather- say, he reached at a bound the truth that the principle of the Christian life had its root in no merely Jewish soil but in the needs and aspirations of the universal heart of man?

The second element in the empire which attracted the eye of Paul was the Roman ideal of power. The Roman ideal of power was freedom. Other empires had based their aspiration on the attainment of a standard of mere mechanical force. The standard which Rome set before herself was not mechanical but mental. Her ideal of power was not the working of a mighty engine through the force of physical appliances; it was the impelling strength of a human will. What she valued above all things was the sense of mental unrestrainedness, the feeling that she could do what she liked. The idea of a paramount will, of a will which neither brooked nor re ceived any contradiction in the achievement of its desires, was for her the pole-star which directed all her way; it was at once the goal to which she travelled and the light which helped her to travel. To the eye of Paul, marking the almost uninterrupted success with which that goal had been pursued, Christianity must have presented for a moment a painful contrast. The watchword of Christianity was not power but service, her ideal was not a sovereign but a minister. In the vision of this self-sacrificing life, side by side with that spectacle of imperial life whose motive was unrestrained will, the apostle felt for a time as if the earth and the fulness thereof were not the Lord’s. It is rather significant that it is in his epistle to the Romans we find him most confronted with that aspect of Christianity which suggested the idea of shame. Else where he speaks of its persecutions, of its hardships, of its outer and inner conflicts, of the watchings and fastings which its path involved. But here, in the presence of imperial Rome, all these difficulties of the Christian life are forgotten in the sense of a more absorbing difficulty — the trial of human pride. In the vision of service side by side with power, in the sight of ministration standing at the very doors of majesty, the apostle feels that his converts are incurring a greater danger than they could ever have experienced from the fear of martyrdom — the danger of being ashamed of a faith which seemed to isolate them from the prizes of human life.

What, than, is Paul’s refuge under these circumstances? Does he decry the Roman element of power? Does he exalt the sense of shame as a means of impressing man with his own nothingness, and depreciate the possession of influence as a source of pride? None of these things. On the contrary, his aim is rather to find a mitigation of the contrast between Rome and Christianity. Instead of trying to impress the world with the belief that the power acquired by the empire was a worthless thing, he

i Rom. 1. 16; v. C.

seeks rather to show that, unconsciously to the empire herself, her power was really the result of the Christian principle. Wide as seemed the difference between the regal majesty of Rome and the sacrificial service of Christianity, Paul had awakened to the discovery that the majesty was founded upon sacrifice. Let any man read the sixth chapter of Romans and he will be convinced beyond controversy how thoroughly this thought had taken possession of the apostle’s mind. In that chapter Paul virtually says:” You, Romans, boast of your freedom, and ye do well, but you have mistaken the source of your freedom. You imagine that you have derived it from the exercise of independence; it comes in fact from the intensity of your service. The reason why you are great as an empire is that you are dutiful as citizens. You have yielded yourselves into membership with a body-politic, and you have received back from the united organism the strength of that life which you have contributed to create. I tell yon that there is no such thing as freedom from service; there is only freedom in service. If you want to be free from one law, you must embrace another law. If you would rise into empire over the things of the past, you must devote yourselves to some new and fresh ideal. Your whole success as a political power has been based upon such devotion, based upon your self-surrender to the majesty of a thought to which your contemporaries were deaf and blind. I, as a Christian, seek no other method. I, like you, am in search of a universal kingdom, but, unlike you, I recognise the truth that the founding of a universal

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kingdom demands before all things a surrender to the Will of the universe.”!

The third element by which Paul was attracted in the vision of the empire was the Roman ideal of glory. The Roman ideal of glory was conquest; it was that process of removing obstacles whereby the sense of freedom was realised. As long as anything was external to the empire it was a barrier to its advance. Accordingly, it became the goal of every Roman citizen to transform the external into the internal. Roman conquest consisted in laying hold of those nations that stood outside the gates and dragging them inside the gates. The only way to realise the sense of freedom was to have nothing out side at all. The Roman empire was by no means anxious nor even desirous to exterminate its enemies. What it did desire was to transform its enemies into national dependencies. It was quite willing that the opposing nation should keep its manners, its religion, and its laws, provided only it would consent to have the Roman wall extended beyond its boundaries. Its whole political policy, in short, alike in peace and war, consisted in a process of appropriation, by which it gathered into itself and transferred into its own service those very influences which in the days of old had been adverse to its life.

