Puslapio vaizdai
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cannot measure and control, and which in each of us differs immensely in force, volume, and mode of manifestation, he calls into full play, and sets it to work with all its strength and in all its variety. But one unalterable object is assigned by him to this power: to die with Christ to the law of the flesh, to live with Christ to the law of the mind.

This is the doctrine of the necrosis,*-Paul's central doctrine, and the doctrine which makes his profoundness and originality. His repeated and minute lists of practices and feelings to be followed or suppressed, now take a heightened significance. They were the matter by which his faith tried itself and knew itself. Those multitudinous motions of appetite and self-will which reason and conscience disapproved, reason and conscience could yet not govern, and had to yield to them. This, as we have seen, is what drove Paul almost to despair. Well, then, how did Paul's faith, working through love, help him here? It enabled him to reinforce duty by affection. In the central need of his nature, the desire to govern these motions of unrighteousness, it enabled him to say: Die to them! Christ did. If any man be in Christ, said Paul,—that is, if any man identifies himself with Christ by attachment so that he enters into his feelings and lives with his life, he is a new creature; he can do, and * II Cor. iv, 10.

does, what Christ did. First, he suffers with him. Christ throughout his life and in his death presented his body a living sacrifice to God; every self-willed impulse blindly trying to assert itself without respect of the universal order, he died to. You, says Paul to his disciple, are to do the same. Never mind how various and multitudinous the impulses are; impulses to intemperance, concupiscence, covetousness, pride, sloth, envy, malignity, anger, clamour, bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness. Die to them all, and to each as it comes! Christ did. If you cannot, your attachment, your faith, must be one that goes but a very little way. In an ordinary human attachment, out of love to a woman, out of love to a friend, out of love to a child, you can suppress quite easily, because by sympathy you become one with them and their feelings, this or that impulse of selfishness which happens to conflict with them, and which hitherto you have obeyed. All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ's feelings, he showed it by dying to them all; if you are one with him by faith and sympathy, you can die to them also. Then, secondly, if you thus die with him, you become transformed by the renewing of your mind, and rise with him. The law of the spirit of life which is in Christ becomes the law of your life also, and frees you from the law of sin and death. You rise with

him to that harmonious conformity with the real and eternal order, that sense of pleasing God who trieth the hearts, which is life and peace, and which grows more and more till it becomes glory. If you suffer with him, therefore, you shall also be glorified with him.

The real worth of this mystical conception depends on the fitness of the character and history of Christ for inspiring such an enthusiasm of attachment and devotion as that which Paul's notion of faith implies. If the character and history are eminently such as to inspire it, then Paul has no doubt found a mighty aid towards the attainment of that righteousness of which Christ's life afforded the admirable pattern. A great solicitude is always shown by popular Christianity to establish a radical difference between Christ and a teacher like Socrates. Ordinary theologians establish this difference by transcendental distinctions into which science cannot follow them. But what makes for science the radical difference between Jesus and Socrates, is that such a conception as Paul's would, if applied to Socrates, be out of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired boundless friendship and esteem; but the inspiration of reason and conscience is the one inspiration which comes from him, and which impels us to live righteously as he did. A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity, adora

tion, reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty, does not belong to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On this point it is needless to argue; history has proved. In the midst of errors the most prosaic, the most immoral, the most unscriptural, concerning God, Christ, and righteousness, the immense emotion of love and sympathy inspired by the person and character of Jesus has had to work almost by itself alone for righteousness; and it has worked wonders. The surpassing religious grandeur of Paul's conception of faith is that it seizes a real salutary emotional force of incalculable magnitude, and reinforces moral effort with it.

Paul's mystical conception is not complete without its relation of us to our fellow-men, as well as its relation of us to Christ. Whoever identifies himself with Christ, identifies himself with Christ's idea of the solidarity of men. The whole race is conceived as one body, having to die and rise with Christ, and forming by the joint action of its regenerate members the mystical body of Christ. Hence the truth of that which Bishop Wilson. says: "It is not so much our neighbour's interest as our own that we love him." Christ's life, with which we by faith identify ourselves, is not complete, his aspiration after the eternal order is not satisfied, so long as only Christ himself follows this order, or only this or that

individual amongst us men follows it. The same law of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which prevails in our inward self-discipline, is to prevail in our dealings with others. The motions of sin in ourselves we succeed in mortifying, not by saying to ourselves that they are sinful, but by sympathy with Christ in his mortification of them. In like manner, our duties towards our neighbour we perform, not in deference to external commands and prohibitions, but through identifying ourselves with him, by sympathy with Christ who identified himself with him. Therefore, we owe no man anything but to love one another; and he who loves his neighbour fulfils the law towards him, because he seeks to do him good and forbears to do him harm just as if he was himself. Mr. Lecky cannot see that the command to speak the truth to one's neighbour is a command which has a natural sanction. But according to these Pauline ideas it has a clear natural sanction; for if my neighbour is merely an extension of myself, deceiving my neighbour is the same as deceiving myself; and than self-deceit there is nothing by nature more baneful. And on this ground Paul puts the injunction; he says: "Speak every man truth to his neighbour, for we are members one of another." This direction to identify ourselves in Christ * Eph. iv, 25.

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