patience--a deep abiding sense of what they owe to Christ, and can
never, by any length or ardour of service, repay. It accuses us, not
so much of human weakness, as of ingratitude, and insensibility to the
mercy of God, when we faint in the exercise of our ministry.

"We faint not," says Paul: "we show no weakness. On the contrary, we
have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness,
nor handling the Word of God deceitfully." The contrast marked by ἀλλὰ
is very instructive: it shows, in the things which Paul had
renounced, whither weakness leads. It betrays men. It compels them to
have recourse to arts which shame bids them conceal; they become
diplomatists and strategists, rather than heralds; they manipulate
their message; they adapt it to the spirit of the time, or the
prejudices of their auditors; they make liberal use of the principle
of accommodation. When these arts are looked at closely, they come to
this: the minister has contrived to put something of his own between
his hearers and the Gospel; the message has really not been declared.
His intention, of course, with all this artifice, is to recommend
himself to men; but the method is radically vicious. The Apostle shows
us a more excellent way. "We have renounced," he says, "all these weak
ingenuities; and by manifestation of the truth commend ourselves to
every man's conscience in the sight of God."[37]

This is probably the simplest and most complete directory for the
preaching of the Gospel. The preacher is to make the truth manifest.
It is implied in what has just been said, that one great hindrance to
its manifestation may easily be its treatment by the preacher himself.
If he wishes to do anything else at the same time, the manifestation
will not take effect. If he wishes, in the very act of preaching, to
conciliate a class, or an interest; to create an opinion in favour of
his own learning, ability, or eloquence; to enlist sympathy for a
cause or an institution which is only accidentally connected with the
Gospel,--the truth will not be seen, and it will not tell. The truth,
we are further taught here, makes its appeal to the conscience; it is
there that God's witness in its favour resides. Now, the conscience is
the moral nature of man, or the moral element in his nature; it is
this, therefore, which the preacher has to address. Does not this
involve a certain directness and simplicity of method, a certain
plainness and urgency also, which it is far easier to miss than to
find? Conscience is not the abstract logical faculty in man, and the
preacher's business is therefore not to prove, but to proclaim, the
Gospel. All he has to do is to let it be seen, and the more nakedly
visible it is the better. His object is not to frame an irrefragable
argument, but to produce an irresistible impression. There is no such
thing as an argument to which it is impossible for a wilful man to
make objections; at least there is no such thing in the sphere of
Christian truth. Even if there were, men would object to it on that
very ground. They would say that, in matters of this description, when
logic went too far, it amounted to moral intimidation, and that in the
interests of liberty they were entitled to protest against it.
Practically, this is what Voltaire said of Pascal.[38] But there is
such a thing as an irresistible impression,--an impression made upon
the moral nature against which it is vain to attempt any protest; an
impression, which subdues and holds the soul for ever. When the truth
is manifested, and men see it, this is the effect to be looked for;
this, consequently, is the preacher's aim. In the sight of God--that
is, acting with absolute sincerity--Paul trusted to this simple method
to recommend himself to men. He brought no letters of introduction
from others; he had no artifices of his own; he held up the truth in
its unadorned integrity till it told upon the conscience of his
hearers; and after that, he needed no other witness. The same
conversions which accredited the power of the message accredited the
character of him who bore it.

To this line of argument there is a very obvious reply. What, it may
be asked, of those on whom "the manifestation of the truth" produces
no effect? What of those who in spite of all this plain appeal to
conscience neither see nor feel anything? It is sadly obvious that
this is no mere supposition; the Gospel remains a secret, an impotent
ineffective secret, to many who hear it again and again. Paul faces
the difficulty without flinching, though the answer is appalling. "If
our Gospel _is_ veiled (and the melancholy fact cannot be denied), it
is veiled in the case of the perishing." The fact that it remains
hidden from some men is their condemnation; it marks them out as
persons on the way to destruction. The Apostle proceeds to explain
himself further. As far as the rationale can be given of what is
finally irrational, he interprets the moral situation for us. The
perishing people in question are unbelievers, whose thoughts, or
minds, the god of this world has blinded.[39] The intention of this
blinding is conveyed in the last words of ver. 4: "that the
illumination which proceeds from the Gospel, the Gospel of the glory
of Christ, who is the image of God, may not dawn upon them."

