Bible Commentaries
Romans 13

Verse 8

Debt

Owe no man anything, save to love one another.— Romans 13:8.

1. There are several things in the verse from which the text is taken that are very characteristic of St. Paul. First, there is the tendency to go off upon a word; the mention of the word “love” seems to suggest to the Apostle’s mind his favourite thesis, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” This he pursues through several verses. Again, he uses the word “owe” in two different ways: in the familiar signification of owing money, and also in the sense of duty or obligation. As if he said, “Owe no man anything but that debt which you must always owe and ought to be always paying, the endless debt of love.” Thirdly, there is the tendency which we often observe in the writings of St. Paul to merge the particular in the general, the moral in the spiritual. He is constantly going back to the first principles of the love of God and of man.

2. St. Paul has spoken of the duties and the spirit befitting members of the body of Christ in their association with one another in the intercourse of private life. He now comes by a natural transition to speak of their attitude to the community at large, and especially to the authorities, whether of the city or of the empire, under whom they found themselves. That they were Christians was an additional reason why they should be good citizens. The State, like the family or the Church, is of Divine origin and appointment, with claims not to be set aside, demanding in some form the service, the support, the loyalty of all who belong to it. The persuasion that each individual has a duty to the State, must hear its call and give it his support, is not at liberty to uphold merely what is pleasing to himself, to pay or not to pay according to his own whim and fancy, leads to the further persuasion that each has a duty to each and all around. “For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. Owe no man anything, save to love one another: for he that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the law.” It is a principle of universal application. It covers the vast field of mutual human obligation.

3. How Christians should behave in their relations to one another and to the world around now becomes the burden of the Apostle’s counsel. Each man in the station in which he is placed is to exercise the gifts with which he has been endowed. And each man is bound to consider the rights of others. No man can live his life without learning that he cannot follow his own inclinations to the uttermost without coming into contact and conflict with inclinations different from his own. He must in some respects yield to others, or others must yield to him. He has to do with kindred, or friends, or strangers, with the sympathetic or the antagonistic, with superiors, inferiors, or equals; and the manner in which he conducts himself towards them has much to do both with the development of his own character and with the public weal.

St. Paul says, “Owe no man anything.” Let there be no man who has against thee a legitimate claim which thou hast not fulfilled. The subject is Debt. Beginning with that part of it which relates to money, let us proceed to moral debts, and end with the debt of Love.

I

Money Debts

First, in its most prosaically simple form, “Owe no man anything” means, Have no money duties which thou canst not pay. This is a homely and excellent rule which carries us a long way in daily life. Debt is to be avoided. All money claims are to be honestly and scrupulously met. And this is nearly always possible, as we shall see if we look into the most common causes of “running into debt.”

Dr. Kidd had a great horror of debt. When parting with a friend whom he did not expect to see for some time, he would exhort him to “Fear God, and keep out of debt.” 1 [Note: J. Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 267.]

In addition to the heavy losses Lord Shaftesbury had sustained from his steward, he had incurred enormous expenses—amounting to some thousands of pounds—in inevitable lawsuits, civil and criminal, and the combination of circumstances against him produced so much anxiety that he felt incapable of any prolonged energy. The dread of debt was a “horror of great darkness” before him. “If I appear to fail in life and vigour, it is not for the want of zeal,” he wrote to a friend, “but from that kind of Promethean eagle that is ever gnawing my vitals. May God be with you, and keep you out of debt.” And in his Diary, among many expressions of sadness and almost despair, he writes: “Our Blessed Lord endured all the sorrows of humanity but that of debt.” Perhaps it was to exemplify the truth, uttered afterwards by St. Paul, “Owe no man anything, but to serve him in the Lord.” The subject was ever in his thoughts; it was “a dead weight on his back which made him totter in every effort to go forward”; it haunted him night and day, and often, in his Diary, he breaks out into a wail of lamentation: “My mind returns at every instant to the modus operandi. How meet the demands that must speedily be made? How satisfy the fair and righteous claims of those who only ask for their dues? How can I pursue the many objects I have in view, with this anxiety at my heart? God alone can deliver me.” 2 [Note: F. Hodder, Life of the Earl of Shaftesbury, 634.]

1. What are the common causes of “running into debt,” as we commonly understand the phrase?

(1) Carelessness.—We all of us too easily slide into carelessness about money matters. In the enjoyment of the present, the hour of reckoning is comparatively distant; almost unconsciously to ourselves a certain amount of debt accumulates. While we are young we are especially open to influence of this kind. And therefore early in life we should acquire the habit of owing no man anything, and we should deal only with those who are willing that we should owe them nothing. It is good to feel somewhat uneasy while a bill remains unpaid. Every one can with a little trouble to himself see how he stands at the end of each month or of each term. He has only to cast up a few figures, to compare what he has received with what he has paid, and to satisfy himself that nothing has been omitted. Unless he wishes to be deceived, as is the case with some persons who refuse to look into their accounts, he can easily know the truth. And he is inexcusable who is careless in a matter of such importance.

There is a power which may be easily acquired, but which some never acquire, and others only by dear experience—the power of understanding and doing business. It is hardly thought of by young men in comparison with intellectual gifts, and yet there is no power which conduces more to happiness and success in life. It is like a steward keeping the house in order. It is the power of managing and administering, whether in public or in private life. To be called a thorough man of business is really very high praise. It implies a clear head and mastery of details; it requires accuracy and constant attention and sound judgment. Though it begins with figures of arithmetic, it ends with a knowledge of the characters of men. It is that uncommon quality “common sense” applied to daily life. And it runs up into higher qualities, uprightness, self-denial, self-control; the honourable man of business is one of the noblest forms of English character. 1 [Note: B. Jowett.]

Let me tell you a story of one of the greatest heroes of last century. Never did any man fight through a greater fight in the interest of his country and the world than Abraham Lincoln. From his early years great imaginations were in his mind, but he did not neglect plain duties. He was a postmaster in a very out-of-the-way district in Illinois. After a time the central authority found that so little business was done there that the Post Office was closed, and when it was closed, there was owing to the postal authority a sum of seventeen dollars and some odd cents, and they forgot to claim it. The years passed by, one year, two years, three years, and the money was still unclaimed. Meanwhile Abraham Lincoln had been fighting a hard fight against poverty. He had found it very hard to keep his head financially above water. It so happened that the omission was discovered after this period, and the officers of the Post Office arrived and asked Abraham Lincoln for the money which was still owing. A friend was in the room. He knew Abraham’s hard circumstances. He supposed, as a matter of course, that the money would have been appropriated. He called him out of the room, and offered to lend it to him; but Abraham Lincoln smiled a little, then went up to his room and came down and produced that money, not merely in the exact amount, but in the very little coin in which it had been paid in by the village people when they bought their stamps. Here is an example of honesty, the honesty which is at the root of a noble life, the simple, central honesty about money without which, in its pure and simple detail, we can build no building that in the sight of God will stand. 1 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

(2) The love of display.—The craving for luxuries, the passion for physical comforts, the widespread disposition to make life more ornate and less rugged, more smooth and less self-denying, are tendencies and desires concerning which at the present day there can be no dispute or any serious question. In a community this means the growth of a relaxed sense of individual honour and of common honesty. It means a disposition that will have luxuries by paying for them if it can, but which will have them anyhow. To think lightly of debt, and the personal and business discredit which comes or ought to come with it, to be loose in matters of trust, and reckless or unscrupulous in dealing with the interests of others, to maintain a scale of living which is consciously beyond one’s means, and yet to go any length and run any risk rather than abridge or relinquish it, these things are so frequent, if not so familiar, as almost to have lost the power to shock us.

(3) Envy.—The emulation of richer neighbours and friends, the eagerness to have and wear and eat and drink what one’s neighbours have to wear and eat and drink is another potent factor. We know the story. It repeats itself very often; it repeats itself not least among religious people. A young couple begin life with a small competence—enough if they would be modest in their requirements. But they have richer friends, and they think the good things of the world are meant for them too. Why should they not have them? And so they find themselves by the end of the year living beyond their income—they are in debt. There are bills they cannot pay, and there begins that long period of bondage, of misery, which comes when we are not, and ought not to be, able to look people in the face.

2. The results of this easy “running into debt” are always grave and often tragic.

(1) One result is loss of independence.—Not only are many enjoyments and comforts dependent on the possession of some amount of wealth, but also many of the higher goods of life. Often through extravagance in youth a man may be bound to some inferior or mechanical occupation; he may be deprived of the means of study or education; he may lose one of the best of all God’s gifts—independence.

(2) Over the miseries of debt there have been hearts broken—of parents suddenly awakened out of the fool’s paradise in which they have been living, of children saddened by the thought of the sorrow to others which their improvidence has caused. Every now and then the community stands aghast at some tragedy of horror in which a poor wretch, daring rather to face his Maker than his creditors, jumps off the dock or blows his brains out. A dozen of his fellows, hastily gathered and as hastily dismissed, register their verdict of “suicide occasioned by financial difficulties,” and the great wave of human life rolls on and over, and the story is soon forgotten. Whereas, if we fairly realized what such things meant, we would empanel as the jury every youth who is just setting out in life, every husband who has just led home a young wife, every woman who is a mother or a daughter in so many thoughtless house-holds, and cry to them, “See! Here is the fruit of extravagant living and chronic debt. Here is the outcome of craving for what you cannot pay for, and of spending what you have not earned. Would you be free and self-respecting and undismayed, no matter how scanty your raiment or bare your larder? Hear the Apostle’s words to that Rome which had such dire need to heed them: ‘Owe no man anything, save to love one another.’ ”

Said a foremost physician in one of our foremost cities not long ago, when asked how far the facility with which American constitutions break down was occasioned by overwork, “It is not overwork that is killing the American people; neither the people who work with their brains nor those who work with their hands. I see a great many broken-down men and women. I am called to treat scores of people with shattered brains and nerves, but they are not the fruits of overwork. The most fruitful sources of physical derangement and mental and nervous disorders in America are pecuniary embarrassments and family dissensions.” 1 [Note: Bishop Potter.]