And here again to the eye of Paul there rose a striking parallel. There had been a time in which, as a Jew, he had looked upon the kingdom of God as something which could only exist by the extermination of the pains of life. There was a time in which

1 Bom. vl. 12-18; compare vlii. 2.

he had held it to be impossible that the sufferings of human nature could be pressed into the service of God. We have seen how under the shadows of Arabia he had been oppressed by the thought of his own thorn. He had for the time found refuge from this oppression only by an appeal to the all-conquering strength of the Almighty, only by the reflection that the glory of God would be magnified in exalting him in spite of his weakness. This was a vision of conquest, but it was not a vision of Roman conquest; it was a subduing of suffering by an act of extermination. It proposed to destroy the enemies of the kingdom by putting them out of existence. There had not yet dawned on the mind of the apostle the vision of a kingdom of God whose enemies should be suppressed not by destruction but by incorporation, whose opposition should be conquered not by sweeping them off the face of the earth but by lilting them within the boundaries of the Divine empire. That vision, that possibility, broke upon the eye of Paul only when he stood face to face with the spectacle of the Roman State. He there beheld the vision of an empire which had subdued its foes by utilising them, which had risen into strength by converting its enemies into members of its own body. And the thought occurred to Paul, ought not the kingdom of Christ to do the same? Why should not the all-conquering force of Christianity be also manifested by the utilising of those materials which had hitherto been deemed antagonistic to its progress? Hitherto, the religion of Christ had been glorified merely as a power which freed men from

Buffering; might it not be glorified as a power which freed men through suffering? Why should not the sorrows of life be themselves made the allies of the kingdom of God; why should not the cross become itself the crown? So Paul asked, and the answer appears in the epistle to the Church of that metropolis which had suggested the problem. Nowhere in previous epistles does his view of human suffering exhibit so roseate a hue. It is no longer merely something from which he expects to be delivered; it is something which he expects, itself, to deliver him. It is no longer the prison-house from which he hopes that Christ will set him free; it is the key which unlocks the prison-house and ushers him into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. There is a ring of Horn an triumph in such words as these — “We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope;”2 and in those other words in which he expresses his permanent superiority to fear — “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us.”8 It is “in all these things,” not “over them.” He has claimed for Christianity the Roman method of appropriation, of incorporation. He has asserted for Christ the right to rear an empire after the manner of Caesar — by making friends of the once adverse forces, by trans-

1 The nearest parallel ia 2 Cor. Iv. 17.
Bom. v. 8. 4. 3 Bom. Vlli. 35, 87.

forming the weapons of the enemy into the defences of the kingdom.

Such are the evidences of that influence which the spectacle of the Roman empire was already beginning to exert over the mind of Paul. He was like the children of Israel standing on the borders of the promised land. Christianity had hitherto been to him a desert experience. It had been grand, but it had been solitary. In its latest development it had been something which had lifted Paul into a new world, but it had lifted him into an isolated world. He had been caught up to meet the Lord in the air, but for that very reason he had been separated from the life of the common ground. Christ had become to him not only a hope of glory, but a positive glorification; yet the glorification had been hitherto purchased by leaving the lower world in the shade. It had not occurred to Paul that Christ ought to become the glory of the world as a world. It had not occurred to him that the heavenly places of the universe which remained to be filled were precisely those places called mundane, precisely those haunts of men which had been habitually assigned to the Prince of the power of the air. But now there wras breaking upon the apostle’s mind the first wave ol this great thought, and it was coming from the shores of that empire which of all others had mirrored most in its secularism the plan of the kingdom of God. Paul there beheld the image of a kingdom whose glory consisted precisely in its incorporative or reconciling power. Reconciliation had been for him the Christian watchword. But when he saw the shadow of the Roman empire he asked himself if he had been true to his watchword. Had he not hitherto claimed too little for Christ? Was it enough that He should be the reconciler of the soul; ought He not also to be the reconciler of the world? Was it not His province to do for the realm of spirit what Rome had done for the realm of physical dominion — to find a field for its manifestation in the life of all secular things? The vision of Rome was to Paul the first-fruits of the promised land. It came to him as a prophecy and presentiment of what was to constitute Christianity’s highest glory, and in that sense of prophecy and presentiment he had already made his moment of transition from the Christ of the inward spirit to the Christ of the universal world.