Let these solemn words appeal to our hearts and consciences, before we
attempt to criticise them. Let us have a due impression of the
stupendous facts to which they refer, before we raise difficulties
about them, or say rashly that the expression is disproportioned to
the truth. To St. Paul the Gospel was a very great thing. A light
issued from it so dazzling, so overwhelming, in its splendour and
illuminative power, that it might well appear incredible that men
should not see it. The powers counteracting it, "the world-rulers of
this darkness," must surely, to judge by their success, have an
immense influence. Even more than an immense influence, they must have
an immense malignity. For what a blessedness it meant for men, that
that light should dawn upon them! What a deprivation and loss, that
its brightness should be obscured! Paul's whole sense of the might and
malignity of the powers of darkness is condensed in the title which he
here gives to their head--"_the god_ of this world." It is literally
"of this age," the period of time which extends to Christ's coming
again. The dominion of evil is not unlimited, in duration; but while
it lasts it is awful in its intensity and range. It does not seem an
extravagance to the Apostle to describe Satan as the god of the
present æon; and if it seems extravagant to us, we may remind
ourselves that our Saviour also twice speaks of him as "_the prince_
of this world." Who but Christ Himself, or a soul like St. Paul in
complete sympathy with the mind and work of Christ, is capable of
seeing and feeling the incalculable mass of the forces which are at
work in the world to defeat the Gospel? What sleepy conscience, what
moral mediocrity, itself purblind, only dimly conscious of the height
of the Christian calling, and vexed by no aspirations toward it, has
any right to say that it is too much to call Satan "the god of this
world"? Such sleepy consciences have no idea of the omnipresence, the
steady persistent pressure, the sleepless malignity, of the evil
forces which beset man's life. They have no idea of the extent to
which these forces frustrate the love of God in the Gospel, and rob
men of their inheritance in Christ. To ask why men _should_ be exposed
to such forces is another, and here an irrelevant, question. What St.
Paul saw, and what becomes apparent to every one in proportion as his
interest in evangelising becomes intense, is that evil has a power and
dominion in the world, which are betrayed, by their counteracting of
the Gospel, to be purely malignant--in other words, Satanic--and the
dimensions of which no description can exaggerate. Call such powers
Satan, or what you please, but do not imagine that they are
inconsiderable. During this age they _reign_; they have virtually
taken what should be God's place in the world.

It is the necessary complement of this assertion of the malign
dominion of evil, when St. Paul tells us that it is exercised in the
case of unbelievers. It is their minds which the god of this world has
blinded. We need not try to investigate more narrowly the relations of
these two aspects of the facts. We need not say that the dominion of
evil produces unbelief, though this is true (John iii. 18, 19); or
that unbelief gives Satan his opportunity; or even that unbelief and
the blindness here referred to are reciprocally cause and effect of
each other. The moral interests involved are protected by the fact
that blindness is only predicated in the case in which the Gospel has
been rejected by individual unbelief; and the mere individualism,
which is the source of so many heresies, doctrinal and practical, is
excluded by the recognition of spiritual forces as operative among men
which are far more wide-reaching than any individual knows. Nor ought
we to overlook the suggestion of pity, and even of hope, for the
perishing, in the contrast between their darkness and the illumination
which the Gospel of the glory of Christ lights up. The perishing are
not the lost; the unbelievers may yet believe: "in our deepest
darkness, we know the direction of the light" (Beet). Final unbelief
would mean final ruin; but we are not entitled to make sense the
measure of spiritual things, and to argue that because we see men
blind and unbelieving now they are bound for ever to remain so. In
preaching the Gospel we must preach with hope that the light is
stronger than the darkness, and able, even at the deepest, to drive it
away. Only, when we see, as we sometimes will, how dense and
impenetrable the darkness is, we cannot but cry with the Apostle, "Who
is sufficient for these things?"

This passage is one of those in which the subject of the Gospel is
distinctly enunciated: it is the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who
is the image of God. The glory of Christ, or, which is the same thing,
Christ in His glory, is the sum and substance of it, that which gives
it both its contents and its character. Paul's conception of the
Gospel is inspired and controlled from beginning to end by the
appearance of the Lord which resulted in his conversion. In the First
Epistle to the Corinthians (i. 18, 23), and in the Epistle to the
Galatians (vi. 14), he seems to find what is essential and
distinguishing in the Cross rather than the Throne; but this is
probably due to the fact that the significance of the Cross had been
virtually denied by those for whom His words are meant. The Christ
whom he preached had died, and died, as the next chapter will make
very prominent, to reconcile the world to God; but Paul preached Him
as he had seen Him on that ever-memorable day; with all the virtue of
His atoning death in it, the Gospel was yet the Gospel of _His glory_.
It is in the combination of these two that the supreme power of the
Gospel lies. In the distaste for the supernatural which has prevailed
so widely, many have tried to ignore this, and to get out of the Cross
alone an inspiration which it cannot yield if severed from the Throne.
Had the story of Jesus ended with the words "suffered under Pontius
Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried," it is very certain that
these words would never have formed part of a Creed--there would never
have been such a thing as the Christian religion. But when these words
are combined with what follows--"He rose again from the dead on the
third day, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of
God the Father"--we have the basis which religion requires; we have a
living Lord, in whom all the redemptive virtue of a sinless life and
death is treasured up, and who is able to save to the uttermost all
that trust Him. It is not the emotions excited by the spectacle of the
Passion, any more than the admiration evoked by the contemplation of
Christ's life, that save; it is the Lord of glory, who lived that life
of love, and in love endured that agony, and who is now enthroned at
God's right hand. The life and death in one sense form part of His
glory, in another they are a foil to it; He could not have been our
Saviour but for them; He would not be our Saviour unless He had
triumphed over them, and entered into a glory beyond.