A question that Dr. Kidd often put to the bridegroom, immediately after the ceremony was over, was, “What makes a good husband?” The answer expected was, “The grace of God,” to which the minister sometimes added, “Yes, and keeping out of debt.” A young man, wanting to be fully primed before he had to submit to the fiery ordeal of the Doctor’s questioning, got the whole thing up in parrot-like fashion. The usual question being put, “What makes a good husband?” the young fellow glibly blurted out, “The grace of God, sir, and keeping out of debt.” The Doctor gave him a curious look, and then, with a comical twinkle, added, “I see, sir, you have been ploughing with my heifer.” 2 [Note: J. Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 166.]

II

Moral Debts

“Render to all their dues.” St. Paul does not disdain to urge upon his friends at Rome the duty of common honesty in all matters of indebtedness to the State to which they belonged. He would have them remember that the powers that be are ordained of God, and that they that resist shall receive to themselves judgment, as in more spiritual things, so in these secular things—judgment according to their neglect.

Money-making or money-saving is a great inducement to dishonour—though most persons would indignantly deny that such a thing could be possible in their case. The conferences and discussions of the passengers on an ocean liner about to land at an American port, as they consider the matter of their customs declarations, form an interesting illustration of this. It is so much easier to denounce the outrages of the use of a secret spring by the Sugar Trust to defraud the United States of millions of dollars of dodged duties than to admit that one is considering participation in just such dishonour by “interpreting” the customs requirements rather broadly as to one’s personal effects. The printed circular which is given to every passenger, explaining what is required by law, is so explicit and simple that no intelligent child of twelve could readily misunderstand it. It is plainly stated that every article obtained abroad, whether by purchase or otherwise, and whether used or unused, must be declared, including all the articles upon which an exemption of duty is allowed. Moreover, each person reporting must sign his or her name to a statement declaring that every article brought from abroad, whether on the person, or in the clothing, or in the baggage, is thus mentioned. Yet the majority of otherwise reputable people on an incoming steamer, in the face of all this, will discuss whether to declare this or that article, whether such a garment, having been used, need be declared, whether this ring or pin, if worn, need be mentioned, and the person who, preferring a literal honouring of the law to deliberate, written perjury, declares everything he has, is looked upon with tolerant amusement as a rather weak-minded fanatic. It is easier to condemn public graft than private. But public and general standards of honour in any community will rise no higher than that of the majority of its individuals. 1 [Note: Sunday-School Times (Philadelphia).]

1. We owe a debt to society.—Not to do something good, not to have an honest trade, and be making or producing something material and spiritual which is worth producing and offering to mankind, is, in itself, a sort of stealing. We owe it to society that we should be doing something worth doing. We may have means enough to be idle, as people say, but that does not exempt us. No man is justified in living who is not performing something for society.

Remember we are debtors to the good by birth, but remember we may become debtors to the bad by life, and both sides of service and allegiance must be paid alike. 2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Life, 76.]

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,

Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues

Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike

As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch’d

But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends

The smallest scruple of her excellence

But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines

Herself the glory of a creditor,

Both thanks and use. 3 [Note: Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, I. i. 33.]

(1) The employer has a debt to the employed. In society we are members one of another, and every member needs all the rest. As society is now constituted, our wealth may generally command the service of others, but it does not make us independent of that service. Inequality does not cancel obligation. For suppose that the poor and dependent, for some reason or other, should refuse to render us the needful service. What becomes of our independence then? Is the lady housewife less dependent on her cook than the cook is on her?

(2) The employed has a debt to the employer. The responsibility is equally on this side. God expects our best work; if it be only dusting a room, He expects that it shall be done thoroughly. God’s eye sees our work, whether it is thorough, whether it is the best we can give in small things or in great. Our obligation is not only to pass muster and get our wages; our obligation is to do the best we can. That is what our duty is; that is our obligation, whether the business in which we are employed is one which demands a black coat and a smart dress, or one of a much lower kind. Everywhere God expects that as we are receiving so we shall give of our best and to God “Owe no man anything.”

2. We owe a debt to those whom we can help.—The Day of Judgment will be a surprise to us in regard to our relations to our fellow-men. You know how Christ depicts the gathering of all nations before His feet. They are the nations, not the Jews; they are those who had no special revelation from God; but He tests them by their conduct one to another, by their mercifulness. And they are astonished when they find themselves charged with having neglected Christ in His need. “Lord, when saw we thee poor, or sick, or in prison, and ministered not to thee in thy necessity?” And the reply we know very well: “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” It is the surprise of the not specially enlightened multitude that they were neglecting anything that Christ could care about in neglecting the poor and the oppressed. It is the surprise continually for the enlightened consciences of us upon whom has shone the Sun of Righteousness. It is the continued surprise that we who thought ourselves walking so uprightly in the way of God were neglecting the plain and manifest duties, or duties that ought to have been plain and manifest, towards our fellow-men.

It is no excuse that my conscience did not tell me to do such and such things. We live up to our conscience, but it is a vastly important truth that we are expected to be enlightening our conscience. Our conscience is not furnished without trouble from ourselves any more than our intellect. We have to think, we have to fight out, to open our conscience to the light of God; otherwise, like the Pharisee, like the Priest and the Levite, we are continually passing by on the other side, our conscience making no particular suggestion as to our duty towards this person or that person, our heart not awake to the claims of neighbourliness, because we have been content to take the estimate of duty which prevailed in the society about us. It is our duty not only to obey our conscience, but before that to enlighten our conscience with the light of Christ.

If I can live

To make some pale face brighter, and to give

A second lustre to some tear-dimmed eye,

Or e’en impart

One throb of comfort to an aching heart,

Or cheer some way worn soul in passing by;

If I can lend

A strong hand to the fallen, or defend

The right against a single envious strain,

My life, though bare

Perhaps of much that seemeth dear and fair

To us on earth, will not have been in vain.

The purest joy,

Most near to heaven, far from earth’s alloy,

Is bidding clouds give way to sun and shine,

And ’twill be well

If on that day of days the angels tell

Of me: “She did her best for one of Thine.”

(1) It is our duty to be charitable, and to be liberal in our charity. We owe it to those who are poorer than we are. Many would tell us that the less we give away in charity the better; and such a maxim naturally falls in with the indolence or selfishness of mankind. The reason is supposed to be that charity tends to destroy independence; men will not do for themselves what others are willing to do for them. If aged persons are supported by the parish they will often be neglected by their children; if education is free, if relief in sickness is given, there will be some corresponding relaxation of duty: the family tie will be weakened and the social state of the country will decline. Such is the argument, and there is a great deal of truth in it. In works of charity I think we might fairly be required to start with some such principle as this—that we should never relieve physical suffering at the cost of moral degradation. But may there not be modes of charity which increase the spirit of independence instead of diminishing it? A small loan of money given to a person who is engaged in a hard struggle to keep himself or his children out of the workhouse, for a purpose such as education, which is least liable to abuse, can scarcely be imagined to do harm. It would be more satisfactory if the poor were able to manage for themselves, and perhaps, when they have been educated for a generation or two, they may be in a different position, and may no longer require the assistance of others. But at present, and in this country, they must have some help from the classes above them; they have no adequate sense of their own higher wants, of education, of sanitary improvement, of the ordering of family life, and the like. We all know the difference between the lot of a parish in one of our rural districts, which has been cared for by the landlord and looked after by the ministers of religion, and one which has not. And therefore it is that great responsibilities fall upon us who have money or education, nothing short of the care of those who in the social scale are below us. Property has its duties as well as its rights, but the sense of right is apt to be stronger in most of us than the sense of duty. Instead of habitually feeling that the poor are our equals in the sight of God, that “there is nothing which we have not received,” that our advantages, whatever they may be—money, talent, social position—are a trust only; instead of rendering to God the things which He has given, we claim and assert them for ourselves.

Let us start fairly with the great truth: for those who possess there is only one certain duty, which is to strip themselves of what they have, so as to bring themselves into the condition of the mass that possesses nothing. It is understood, in every clear-thinking conscience, that no more imperative duty exists; but, at the same time, it is admitted that this duty, for lack of courage, is impossible of accomplishment. For the rest, in the heroic history of the duties, even at the most ardent periods, even at the beginning of Christianity and in the majority of the religious orders that made a special cult of poverty, this is perhaps the only duty that has never been completely fulfilled. 1 [Note: Maurice Maeterlinck, Life and Flowers, 65.]

(2) The Apostle commends hospitality; the bringing together of our friends to eat and drink and converse, and not only those whose rank is equal to or higher than our own, and who can ask us again, but those who are a little depressed in life, and who may be said to correspond to the halt and maimed in the parable of the Marriage Supper. Hospitality may do a great deal of good in the world. It binds men together in ties of friendship and kindness; it draws them out of their isolation; it moulds and softens their characters. The pulse seems to beat quicker, and our spirits flow more freely when we are received with a hearty welcome; when the entertainer is obviously thinking not of himself but of his guests, when the conversation has health and life in it, and seems to refresh us after toil and work.

Let a man, then, say, My house is here in the country, for the culture of the country; an eating-house and sleeping-house for travellers it shall be, but it shall be much more. I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your accent and behaviour, read your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price, in any village or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely and sleep hard, in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honour to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honour and courtesy flow into all deeds. 2 [Note: Emerson.]

Ye gave me of your broken meat,

And of your lees of wine,

That I should sit and sing for you,

All at your banquet fine.

Ye gave me shelter from the storm,

And straw to make my bed,

And let me sleep through the wild night

With cattle in the shed.

Ye know not from what lordly feast

Hither I came this night,

Nor to what lodging with the stars

From hence I take my flight. 1 [Note: Cicely Fox Smith.]