When the Apostle speaks of Christ as the image of God, we must not let
extraneous associations with this title deflect us from the true line
of his thought. It is still the Exalted One of whom he is speaking:
there is no other Christ for him. In that face which flashed upon him
by Damascus twenty years before, he had seen, and always saw, all that
man could see of the invisible God. It represented for him, and for
all to whom he preached, the Sovereignty and the Redeeming Love of
God, as completely as man could understand them. It evoked those
ascriptions of praise which a Jew was accustomed to offer to God
alone. It inspired doxologies. When it passed before the inward eye of
the Apostle, he worshipped: "to Him," he said, "be the glory and the
dominion for ever and ever." Whether the pre-incarnate Son was also
the image of God, and whether the same title is applicable to Jesus of
Nazareth, are separate questions. If they are raised, they must be
answered in the affirmative, with the necessary qualifications; but
they are quite irrelevant here. Much misunderstanding of the Pauline
Gospel would have been prevented if men could have remembered that
what was only of secondary importance to them, and even of doubtful
certainty--namely, the exaltation of Christ--was itself the foundation
of the Apostle's Christianity, the one indubitable fact from which his
whole knowledge of Christ, and his whole conception of the Gospel, set
forth. Christ on the throne was, if one may say so, a more immediate
certainty to Paul, than Jesus on the banks of the lake, or even Jesus
on the cross. It may not be natural or easy for _us_ to start thus;
but if we do not make the effort, we shall involuntarily dislocate and
distort the whole system of his thoughts.

In the fourth verse the stress is logically, if not grammatically, on
Christ. "The Gospel of the glory of _Christ_," I say. "For we preach
not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your
servants for Jesus' sake." Perhaps ambition had been laid to Paul's
charge; "the necessity of being first" is one of the last infirmities
of noble minds. But the Gospel is too magnificent to have any room for
thoughts of self. A proud man may make a nation, or even a Church, the
instrument or the arena of his pride; he may find in it the field of
his ambition, and make it subservient to his own exaltation. But the
defence which Paul has offered of his truthfulness in chap. i. is as
capable of application here. No one whom Christ has seized, subdued,
and made wholly His own for ever, can practise the arts of
self-advancement in Christ's service. The two are mutually exclusive.
Paul preaches Christ Jesus as Lord--the absolute character in which he
knows Him; as for himself, he is every man's servant for Jesus' sake.
He obtained mercy, that he might be found faithful in service: the
very name of Jesus kills pride in his heart, and makes him ready to
minister even to the unthankful and evil.

This is the force of the "for" with which the sixth verse begins. It is
as if he had written, "With our experience, no other course is possible
to us; for it is God, who said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who
shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ." But the connexion here is of little
importance in comparison with the grandeur of the contents. In this
verse we have the first glimpse of the Pauline doctrine, explicitly
stated in the next chapter--"that if any man be in Christ, he is a new
creature." The Apostle finds the only adequate parallel to his own
conversion in that grand creative act in which God brought light, by a
word, out of the darkness of chaos. It is not forcing the figure unduly,
nor losing its poetic virtue, to think of gloom and disorder as the
condition of the soul on which the Sun of Righteousness has not risen.
Neither is it putting any strain upon it to make it suggest that only
the creative word of God can dispel the darkness, and give the beauty of
life and order to what was waste and void. There is one point, indeed,
in which the miracle of grace is more wonderful than that of creation.
God only commanded the light to shine out of darkness when time began;
but He shone Himself in the Apostle's heart: _Ipse lux nostra_ (Bengel).
He shone "to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the
face of Jesus Christ." In that light which God flashed into his heart,
he saw the face of Jesus Christ, and knew that the glory which shone
there was the glory of God. What these words mean has already been
explained. In the face of Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory, Paul saw
God's Redeeming Love upon the throne of the universe; it had descended
deeper than sin and death; it was exalted now above all heavens; it
filled all things. That sight he carried with him everywhere; it was his
salvation and his Gospel, the inspiration of his inmost life, and the
motive of all his labours. One who owed all this to Christ was not
likely to make Christ's service the theatre of his own ambitions; he
could not do anything but take the servant's place, and proclaim Jesus
Christ as Lord.