(3) It is our duty to be friendly. Even a single person who has strong affection and principle, and a natural gaiety of soul, may have a great influence for good; without pretending to be wiser or better than others, he may have a form of character which controls them. People hardly consider how much a little kindness may do in this sometimes troubled world. When a man is a stranger in a strange place, a sympathetic word, a silent act of courtesy makes a wonderful impression. The plant that was shrinking into itself brings forth under these genial influences leaves and flowers and fruit. There is probably no one who, if he thought about it, would not contribute much more than he does to the happiness of others.

The Russian reformer, novelist and philanthropist, had an experience that profoundly influenced his career. Famine had wrought great suffering in Russia. One day the good poet passed a beggar on the street corner. Stretching out gaunt hands, with blue lips and watery eyes, the miserable creature asked an alms. Quickly the author felt for a copper. He turned his pockets inside out. He was without purse or ring or any gift. Then the kind man took the beggar’s hand in both of his and said: “Do not be angry with me, brother; I have nothing with me!” The gaunt face lighted up; the man lifted his bloodshot eyes; his blue lips parted in a smile. “But you called me brother—that was a great gift.” Returning an hour later he found the smile he had kindled still lingered on the beggar’s face. His body had been cold; kindness had made his heart warm. 2 [Note: N. D. Hillis, Investment of Influence, 41.]

In one of my earliest missions we were using the communion rail for seekers, and I was much puzzled by the conduct of a middle-aged man in the second centre pew from the front. I could see he was broken-hearted and sobbing, but he did not come out. When I went to his side he said he wanted to be saved and was willing; but he would not stir. Presently I looked at his boots and saw the reason. He mixed the plaster for some builders, and had come to the service in a pair of big ugly plaster-covered boots, and was ashamed to go to the front in them. I said to him, “Are those dirty boots your hindrance?” And his answer was, “Yes, sir, they are.” “All right,” I said, “put mine on to go forward in.” When he saw me begin to unloose my boots and realized that I was willing to do this to help a stranger to Christ, he sprang to his feet, boots and all, and was soon kneeling with others seeking the Lord. But my little act of helpfulness so completely moved him that for two or three minutes he could do nothing but laugh and cry at the same time. Ay, and he made a lot of us who were near join him in both. 1 [Note: Thomas Waugh, Twenty-Three years a Missioner, 220.]

III

The Debt of Love

“Owe no man anything, save to love one another.” St. Paul bids us avoid all debt save this. This is a debt which we all owe, which we can never discharge, and which we must always be seeking to pay.

1. It is unavoidable.—Owe nothing, do you say? Paid for all? You may pay your tradesman for his wares, you may pay your tailor for your coat, your butcher and your cook for your meals. But what have you paid Arkwright and Watt for your cotton? What have you paid Kepler and Newton and Laplace and Bowditch for your ocean commerce? What have you paid Sir Humphry Davy for your coal? You cannot stir without encountering obligations which no conceivable amount of silver or gold can ever compensate. And now let us mount from worldly and intellectual obligations to spiritual—from that which is least to that which is highest. Who shall repay the prophets and martyrs of sacred truths for the light they have shed on our mortal path, and for the hope of immortality? Who shall satisfy the debt incurred by their testimonies and sacrifices, the dangers braved, the pains endured in the cause of mankind? Whatever he may think, every son of man is a debtor to his kind for the larger part of all that he possesses, or can by any possibility acquire. A compound and accumulated debt has devolved upon his head—a debt of which a fraction of the interest is all that with lifelong effort he can hope to discharge; a debt contracted in part before he saw the light, multiplied by all the years of childish imbecility and childish dependence, and consummated by drafts on years to come. Past, Present, and Future are his creditors. It needs another view than the mercantile, debt-and-credit theory of life and society to free us from the weight of obligation, the overwhelming burden of indebtedness, which the thoughtful and conscientious mind must feel, regarding the subject of benefits received and ability to pay in that light.

Compared with that goodwill I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it has proved an intellectual trick—no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time. 1 [Note: Emerson, Essays, ii. 122.]

Love, work thy wonted miracle to-day.

Here stand, in jars of manifold design,

Life’s bitter waters, mixed with mire and clay,

And thou canst change them into purest wine. 2 [Note: Hannah Parker Kimball.]

2. It is commendable.—The more we pay the more we have to contribute, and the greater the capital from which to draw. But the recognition of the debt with the consequent effort to liquidate it, though leaving us with the debt unpaid, fulfils the law of life. St. Paul bids us lead a life of universal love. If we do that we shall not only be good citizens, paying our taxes as law-abiding subjects should, but we shall be good neighbours, good husbands, good parents, good children, good masters, good servants.

I often wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are. How much the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is remembered. How superabundantly it pays itself back—for there is no debtor in the world so honourable, so superbly honourable, as love. 3 [Note: Henry Drummond.]

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that it is always the part of prudence to face every claimant and pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the most benefits. He is base—and that is the one base thing in the universe—who receives favours and renders none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying on your hand. It will corrupt and breed worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort. 1 [Note: Emerson, Essays, i. 85.]

3. It is unpayable.—But the effort to discharge it cancels obligation. Wherever two things are bound to each other by reciprocal, equal, and perfect love, all feeling of obligation or indebtedness one to the other ceases; there is no question of claims or dues between them, though all the giving, the technical, ostensible giving, has been confined to one side of the union and all the apparent receiving to the other. In a case of friendship, fervent and true, between two large-hearted men, if one happens to be in want and borrows and the other happens to abound and lends, although there is a technical and legal indebtedness of the borrower, there is no obligation between them, or if any, it is the lender’s quite as much as the borrower’s.

The obligation of love to our neighbour can never be so fulfilled that one comes to an end of it, but every fulfilment brings in its train the obligation of a new and yet higher fulfilment of the duty. It is with charity as with a flame. The more the flame burns and blazes, the more need there is of oil to feed it, and the more plentifully the oil is poured upon the flame, so much the more actively it blazes, so much the more it demands fresh nourishment. So they emulate each other, the flame and the oil, to the highest point of light and heat. Even so it is with love of our neighbour. Love begets answering love, and this answering love again demands fresh love, so that for neither is there limit or end. That is the meaning of the apostolic saying: “Owe no man anything, save to love one another.”

No man becomes independent of his fellow-men excepting in serving his fellow-men. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 21.]

Dig channels for the streams of Love,

Where they may broadly run;

And Love has overflowing streams

To fill them every one.

But if at any time thou cease

Such channels to provide,

The very founts of Love for thee

Will soon be parched and dried.

For we must share, if we would keep,

That good thing from above;

Ceasing to give, we cease to have—

Such is the law of Love. 2 [Note: R. C. Trench.]

Debt

Literature

Jowett (B.), College Sermons, ii. 168.

Oosterzee (J. J. van), Year of Salvation, i. 107.

Potter (H. C.), Sermons of the City, 190.

Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 79.

Scott (M.), Harmony of the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, 1.

Streatfeild (G. S.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 23.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 131 (Beecher); liii. 36 (Gore); lxx. 372 (Muir).

Church Pulpit Year Book, v. (1908) 162.

Churchman’s Pulpit, i. (Pt. 47), 280 (Hedge), 282 (Brent).

Verse 10

Love and the Law

Love is the fulfilment of the law.— Romans 13:10.

1. “Of Law,” says Hooker, in the celebrated sentence with which he closes the first book of his Ecclesiastical Polity,—“Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both Angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.”

I cannot fancy to my self what the Law of Nature means, but the Law of God. How should I know I ought not to steal, I ought not to commit Adultery, unless some body had told me so? Surely ’tis because I have been told so? ’Tis not because I think I ought not to do them, nor because you think I ought not; if so, our minds might change, whence then comes the restraint? from a higher Power, nothing else can bind. I cannot bind myself, for I may untye myself again; nor an equal cannot bind me, for we may untye one another. It must be a superior Power, even God Almighty. If two of us make a Bargain, why should either of us stand to it? What need you care what you say, or what need I care what I say? Certainly because there is something about me that tells me Fides est servanda, and if we after alter our minds, and make a new Bargain, there’s Fides servanda there too. 1 [Note: John Selden, Table Talk, 66.]

2. There is a law which men recognize always, even when they refuse to obey it. There is a still, small voice that speaks within, which tells a man that the right is to be followed and the wrong is to be shunned, which condemns a man when he has succumbed to the wrong, and refused the right. To all mankind, said a pagan writer, the voice of conscience is the voice of God. Things may fill us with amazement in this world of perplexities and antitheses, but none of us will refuse to recognize that morality needs no defence. For man, however imperfect his moral ideal may be, will recognize that if he does not obey the voice of conscience, at any rate he ought to do so; and there is a power within, higher than himself, nobler than himself, which speaks to him without the voice of any preacher, “This ought ye to have done.”

3. The Jews designated by the term “law” the entire Old Testament, less in the literary sense, according to which the “prophets” were added, to complete the idea of the volume, than in the theological sense, all the other books being thus regarded as corollaries of the Mosaic legislation. It may be boldly affirmed that in most of the passages in which St. Paul makes use of the word law, it is in the historical or literary sense; the allusion is to the Old Testament as a whole, not to the Pentateuch in particular. On this account the term has most frequently that which was called in the old theology the economic signification—that is, it stands for the entire Old Testament economy.

4. But in the present passage, as often elsewhere in St. Paul’s Epistles, the word “law” signifies purely and simply the Law of Moses as contained in the Pentateuch, or even more particularly, the Ten Commandments. It is true that the word in the original is without the article—“law” simply, not “the law”; and it is important to observe that distinction generally. As Lightfoot says: “The distinction between “law” and “the law” is very commonly disregarded, and yet it is full of significance. Behind the concrete representation—the Mosaic Law itself—St. Paul sees an imperious principle, an overwhelming presence, antagonistic to grace, to liberty, to spirit, and (in some aspects), even to life—abstract law, which, though the Mosaic ordinances are its most signal and complete embodiment, nevertheless is not exhausted therein, but exerts its crushing power over the conscience in diverse manifestations. The one—the concrete and special—is “the law”; the other—the abstract and universal—is “law.” 1 [Note: Revision of the New Testament, 110.]

But in spite of this, there is little doubt that in the present passage the Apostle’s thought is of the Law of Moses, and that it is concentrated on that part of the Law of Moses which we call the Decalogue. Not that we are bound to restrict the law which is fulfilled by love to the Ten Commandments. While the argument of the passage is satisfied in that way, love meets not only the negative demands of the Decalogue but also the positive precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. For viewed in its idea and essence as a revelation of God’s will, “law” requires for its fulfilment that we should not only cease to do evil, but also learn to do well.

The subject is the fulfilment of the Law. Its fulfilment is to be contrasted with partial or imperfect obedience to it. So we have these three divisions—

I. Obeying the Law.

II. Fulfilling the Law.

III. Love the Fulfilment of the Law.

I

Obeying the Law

There are ways in which the Law may be obeyed without being fulfilled.

1. The law may be obeyed through fear; or on account of the punishment which would follow its violation. A person may pay his debts, for instance, because, if he does not, he will go to prison. But you can never be quite sure that the law is really obeyed when you appeal only to fear. If a man is a clever scoundrel he may avoid detection, or, if detected, he may perhaps be able to make his escape before the punishment can be inflicted. And a stupid scoundrel, probably not knowing that he is stupid, will often run a similar risk. Thus, so long as the law depends solely upon fear for its fulfilment, however vigilant may be our police, however upright our courts of justice, however severe may be the condemnation of society, we have no security for its fulfilment, and as a matter of fact we know that it is constantly being violated.

And certainly the law of God can never be obeyed through fear. Despots may feel flattered as they see a population pale with terror at their power. They may think themselves all the safer when their subjects quail before them. And they may not care much, if only outward obedience is rendered, whether there be behind it a feeling of loyalty or not. But we cannot submit to or obey God in any such manner. He is a King and a Father who asks for love—asks for it because He gives His love to us. He says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; not, “Thou shalt dread the Lord thy God.” He is a Monarch whose laws we cannot obey except by loving Him. If there are words we would speak, but that we dread God, we have spoken them in our hearts. If there are deeds we would do, but that we dread God, we have already done them in our hearts. He clearly and strikingly discriminates between what seems obedience and what is. “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.”

Every father fathoms the secret of obedience. You know that it is not worth the name of obedience if your child serves you from dread of consequences. You may have two children, one of whom is self-willed and fulfils your commands only from fear. He may fulfil them with strict literalness, doing exactly what you order, and no more. He may be most careful not to be found wanting in any particular, but you have reason to know that this is from no love of you or of your commands, but from dread of the consequences. Another obeys because he loves; perhaps he is not quite so punctilious in his obedience as the other; there may be occasional failure, occasional forgetfulness, blunders every now and then; but you know that, under all, there is a real love which is never more wounded than when you are wounded. Which of these two do you feel most fulfils your law? which meets most your fatherly sense of what is due to you? in which of them have you most confidence, not only when they are in your sight, but when they are out of your sight? You do not hesitate about the answer; and if the first child were only to do some act of obedience to you because he had begun to love you, you would feel that that one act weighed more than all the deeds of hollow servility he had ever performed. You would feel that love was the fulfilling of the law. 1 [Note: E. Mellor.]

Fear acts chiefly as a restraint. It has checked many in a career of wickedness, and brought a few, perhaps, to the scrupulous observance of some precepts. In all things which are thought necessary to avert vengeance, it has often a strong influence, and its effects may even seem greater for a time than that which better principles produce; but it never yet brought a man with his whole heart into the service of Christ; nor does it lead to anything from which we think we may with safety be excused. It neither sets the affection on things above, nor kindles any zeal in the cause of the Redeemer. The dread of God’s anger will not make us cheerfully submissive to His will, or cherish the gentler graces which He requires from us to mankind.

While the law on stone is written,

Stone-like is the mighty word;

We with chilling awe are smitten,

Though the word is Thine, O Lord.

Firm it is as mountains old,

As their snowy summits cold. 1 [Note: T. T. Lynch, The Rivulet, 29.]

2. The law may be obeyed from motives of self-interest; there is profit in obedience. To serve for profit is only the other side of the same spirit that serves from fear. Obedience is profitable. But there is a great difference between pursuing a course which is profitable, and pursuing it because it is profitable. A faithful servant of a monarch may be paid for his service; but if he serves only for his pay, he is not a faithful servant. The obedience we render only for the sake of what it will bring, we should not render at all if it brought us nothing; and in such a case the first and ruling motive is not service, but pay.

We cannot in this spirit obey the law of God. The rewards of God, the promised joys and glories of heaven, are far more than the wages of service. The crowns are not given to those who have served for gain; they are given to those who have served from love, who have found the service itself to be a joy, who would be content to serve for love for ever, even if there were no other recompense.

We sometimes meet with men who never commit any punishable injury, but who are to the last degree cold, callous, hard-hearted, and selfish. We are quite sure they would not rob or murder us, but we are equally sure they would not move their little finger to do us any good, would not raise their hand to save us from destruction. These men do incalculable mischief, and that of the worst kind. They injure the moral nature of their neighbours, whose best affections are dwarfed, or it may be destroyed, by their inhumanity, just as fruit is blighted by the frost. They do all that in them lies to make other men into moral pigmies like themselves. Hence, though they are not guilty of any punishable breach of the law, they are guilty of violating it—they do ill to their neighbours. 1 [Note: A. W. Momerie.]

3. The law may be obeyed in the letter while its spirit is violated. The letter of the law is enforced by the punishment of society, and just because it is so enforced it is of necessity very limited in its scope. As Bentham explains in his principles of jurisprudence, the written law only takes cognizance of vices which can be clearly defined and readily distinguished. If it attempted to cover a larger area—if, for example, it endeavoured to punish ingratitude or unkindness—it would do more harm than good. It is difficult, or rather impossible, to find out when and to what extent such sins have been committed. If, therefore, the law attempted to deal with them, it would be in constant danger of punishing the less guilty or even the innocent, and of allowing the more guilty to get off scot-free. And, further, this unjust administration of justice would involve an amount of inquisitive surveillance which would be more hurtful to society than the evils which, after all, it failed to prevent. For these reasons, then, the spirit of the law, which is “Thou shalt do no ill to thy neighbour,” has to be narrowed in the letter, where we read only, “Thou shalt not injure thy neighbour in a certain few definite ways.” From this, of course, it follows that the man who is contented with keeping the letter of the law is most undoubtedly guilty of violating its spirit. He goes but a little way along the path of duty.

This was the sin of the Pharisees, the class that Christ denounced most strongly, and the only class that He did denounce. At the time when Jesus first began, with His Gospel of repentance and of Divine love, to teach the simple fishermen of Galilee, scribes and Pharisees had managed, by their interpretation of the law, which was at once a law of religion and a law of righteousness, to bind heavy burdens upon men’s shoulders, and to reduce the simple moral code to a series of minute ritual observances. He was held to fulfil the law who could remember what to do ceremonially, and he was held to have disregarded the law, however faithfully, kindly, and nobly he might be living, who had forgotten or who never knew what the proper ritual was. Then came Jesus and swept it all away; and, humanly speaking, He died for doing it. His protest was entered in the name of religion against the burdensome ritual and minute useless observances with which men were troubled in His day.

The Pharisees were active and zealous. The Gospel was an active religion, and Pharisaism was an active religion; particular virtues were common to both. But the Gospel was an active religion founded upon love, and Pharisaism was an active religion founded upon egoism.

In our own day also a conscious obedience to particular laws of the Gospel determines the lives of large numbers among us; we pray, we worship, we learn the knowledge of Divine things, we give alms, we even fast, we follow the approved methods of repentance, we practise intercession, we bring all our daily interests,—our politics, our friendships, our households, to the feet of God in prayer; we could not be safe or happy for half a day of our lives without God being in all our thoughts; yet when our work for God is over, or even in the dread intervals of silence which stop the heart’s pulses in the stir of work, there comes to all of us this question, “Have I, after all, any true love for God? If God and I were alone in the world where would be my love for God? If there were no work to be done—that work which I love—should I love God at all?”

I put a loaded gun in the corner of a room, and tell my child not to touch it. There is a rule or maxim. Knowing nothing of the reason of my command, his plain duty as a child is implicit servile obedience to my order; his conscience should be grieved if, even to prevent its being broken by a fall, he is induced to touch it, because there is a harm in doing it which is to him mysterious and unknown. But suppose him older, and suppose him to understand by natural intelligence, that the reason of my prohibition was to prevent the possibility of its exploding, and suppose him to see a sheet of paper fall from the table on fire close to it, what would his duty be—to cleave to the maxim, or to cut himself adrift from it? Surely to snatch up the forbidden gun directly. His first duty, in point of time, is to obey the rule; his first in point of importance, is to break it. Indeed, this is the very essence, according to St. Paul, of the difference between the legal and the Gospel state. In the legal state we are under tutors, governors, and must not go beyond rules; for rules are disciplining us to understand the principles of themselves. But in the Gospel state we are redeemed from this bondage, serving in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. We discern principles, and are loyal to them; we use rules or dispense with them, as they save or destroy the principle for which they exist. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 358.]

II

Fulfilling the Law

1. To fulfil a thing is to fill it full, so that no part of it is left void or empty. It is an image taken from a cup filled to the brim, as full as it can hold; and it is applied to a number of things both in Scripture and in common life. We read in the Book of Exodus, that Pharaoh’s taskmasters compelled the children of Israel to fulfil their daily tasks of making brick as heretofore, after they had taken away the straw from them. In other words, they had to give in quite as many bricks as they had been accustomed to make when the straw was duly supplied them. They were not to diminish the tale or quantity of bricks demanded of them. And in the same way, to fulfil a promise is to keep it fully and completely; and also if we fulfil a duty we discharge it fully and completely, leaving no part of it unperformed.