There is a difficulty in the last half of ver. 6: it is not clear what
precisely meant by πρὸς φωτισμὸν τῆς γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ Θεοῦ κ.τ.λ.
By some the passage is rendered: God shined in our hearts, "that _He_
might bring into the light (for _us_ to see it) the knowledge of His
glory," etc. This is certainly legitimate, and strikes me as the most
natural interpretation. It would answer then to what Paul says in Gal.
i. 15 f., referring to the same event: "It pleased God to reveal His Son
in me." But others think all this is covered by the words "God shined in
our hearts," and they take πρὸς φωτισμὸν κ.τ.λ., as a description of the
apostolic vocation: God shined in our hearts, "that _we_ might bring
into the light (for _others_ to see) the knowledge of His glory," etc.
The words would then answer to what follows in Gal. i. 16: God revealed
His Son in me, "that I might preach Him among the heathen." This
construction is possible, but I think forced. In Paul's experience his
conversion and vocation were indissolubly connected; but πρὸς φωτισμὸν
κ.τ.λ., can only mean one, and the conversion is the likelier.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Expositors seem to be agreed that in this passage there is a
reference, more or less definite and particular, to the Judaising
opponents of St. Paul at Corinth. This may be admitted, but is not to
be forced. It is forced, _e.g._, by Schmiedel, who habitually reads
St. Paul as if (1) he had been expressly accused of everything which
he says he does not do, and (2) as if he deliberately retorted on his
opponents every charge he denied. Press this as he does, and whole
passages of the Epistles become a series of covert insinuations--a
kind of calumnious conundrums--instead of frank and _bona fide_
statements of Christian principle. The result condemns the process.

[38] "Il voulut se servir de la supériorité de ce génie, comme les
rois de leur puissance; il crut tout soumettre, et tout abaisser par
la force."

[39] Grammarians differ much as to the relation of τῶν ἀπίστων ("which
believe not") to ἐν οἶς ("in whom"). I have no doubt they are the
same. The natural way for the Apostle to express himself would have
been: "it is veiled in them that are perishing, whose minds the god of
this world blinded." But he wished to include the moral aspect of the
case, the side of the personal responsibility of the perishing, as of
equal significance with the agency of Satan; and this is what he does
by adding τῶν ἀπίστων. Hence, though the expression is capable of
being grammatically tortured into something different (the perishing
becoming only _a part_ of the unbelieving--so Meyer), it is, by its
sheer grammatical awkwardness, exempted from liability to such
rigorous treatment, and brought under the rules, not of grammar, but
of common sense.

                                  XII

                         _THE VICTORY OF FAITH_

    "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding
    greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves; _we
    are_ pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not
    unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not
    destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that
    the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body. For we which
    live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life
    also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death
    worketh in us, but life in you. But having the same spirit of faith,
    according to that which is written, I believed, and therefore did I
    speak; we also believe, and therefore also we speak; knowing that He
    which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also with Jesus,
    and shall present us with you. For all things _are_ for your sakes,
    that the grace, being multiplied through the many, may cause the
    thanksgiving to abound unto the glory of God.

    "Wherefore we faint not; but though our outward man is decaying, yet
    our inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction,
    which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an
    eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are
    seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are
    seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are
    eternal."--2 COR. iv. 7-18 (R.V.).

In the opening verses of this chapter Paul has magnified his office,
and his equipment for it. He has risen to a great height, poetic and
spiritual, in speaking of the Lord of glory, and of the light which
shines from His face for the illumining and redemption of men. The
disproportion between his own nature and powers, and the high calling
to which he has been called, flashes across his mind. It is quite
possible that this disproportion, viewed with a malignant eye, had
been made matter of reproach by his adversaries. "Who," they may have
said, "is this man, who soars to such heights, and makes such
extraordinary claims? The part does not suit him; he is quite unequal
to it; his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible." It
is possible, further, though I hardly think it probable, that the very
sufferings Paul endured in his apostolic work were cast in his teeth
by Jewish teachers at Corinth; they were read by these spiteful
interpreters as signs of God's wrath, the judgment of the Almighty on
a wanton subverter of His law. But surely it is not too much to
suppose that Paul could sometimes think unchallenged. A soul as great
and as sensitive as his might well be struck by the contrast which
pervades this passage without requiring to have it suggested by the
malice of his foes. The interpretation which he puts upon the contrast
is not merely a happy artifice (so Calvin), and still less a _tour de
force_; it is a profound truth, a favourite, if one may say so, in the
New Testament, and of universal application.