Now this is what St. Paul means by “fulfilling the law.” He means that we should do to the very utmost everything required of us. It is incumbent upon us to give in every single one of the tale of bricks, or rather of the fine hewn stones, which God demands from us towards building up the edifice of duty. We must not, we dare not, break, or neglect, or overlook any part of any one of the commandments, for the reason that it is a little one, or that it is a trifle, that it cannot signify, that there is no use in being too particular. We are to remember the words of the Sermon on the Mount, where our Lord says that whosoever shall break one of the least of these commandments or shall teach men so, shall be reckoned the least in the Kingdom of heaven.

Men are apt to think that they cannot have too much of a good thing—too much piety, too much religious feeling, too much attendance at the public worship of God. They forget the truth which the old philosophy taught, that the life of man should be a harmony; not absorbed in any one thought, even of God, or in any one duty or affection, but growing up as a whole to the fulness of the perfect man. That is a maimed soul which loves goodness and has no love of truth, or which loves truth and has no love of goodness. The cultivation of one part of religion to the exclusion of another seems often to exact a terrible retribution both in individual characters and in churches. There is a Nemesis of believing all things, or indeed of any degree of intellectual dishonesty, which sometimes ends in despair of all truth. 1 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.]

2. The fulfilling of the law, therefore, is keeping it in its fullest, its deepest, its most spiritual meaning. Every angry feeling, every wanton thought, every uncharitable and suspicious thought, every unfair advantage and dishonest trick, however it may be allowed to pass free by human laws, and however customary in men’s dealings with each other,—all these, and all manner of greediness after the things of this world, are breaches of one or other of the commandments. Nothing short of perfect kindness, perfect purity, perfect honesty, perfect truth, and perfect temperance will fulfil the law. Nothing short of perfect kindness, because every degree of unkindness is forbidden by the sixth commandment; nothing short of perfect purity, because all impurity is forbidden by the seventh; nothing short of perfect honesty, because every kind of dishonesty is forbidden by the eighth; nothing short of perfect truth, because all falsehood is condemned by the ninth; nothing short of perfect temperance, because all greediness and covetous desires are forbidden by the tenth commandment. Such are the vast claims which God’s law has upon us, when taken in its full extent.

When Christ denounced the breaking of any of the commandments, He spoke on the very point that St. Paul is speaking of. His subject was “fulfilling the law.” “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you,”—I, the Eternal Word and Infallible Truth—“that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Or we might paraphrase it thus: “I am come to fulfil the law of Moses; I am come to show you the exceeding depth of God’s commandments; I am come to show you how much they require of every one, when they are taken in their full meaning. This is one object of My mission. If any man, then, fancies that I am come to bring a licence for sinning—if a person conceives he may continue in sin, because I have brought pardon and grace into the world—he takes a mistaken view of the object of My coming. My Father sent Me not to abolish holiness, or to diminish aught from its claims, but to place it on a firmer foundation, and to give it its true scope; so that it shall embrace, not only the outward actions of men, but their very thoughts and inmost wishes. I am not come to make the law void, but to fill it up.”

III

How Love Fulfils the Law

“Love is the fulfilment of the law.” If we had perfect love for our neighbour we should keep the commandments perfectly: and in proportion as love fills us, in the same proportion shall we fulfil them. Love will enable us to keep the commandments. That is the Apostle’s argument.

1. The love which is here spoken of, and which the writers of the New Testament set before us on every occasion when they teach about the inner principle of Christianity, is a reverent goodwill, not only from man to God, but from man to man. The very same word which describes love to God is used by New Testament teachers, by the great Apostle of the Gentiles, and by John the Divine, to describe the relations which should exist between man and man. The same quality of reverent affection which is due from man to God is due from man to man.

It is not easy for men to comprehend the full meaning of this term “love.” We identify it with amiability and mildness and sentimentality. We confuse it with the petty standards of love that are partial, weak, and blind: that limit their favours to one or two; that are no more than a flush in the blood or a thrill along the nerves. Love as St. Paul means it, love as it was newly and divinely characterized by the Saviour, is a broader and more comprehensive thing than any of these,—rises higher, runs deeper, sweeps around larger interests, includes nobler ideals. It is a feeling which pervades all conduct, governs all motives, sustains every duty, extends to all souls. It is the kindliness which prompts to courtesy, the sensitive fairness which insists on perfect equity, the sympathy which reaches after the lost, the mercy which softens the doom of crime. And it is the strength and the courage which dare to undertake severities which are destined to end in blessings; to be a little hard in order to be very tender; and to go forth with the scourge against offenders, and draw the sword of retribution against the oppressor and his hard-hearted crew. And, over and above all these peculiarities, love rises above this earth and the humanity it supports, and exalts the soul to heaven’s gates; reaches out for God, and loses itself in the Being whence its holy impulse was derived. That is what Christianity means by love.

Oh, there are moments in man’s mortal years,

When for an instant that which long has lain

Beyond our reach, is on a sudden found

In things of smallest compass, and we hold

The unbounded shut in one small minute’s space,

And worlds within the hollow of our hand,—

A world of music in one word of love,

A world of love in one quick wordless look,

A world of thought in one translucent phrase,

A world of memory in one mournful chord,

A world of sorrow in one little song.

Such moments are man’s holiest,—the full-orbed

And finite form of Love’s infinity. 1 [Note: Henry Bernard Carpenter, Liber Amoris.]

2. “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” St. Paul seems to limit the action of love here to doing no ill. That is simply because the commandments are mostly negative; and that they are is a sad token of the lovelessness natural to us all. But do we love ourselves only negatively, or are we satisfied with doing ourselves no harm? That stringent pattern of love to others prescribes not only degree, but manner. It teaches that true love to men is not weak indulgence, but must sometimes chastise, and thwart, and always must seek their good, and not merely their gratification. Whoever will honestly seek to apply that negative precept of working no ill to others, will find it positive enough. We harm men when we fail to help them. If we can do them a kindness, and do it not, we do them ill. Non-activity for good is activity for evil.

Some years ago we were reading day by day of a murder that had been committed in the swamps of Niagara, and such was the solidarity of the human race that that isolated deed was discussed right round the globe. We saw it all enacted, like some stage drama, before our very eyes. We saw this man, an Oxford graduate, a man of good family, a man reared in honourable traditions, leading his victim on and on to some lonely spot in that dismal swamp, and then the pistol shot rings, and without remorse he turns away, leaving his victim—who has eaten with him, jested with him, trusted in him—to die miserably and unpitied. We tried this man for murder, but that red blossom of murder was only the outward sign of something else. Go deeper to the root, and you will see that he wants to steal, and he covets, and he lies before he wants to murder. These were the active causes of the crime; this was the black sap that fed the tree upon which this hideous blossom of murder at last sprang into life. Reduce all these things to a sentence, and you have said everything when you have said, “This man did not love.” If he had loved his friend he would not have lied to him; if he had loved him he would not have coveted his money; still less could he have pushed him out of life for the sake of paltry gain, which—such is the irony of crime—he never even handled. For that unhappy youth love would literally have been the “fulfilling of the law.” 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson.]

3. Love fulfils the commandments. We may take the commandments one by one, and apply this test to them, and we shall see at once that they would not have been needed if only men had loved one another. Do we need to be told not to murder any one we love, not to defraud him, not to covet his possessions, not to dishonour his home? Why, we not only cannot do it, we simply cannot conceive the thought of doing it. If we have love, we cannot help keeping the law. If we have love, we cannot help being moral. It may seem but a scanty equipment to produce perfection, and so the seven notes of music may seem to be a scanty equipment to produce the heaven-born melodies of a Handel or a Beethoven. But see how they use them,—of what infinite and glorious combinations are they capable! How the highest and deepest emotions of our nature find liberation and a language as we thrill to the majestic strains which purify and exalt us, which give us visions of truth, of self, of heaven, of God, and of the joy of God, which no speech could utter and no articulate array of words could express. Yet there are but seven notes of music in it all, something a child might learn in an hour, but which a Handel or a Beethoven cannot exhaust in a lifetime. So it is with this supreme quality of love! It is capable of all but infinite combinations and interpretations; it utters the grand music of heroism and the soft lute-music of courtesy; it is patriotism, it is altruism, it is martyrdom; it stoops to the smallest things of life and it governs the greatest; it controls the temper and it regulates the reason; it extirpates the worst qualities and it develops and refines the best; it reforms and transforms the whole man into the image of God, for there is no height of character to which love cannot lift a man, and there is no height of character possible without it. Love is character. “Love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Love is so comprehensive a grace that it includeth all the rest; and so is in effect the fulfilling of the whole law. There is a thread of love which runneth through all the particular duties and offices of Christian life, and stringeth them like so many rich pearls into one single chain. 1 [Note: Bishop Sanderson.]

4. Love is the fulfilling of the law for three reasons:—

(1) It removes the bias of self-love that is in our nature.—That there is such a bias in our nature is plain. Else why should we all be such unfair judges in our own case, and, comparatively speaking, such fair judges in matters we are not concerned with? Any man of common sense can see the rights of a case, where the question is between neighbour and neighbour. Not one in ten, or in fifty, or in a hundred, can see the right of the case, when the question is between his neighbour and himself. Where self is concerned, the weight of self-love is sure to slip into one of the scales; and so they become uneven. Nor is this to be remedied, except by putting into the opposite scale that love to our neighbour which Christ commands us to cherish.

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul;

Love is the only angel who can bid the gates unroll;

And when he comes to call thee, arise and follow fast;

His way may lie through darkness, but it leads to light at last. 1 [Note: Henry van Dyke.]

(2) It gives us sympathy, and is the only effective principle of duty.—This love is far more amenable to reason than the passion which goes by the same name. “We may set ourselves,” as George Eliot has put it,—we may studiously set ourselves “to learn something of the poetry and pathos lying in the experience of all human souls—poetry and pathos that look out through dull grey eyes, and that speak in a voice of quite ordinary tones.” We may know something of this if we will only think. And such knowledge will inevitably give birth to sympathy.

If ever you see in your neighbour the downcast, suffering, timid look, that unmistakable air which marks so often the first apprenticeship to hardness, the beginning of the death of finer feelings, does it strike you to show kindness, to administer comfort or ensure protection? Does it not sometimes rather happen that you help to break the bruised reed, that you show contempt or indifference when you should show loving-kindness, or that you even join in mocking or cruelty when you ought to have put your heel upon it? “Do as you would be done by” is only a low form of practical maxim, but even this is very often higher than our practice. Does it never happen that you get your pleasure out of annoyance to another? Does it never happen that you allow this to be done by some one near you? Does a stranger coming amongst us young, inexperienced, or it may be with some peculiarity, never find his life made miserable by some cruel, or hard, or low-toned neighbour? 2 [Note: Bishop Percival, Some Helps for School Life, 175.]

Do thy day’s work, my dear,

Though fast and dark the clouds are drifting near,

Though time has little left for hope and very much for fear.

Do thy day’s work, though now

The hand must falter and the head must bow,

And far above the failing foot shows the bold mountain brow.

Yet there is left for us,

Who on the valley’s verge stand trembling thus,

A light that lies far in the west—soft, faint, but luminous.

We can give kindly speech

And ready, helping hand to all and each,

And patience to the young around by smiling silence teach.

We can give gentle thought,

And charity, by life’s long lesson taught,

And wisdom, from old faults lived down, by toil and failure wrought.

We can give love, unmarred

By selfish snatch of happiness, unjarred

By the keen aims of power or joy that make youth cold and hard.

And, if gay hearts reject

The gifts we hold, would fain fare on unchecked

On the bright roads that scarcely yield all that young eyes expect,

Why, do thy day’s work still.

The calm, deep founts of love are slow to chill;

And heaven may yet the harvest yield, the work-worn hands to fill.

(3) It springs from love to God.—There is no true love of man unconnected with the love of God, nor any which does not originate there. The feeling which takes the name of benevolence is too fickle in its nature, too narrow in its range, too easily checked and extinguished, to fulfil, in any due degree, the duties with which God charges us towards each other. To do this we must love each other for His sake after His pattern, and by extending to them the love we bear to Himself. Then it becomes Christian charity, and is equal to every precept. “Love worketh no ill” to our neighbour; it “thinketh” none. It “suffereth long and is kind.” In no case “doth it behave itself unseemly.” It furnishes unto all good works. It is a principle broad enough for the whole range of our duty; and to be improving in every grace of the Gospel, we need only to be growing perfect in love.

He who loves his neighbour also fulfils the commandments written in the first table of the law. Because he is God’s child and therefore must needs have loved God first, and have thus conformed himself to the obligations of the whole law, he loves his neighbour with a pure heart and true charity. He can, in point of fact, keep the commandments which concern his neighbour only through love of God. For, as the law of Moses was powerless to produce in the heart of the Jew that true love for his fellow-men, without which the law itself could not be fulfilled, which is the effect only of grace, so only those who are filled with the love of God, and possess the grace which grows from this love, can really possess that true love to man which is the fulfilment of the law.

When thy heart, love filled, grows graver,

And eternal bliss looks nearer,

Ask thy heart, nor show it favour,

Is the gift or giver dearer?

Love, love on; love higher, deeper;

Let love’s ocean close above her;

Only, love thou more love’s keeper,

More, the love-creating lover.

5. Love not only fulfils the precepts of the law, it also completes and perfects the law itself. No law can provide for all cases that may come before us in the course of life. Every law can only lay down general principles and rules, and at the utmost can only name some cases in particular. Much less can a lawgiver prescribe exactly the application of his law to the individual case; for the application must necessarily differ with the difference between men, their actions, and the accompanying circumstances. Love alone can take account of all the cases that occur in human life, of all men and their actions, all their surrounding circumstances and peculiarities, and provide completely and suitably for all. In this sense love is not only the fulfilling, but also the fulness ( plenitudo), i.e. the completion and perfection of the law. Where love rules wholly and perfectly, there the precepts of the law become superfluous, and the rule of love takes the place of law; where love withdraws and becomes cold, there the machinery of the law must come in, and the more love removes herself, so much the more must the legal machinery rule until it sinks to the slavery of simple government by police.

A mightier church shall come, whose covenant word

Shall be the deeds of love. Not Credo then,—

Amo shall be the password through its gates.

Man shall not ask his brother any more,

“Believest thou?” but “Lovest thou?” and all

Shall answer at God’s altar, “Lord, I love.”

For Hope may anchor, Faith may steer, but Love,

Great Love alone, is captain of the soul. 1 [Note: Henry Bernard Carpenter, Liber Amoris.]

Love and the Law

Literature

Adams (J. C.), The Leisure of God, 51.

Body (G.), The Life of Love, 10.

Bonar (H.), God’s Way of Holiness, 104.

Campbell (R. J.), City Temple Sermons, 108, 122.

Dawson (W. J.), The Church of To-morrow, 229.

Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 355.

Gibbons (J. C.), Discourses and Sermons, 89.

Hall (C. R.), Advent to Whitsun-Day, 1.

Hall (W. A. N.), “ Do Out the Duty,” 50.

Hancock (T.), The Pulpit and the Press, 67.

Hare (A. W.), Alton Sermons, 538.

Hathaway (E. P.), The Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer, 79, 81.

Horne (W.), Religious Life and Thought, 111.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, ii. 121.

Lee (R.), Sermons, 215, 228.

M‘Cosh (J.), Gospel Sermons, 199.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Romans, 304.

Mellor (E.), In the Footsteps of Heroes, 1.

Momerie (A. W.), The Origin of Evil and Other Sermons, 160.

Percival (J.), Some Helps for School Life, 165.

Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 79.

Streatfeild (G. S.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 23.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 131 (Beecher); xxv. 129 (Furse); xl. 152 (Dawson); lxix. 203 (Hutton); lxx. 372 (Muir).

Church Pulpit Year Book, v. (1908), 162.

Churchman’s Pulpit, i. (Pt. 47), 284 (Atkin).

Verse 12

Ready for the Dawning

The night is far spent, and the day is at hand: let us therefore cast of the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.— Romans 13:12.

1. There can hardly be any doubt that in the apostolic age the prevailing belief was that the Second Coming of the Lord was an event to be expected in any case shortly and probably in the lifetime of many of those then living; it is also probable that this belief was shared by the Apostles themselves. For example, so strongly did such views prevail among the Thessalonian converts that the death of some members of the community filled them with perplexity, and even when correcting these opinions St. Paul speaks of “we that are alive, that are left unto the coming of our Lord”; and in the Second Epistle, although he corrects the erroneous impression which still prevailed, that the coming was immediate, and shows that other events must precede it, he still contemplates it as at hand. Similar passages may be quoted from all or most of the Epistles, although there are others which suggest that it is by his own death, not by the coming of Christ, that St. Paul expects to attain the full life in Christ to which he looked forward.

2. Now, our Lord plainly did not mean His disciples to know when His judgment was to be made manifest, and St. Paul apparently recognized this ( 1 Thessalonians 5:2: “The day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night”), so that his immediate anticipation of the end can never have been part of his faith—never more than the reflection of the eager desire which filled the heart of the Church. On the other hand, our Lord did mean His disciples to go on expecting Him. Thus St. Paul’s admonition is as applicable as ever. The future of the world and of each nation and institution is precarious: things which seem solid and strong may crumble and melt; how soon God is to make plain His judgments, in part or in whole, we do not know; when each one of us is to pass by death to the great account we do not know. There is no reasonable attitude towards the unknown coming of judgment except to be ready, and, though the darkness of the alienated and godless world is all around us, to live as children of the light eagerly expecting the dawning of the day.

The Apostles lived in anticipation of an immediate end of the world, no doubt; but I cannot see that this, on the whole, was anything but good. It was this which drew the Christians so closely together—made their union so remarkable, and startled the world, to which, otherwise, the new religion would have appeared merely a Philosophy, and not a Life. Besides, are we sure that aught less strong than this hope could have detached men so instantly and entirely from the habits of long sin; or that, on natural principles and without a miracle, even the Apostles could have been induced to crowd so much superhuman energy into so small a compass? 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 398.]

3. But to meet Christ we must be like Christ. And to be like Christ we must be in Christ, clothed with His righteousness, invested with His new nature, fighting with the weapons of His victorious manhood. The “evil” which is in ourselves, the unregulated flesh, we can only “overcome with good”—the good which is Jesus Himself: for it is no longer we that live in our bare selves, but Christ that liveth in us. We are baptized into Him—Christ is “put on” in baptism by all ( Galatians 3:27)—we possess His spirit, we eat His flesh and drink His blood. What remains is practically to clothe ourselves in Him, appropriating and drawing out into ourselves by acts of our will His very present help in trouble. So can we become like Him, and be fitted to see Him as He is.

This passage of which the text is a part had an important influence on St. Augustine’s life; for when the child’s voice had bidden him “open and read,” these were the words upon which he opened, and which sealed his conversion to the faith he served so nobly—“not in revelling and drunkenness, … but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” “I had no wish,” he tells us, “to read any further, nor was there any need. For immediately at the end of this sentence, as if a light of certainty had been poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt were scattered.” 1 [Note: Confessions, viii. 2.]

The text falls into two main divisions—

I. The Approach of the Day.

II. The Preparation for it.

I

The Approach of the Day

“The night is far spent, and the day is at hand.”

St. Paul here uses a material illustration to set forth a spiritual fact. It is a picture of the morning with which he presents us; and, if we draw the idea out, we find that it consists of three stages. First, there is the night; that portion of the twenty-four hours during which the sun is below the horizon; that ever-recurring period, when the only light available comes from the faint shining of the stars, or at best from the pale, reflected beams of the moon; that succession of hours, which we ordinarily describe as the time of darkness. Next, there is the dawn. In this, the night is far spent; the obscurity begins to pass off. The sun, indeed, is not yet above the horizon, but the stars fade and disappear, and the moon loses her lustre; there is an increasing brightness in the eastern sky; clear rays shoot up towards the zenith, and at length the shining disc of the great light-bearer becomes visible over the dark shoulder of the earth. The day is at hand! And, lastly, after the dawn comes the day itself. There is no longer a contest between light and darkness; the sun is risen in his power; the shadows have been dispelled and light prevails triumphantly throughout the whole hemisphere. The Night, the Dawn, the Day. St. Paul would be sensible of the poetic fascination of these, but he presents them with a definite object in view—to commend to his readers’ attention the spiritual analogies bodied forth by them.

i. The Night

1. In the night St. Paul sees a picture of the original spiritual state of those to whom he is writing. From such passages in the Epistle as, “Nevertheless, brethren, I have written the more boldly unto you in some sort, as putting you in mind, because of the grace that is given me of God, that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles” ( Romans 15:15), we learn that a great proportion of them must have been born and brought up in heathenism; but other and important parts of the letter are evidently addressed to those who were originally Jews. Now, when the Apostle used the word “night” to describe the early religious condition of his correspondents, he must, of course, have been thinking first and foremost of the Gentile section of the Roman Church. Notwithstanding the glitter of their civilization, the inhabitants of the imperial city had been lost in a state of religious darkness. As much as to the Athenians God was to them “Unknown.” The Sun of their souls was deep below the horizon. The official religion was believed in by few or none, and, if it had been believed in, it would have taught its deluded votaries to acknowledge “lords many and gods many.”

Even the philosophers, who tried to think out something better than the popular religion, illuminated the spiritual darkness only as the stars light up the gloom of natural night. The Stoics knew of nothing better than a mechanical fate overruling all things; and the Epicureans, despairing of finding the truth, taught only some variation or another of the precept, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may!” Thus in the past, God had been a God who had hidden Himself from those Gentiles to whom St. Paul was now writing.

2. But, having thus used the term “night” in connection with the converts from heathenism, the Apostle was willing to let it stand as a description of the original condition of the Jewish Christians in the imperial city also. He habitually thought of his own unconverted days as a season of gloom, and therefore it came natural to him to regard that of his brethren after the flesh in the same light. Thus had those to whom he was writing in the world’s capital, both Jews and Gentiles, each in their own particular way, been till recently in a condition of spiritual darkness.

The comparison of night is used of Christ’s absence from His Church, and of the brooding darkness which overcasts the world. The night is the emblem of indolence and lethargy. And are not the majority of men sluggish towards God, however keen and alert they may be towards the concerns of this world? Night is also the time of illusion. Ugliness and beauty, gold and stone, friend and foe, are all one when night has drawn her curtains. Are not most men mistaking the counterfeit for the real, the false for the true? Again, night is pregnant with danger. Whether to the traveller across the morass, or to the ship feeling her way along a rock-bound coast, darkness is danger. “He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth, because that the darkness hath blinded his eyes.” For vast tracks of time “darkness hath covered the earth, and gross darkness the people”—the night of Satan’s reign, of the power of darkness, of creation’s travail and anguish, of the absence of Jesus from His Church. 1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]

All moveless stand the ancient cedar-trees

Along the drifted sandhills where they grow;

And from the dark west comes a wandering breeze,

And waves them to and fro.

A murky darkness lies along the sand,

Where bright the sunbeams of the morning shone,

And the eye vainly seeks by sea and land

Some light to rest upon.

No large pale star its glimmering vigil keeps;

An inky sea reflects an inky sky,

And the dark river, like a serpent, creeps

To where its black piers lie.

Strange salty odours through the darkness steal,

And, through the dark, the ocean-thunders roll;

Thick darkness gathers, stifling, till I feel

Its weight upon my soul.

I stretch my hands out in the empty air;

I strain my eyes into the heavy night;

Blackness of darkness!—Father, hear my prayer!

Grant me to see the light! 2 [Note: George Arnold, In the Dark.]

ii. The Dawn

1. As St. Paul thinks of his correspondents while he is writing, he describes them as living in the dawn. “The night,” he says, “has advanced towards the dawn” (so the word may be translated). When the sun begins to rise towards the eastern ridges from below, the darkness takes flight and shining rays show themselves increasingly along the horizon. Even so, the Apostle says, through their late conversion to Christ, the gloom of heathenism is effectually lifting from these Roman disciples, and the true spiritual light is shining ever more and more upon them unto the perfect day.

2. But why only “unto the perfect day”? Why speak of them as only in the dawn and not declare them to be already in the perfect day, seeing that they are in Christ? In the general current of New Testament teaching two states, and only two, are broadly defined and distinguished: there are “children of the night” and “children of the day.” Nor is any interval generally assumed between the “darkness” of sin and the “marvellous light” of holiness. But the peculiarity of the present passage is that it gives special prominence to the spiritual phenomena of a certain interval of transition, which reality requires and Scripture never denies. The Apostle means that the Christian state is, at the best, in many respects no better than “the dawn.”

The Church upon earth is only in the dawn of the day of its full redemption. That day will be perfect when Christ shall appear “without sin unto salvation”; when He shall come no longer bearing the burden of His cross, but bearing the burden of His glory and of His exceeding great rewards. Then will He consummate the sanctification of His saints, rendering the warfare between flesh and spirit for ever impossible; releasing them from the last vestige of infirmity, and uttering the final decree, “Be holy still.” Now, in the dawn, we are dependent on the ceaseless ministry of that grace which still retains the basin and the towel to wash the disciples’ feet; we are encompassed about with such infirmities as make the full glory of Christian perfection a state too high for time.

3. It is true that in comparison with their former heathenism and Judaism the Roman Christians were in the full day. The light which their Christianity was now affording them was indeed that of final truth, just as the beams of the natural dawn are truly incipient daylight. All the same, however, there is a point of view in which the Christianity of the Church militant here on earth is only the dawn of a fuller and brighter revelation to follow. For Christ never professed to explain to the world all the perplexing mysteries of life. He professed to reveal and did reveal all that was necessary for our salvation, but He left many an important speculative question unsolved. For example, how we long to know more of the state of the departed and to understand the mystery of evil and of suffering; but, as it is not necessary for our salvation that we should know these things, Christ did not reveal them. He gave us as much light as was required, and such light as is destined to grow more and more unto the perfect day, but for the time being He withheld the noonday splendour and left us to trust in Him for the due supply of such light as should be convenient for us. And thus those Christians who had just been described by the Apostle as involved in darkness were now rightly declared by him to be, by their incorporation into Christ, not yet indeed surrounded by the full effulgence of day, but still enjoying the beams of a dawn, which would ere long increase into the noontide splendour.

Feeling the way,—and all the way uphill;

But on the open summit, calm and still,

The feet of Christ are planted; and they stand

In view of all the quiet land.

Feeling the way,—and though the way is dark,

The eyelids of the morning yet shall mark

Against the East the shining of His face,

At peace upon the lighted place.

Feeling the way,—and if the way is cold,

What matter?—since upon the fields of gold

His breath is melting; and the warm winds sing

While rocking summer days for Him. 1 [Note: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.]

iii. The Day

1. The First Advent answers to the “dawn,” the Second answers to the “day.” Here we must remember the vivid expectation of the Second Advent which prevailed in the primitive Church. After the rising from the dead, the Lord had not merely resumed His interrupted earthly existence, but had taken upon Him the spiritual body of the Resurrection, and had disappeared and re-appeared according to the mysterious laws which governed that new life. And thus, just as He had re-appeared after disappearing at Emmaus, so they expected Him to return after He vanished at the Ascension. Concerning the date of the final return no revelation had been given. The Son of Man was as one who had taken His journey into a far country! But the duration of His absence does not concern us here. St. Paul believed that He would return sooner or later. And then, with His advent, the glorious noon of revelation would be reached. Then we should know as we are known. Then we should no longer see through a glass darkly, but face to face. Then would “the day break, and the shadows flee away!” And so that was the glorious noon which the Apostle declared to be in store for those Roman disciples who had so recently passed from the night of heathenism into the wondrous dawn of Christianity.

Nothing in nature is more beautiful or more symbolical of eager expectation than the dawn that proclaims, “The day is at hand”: the day itself that fulfils its promise cannot surpass its beauty. Here the figure is, in a certain sense, insufficient: the day that we expect will be so glorious as to cause its early splendours to be forgotten. But the brightness is a great reality: the estate of Christ’s watchers is one in which an enthusiastic hope may well predominate. To the company as such there is nothing but joy in the future: its present inheritance is a hope full of immortality that knows no night; and “in the pathway thereof there is no death.” The individual Christian also is taught to enter into the common hope. To every believer in Christ the present life is the dawn of a perfect day. 1 [Note: W. B. Pope.]

Elsewhere this day is more specifically described as “That Day,” as “the Last Day,” as “the Day of God,” and “the Day of the Lord,” as “the Day of Christ,” the “Day of Redemption,” and “the Day of Judgment.” All these expressions are significant, and carry with them meaning of great moment and solemn instruction.

2. The Christian Church is appealed to as exercising a firm faith in the gradual consummation of the present dawn into perfect day. These words are a remembrancer; reminding those early travellers of the great secret which they know,—the most precious secret time has to disclose,—that the Lord is at hand, bringing with Him all, and more than all, their hope can conceive. The return of our Saviour,—or, rather, His coming; for that is the Scriptural word, as if His first appearance was but a transient visit—fills the entire New Testament with a glow that leaves no part dark, brightens into all but glory the dimness of the Church’s present vexation, and already almost swallows up death in victory.

To “know the time” is to know this its greatest secret. But the Apostle uses here an expression which occurs nowhere else; one which, without overstraining it, yields a very important truth. The coming of Christ will be to His Church—to His mystical, spiritual people—the regular and peaceful consummation of a day already begun; the same light and no other, but raised into meridian glory. To the ungodly world a catastrophe, and to slumbering Christians a sore amazement, it will be to those who wait for His appearing what day is to the earthly traveller who waits for the morning. The elements of heaven are here; the dawn is the earnest as well as the pledge of the day; and all that will be needful for the redeeming of every pledge the Scriptures contain is the withdrawal of the veil, the appearing of the Sun in the heavens, the showing Himself once more to His people. One of the most impressive, and also the most common, notes of the Christian community is this, that they “wait for his Son from heaven.”

Through love to light! Oh, wonderful the way

That leads from darkness to the perfect day!

From darkness and from sorrow of the night

To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.

Through love to light! through light, O God, to Thee,

Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light! 1 [Note: Richard Watson Gilder.]

II

Preparation for the Day

“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”

1. The Apostle uses the expectation of Christ’s coming as an argument for wakefulness and watchfulness. “It is high time to awake out of sleep.” “They that sleep, sleep in the night,” but “the night is far spent, the day is at hand.” Awake then ye slumbering and torpid souls; up and be doing! It is not the sinner only that needs thus to be aroused, but the saint also. The Christian ought to be characterized by liveliness, but he is very apt to let torpor get the better of him. He ought not to sleep as do others, but to watch and be sober, giving all diligence to make his calling and election sure.

It is marvellous to consider the unanimity of mankind, outside Christianity altogether, in believing that they are, within limits, responsible beings, and that the results of life will follow them beyond the grave. Even many backward and savage races believe that the Being they worship is also a Moral Governor, and will, at the last, be their Judge. The ancient Egyptian thought that, after death, the soul was weighed in the balance, in the presence of the gods, against the image of the goddess of truth. Therefore, the religious texts were full of such sentences as, “Mind thee of the day when thou, too, shalt start for the land where one goeth to return not thence. Good for thee will have been a good life. Therefore, be just, and hate iniquity; for he who loves what is right shall triumph.” 1 [Note: J. A. MacCulloch.]

2. Because the night is far spent and the day is at hand, we are bidden to cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light. The exhortation, though in two parts, is one and the same. The Apostle gives both its negative and its positive side. The two acts are simultaneous, the one cannot effectually take place without the other; there is no casting off the works of darkness without putting on the armour of light, or putting on the armour of light without casting off the works of darkness. Satan is effectually cast out, and kept out, only by Christ entering in and occupying the heart. Sanctification is a positive as well as a negative process. It is at once the mortification of sin and the cultivation of holiness.

i. The Works of Darkness

1. What are the “works of darkness”? Evidently such works as men commonly choose to do in darkness, i.e. wicked works. For as our Lord says in another place, “Every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.”

St. Paul enumerates these works in three classes. First, indulgence in sensual acts; secondly, indulgence in unholy thoughts and desires; lastly, indulgence in anything that is not perfectly loving and lovely.

Now among Christians there are presumably few who would be guilty of indulging in sins of the first and second classes, but many are prone to anger and jealousy, pride and selfishness, malice and uncharitableness, strife and hypocrisy in the sight of God, equally with drunkenness, gluttony, and lust.

The sins of darkness are followed by a retribution in kind, if the works of darkness are not cast off. Dante represents those who on earth were guilty of the sin of envy as losing their eyesight in Purgatory and condemned to pass their time in darkness.

In vilest haircloth were they dressed,

Each ’gainst his neighbour’s shoulder pressed,

And all alike reclined

Against the bank behind.

So, where the sightless beggars stand

At the church doors and alms demand,

And one his head has dropped,

Against his fellow propped;

Then others feel compassion there,

Not only for the words they hear

But for the yearning face

That pleads no less for grace.

There of the sunlight none partake:

So, in the place whereof I spake,

The precious light of Heaven

Ne’er to those shades is given.

A thread of steel their eyelids all

Were pierced and stitched about withal,

Like to the merlin wild,

That may not else be stilled.

Me seemed to do them wrong, as I

Unseen, yet seeing, passed them by. 1 [Note: Dante, Purg. xiii. 58–74, tr. by Dr. Shadwell.]

2. Such works as befit the kingdom of darkness are represented as being “cast off,” like the uncomely garments of the night, for the bright armour which befits the Christian soldier as a member of the kingdom of light. The conception of the passage is classical and Roman, borrowed from the camp. Through the night the soldiery, divested of their armour, have abandoned themselves to revelry and carouse, and, as the small hours have reigned, have sunk into a deep sleep; but, lo, the ringing bugle note is announcing the herald streaks of dawn, and summoning the troops hastily to put off the dress and works of darkness, and to assume their armour free from rust and stain.

What would you wish to be found doing when Christ comes in? Drinking, and rioting, and making merry? Practising unclean ways, and gazing and longing after evil things? Striving and quarrelling and grudging against one another? Surely not: you would not wish to be so found of Him; nor yet that, coming suddenly, He should find you sleeping. Rather you would desire that He may find you kneeling on your knees, in fervent prayer, confessing your many sins; or waiting on some of those whom He calls His brethren, busy about some work of mercy; or patiently enduring His chastisements; or, at least, honestly and religiously going on with the task which His Providence orders for you. This is how we would wish to be found. Let us not only wish, but pray and strive, and by His grace we shall be found so doing indeed. 1 [Note: J. Keble.]

The longing for ignoble things;

The strife for triumph more than truth;

The hardening of the heart, that brings

Irreverence for the dreams of youth;

All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,

That have their root in thoughts of ill;

Whatever hinders or impedes

The action of the nobler will;—

All these must first be trampled down

Beneath our feet, if we would gain

In the bright fields of fair renown

The right of eminent domain.

Standing on what too long we bore

With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,

We may discern—unseen before—

A path to higher destinies.

Nor deem the irrevocable Past,

As wholly wasted, wholly vain,

If, rising on its wrecks, at last

To something nobler we attain. 1 [Note: Longfellow, Ladder of St. Augustine.]

ii. The Armour of Light

1. “Put on the armour of light.” What a fine battle-cry this is! It comes, too, from the lips of the finest fighter the world has ever seen, the man who could stand up and say to God and all ages, “I have fought the good fight.” Life was a battle to him, a fight for his very soul, a stern unceasing conflict. And so it is with most of us. But let us remember how all the grand heroes of war have borne the brunt without murmuring. Do not complain of the conditions. They are not always fair; we fight an unseen foe who will not come out into the open. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood”; it would be a comparatively simple thing if that were all. But we wrestle against “the wiles of the devil, against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” To such a battle are we called.

A young officer, for the first time under fire, felt that strange demand that is made upon a man’s courage when the bullets fly around him, and he sees men fall and die at his side. He was on the point of breaking down. It seemed impossible for him to go on, and for a moment he faltered, visibly irresolute. An older officer saw what was happening, and he just put his hand upon the lad’s shoulder. “Oh, no!” he said, pointing onward, “there’s your way, you know”; and the young fellow’s career was saved. So what we all want, and what we want most, is that the Master should come over and again lay His hands upon us and tell us to be as men that wait for their Lord, whom when He cometh He shall find watching. What a splendid figure that is! The sentinel at his post, watching in the dim morning, peering through the haze for the rising of the sun. 2 [Note: W. A. L. Taylor.]

2. In his Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul explains more fully what he means by the armour of the soldiers of Christ. There he speaks of it as being the armour of truth, of righteousness, of faith. But here, when he speaks of the armour of light, he goes a step further; he means that men should wear this armour openly, so that others may see that they are Christ’s soldiers; that they should not wear it, as in olden days men sometimes wore a coat of mail, hidden away under their tunics.

You know the story narrated in the Old Testament about Ahab. On going out to battle, he disguised himself, and induced Jehoshaphat to wear his armour, because he was afraid that if he wore it himself he would be a marked man. In his case, you know, the disguise was of no avail. Ahab, disguised though he was, was killed. The other king, the nobler man, escaped. Well, just in the same way I think some of us try to live as Christians “in disguise.” Faith, hope, love—these are the three great words which Christianity has given to the world; and yet there are some who try to hide away, as much as ever they can, their deepest faiths, their highest hopes, their purest loves. When St. Paul tells us that we should put on the “armour of light,” he means that we should so live that others shall see at once that we mean to live the strong true life of a soldier of Christ. 1 [Note: F. de W. Lushington.]

If life is always a warfare

Between the right and the wrong,

And good is fighting with evil

For ages and æons long—

Fighting with eager cohorts,

With banners pierced and torn,

Shining with sudden splendour,

Wet with the dew of morn;

If all the forces of heaven,

And all the forces of sin,

Are met in the infinite struggle

The souls of the world to win;

If God’s is the awful battle

Where the darkling legions ride—

Hasten to sword and to saddle!

Lord, let me fight on Thy side!

Ready for the Dawning

Literature

Blunt (J. J.), University Sermons, 22.

Brooke (S. A.), The Gospel of Joy, 319.

Cox (S.), Expositions, iv. 336.

Gibson (J. G.), Along the Shadowed Way, 1.

Gore (C.), The Epistle to the Romans, ii. 134.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 230.

Holland (W. L.), The Beauty of Holiness, 81.

Horton (R. F.), The Conquered World, 24.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year (Advent to Christmas Eve), 249.

Lushington (F. de W.), Sermons to Young Boys, 1.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Romans, 317.

Meyer (F. B.), Statutes and Songs, 12.

Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 376.

Prothero (G.), The Armour of Light, 1.

Purchase (E. J.), The Pathway of the Tempted, 140.

Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 1.

Stanley (A. P.), Canterbury Sermons, 149.

Symonds (A. R.), Sermons, 1.

Talmage (T. de W.), Sermons, iv. 393.

Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 262.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 25 (Hammond).

Churchman’s Pulpit, i. 299 (Hodges), 301 (Farquhar), 305 (Taylor), 307 (MacCulloch), 309 (Butler).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vii. 321 (Creighton).