"We have this treasure," he writes--the treasure of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, including the apostolic
vocation to diffuse that knowledge--"we have this treasure in earthen
vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power [which it exercises,
and which is exhibited in sustaining us in our function] may be seen to
be God's, and not from us." Earthen vessels are fragile, and what the
word immediately suggests is no doubt bodily weakness, and especially
mortality; but the nature of some of the trials referred to in vv. 8 and
9 (ἀπορούμενοι, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐξαπορύμενοι) shows that it would be a mistake
to confine the meaning to the body. The earthen vessel which holds the
priceless treasure of the knowledge of God--the lamp of frail ware in
which the light of Christ's glory shines for the illumination of the
world--is human nature as it is; man's body in its weakness, and
liability to death; his mind with its limitations and confusions; his
moral nature with its distortions and misconceptions, and its insight
not yet half restored. It was not merely in his physique that Paul felt
the disparity between himself and his calling to preach the Gospel of
the glory of Christ; it was in his whole being. But instead of finding
in this disparity reason to doubt his vocation, he saw in it an
illustration of a great law of God. It served to protect the truth that
_salvation is of the Lord_. No one who saw the exceeding greatness of
the power which the Gospel exercised--not only in sustaining its
preachers under persecution, but in transforming human nature, and
making bad men good--no one who saw this, and looked at a preacher like
Paul, could dream that the explanation lay in _him_. Not in an ugly
little Jew, without presence, without eloquence, without the means to
bribe or to compel, could the source of such courage, the cause of such
transformations, be found; it must be sought, not in him, but in God.
"God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;
and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things
which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are
despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to
nought things which are." And the end of it all is that he which
glorieth should glory _in the Lord_.

This verse is never without its application; and though the contempt
of the world did not suggest it to St. Paul, it may naturally enough
recall it to us. One would sometimes think, from the tone of current
literature, that no person with gifts above contempt is any longer
identified with the Gospel. Clever men, we are told, do not become
preachers now--still less do they go to church. They find it
impossible to have real or sincere intellectual intercourse with
Christian ministers. Perhaps this is not so alarming as the clever
people think. There always have been men in the world so clever that
God could make no use of them; they could never do His work, because
they were so lost in admiration of their own. But God's work never
depended on them, and it does not depend on them now. It depends on
those who, when they see Jesus Christ, become unconscious, once and
for ever, of all that they have been used to call their wisdom and
their strength--on those who are but earthen vessels in which
another's jewel is kept, lamps of clay in which another's light
shines. The kingdom of God has not changed its administration since
the first century; its supreme law is still the glory of God, and not
the glory of the clever men; and we may be quite sure it will not
change. God will always have his work done by instruments who are
willing to have it clear that the exceeding greatness of the power is
His, and not theirs.

The eighth and ninth verses illustrate the contrast between Paul's
weakness and God's power. In the series of participles which the Apostle
uses, the earthen vessel is represented by the first in each pair, the
divine power by the second. "We are pressed on every side, but not
straitened"--_i.e._, not brought into a narrow place from which there is
no escape. "We are perplexed, but not unto despair," or, preserving the
relation between the words of the original, "put to it, but not utterly
put out." This distinctly suggests inward rather than merely bodily
trials, or at least the inward aspect of these: constantly at a loss,
the Apostle nevertheless constantly finds the solution of his problems.
"Pursued, but not abandoned"--_i.e._, not left in the enemy's hands.
"Smitten down, but not destroyed": even when trouble has done its worst,
when the persecuted man has been overtaken and struck to the ground, the
blow is not fatal, and he rises again. All these partial contrasts of
human weakness and Divine power are condensed and concentrated in the
tenth verse in one great contrast, the two sides of which are presented
in their divinely intended relation to each other: "always bearing about
in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be
manifested in our body." And this again, with its mystical poetic
aspect, especially in the first clause, is reaffirmed and rendered into
prose in ver. 11: "For we, alive as we are, are ever being delivered
unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be
manifested in our mortal flesh."

Paul does not say that he bears about in his body the death of Jesus
(θάνατος), but his dying (νέκρωσις, _mortificatio_), the process which
produces death. The sufferings which come upon him daily in his work for
Jesus are gradually killing him; the pains, the perils, the spiritual
pressure, the excitement of danger and the excitement of deliverance,
are wearing out his strength, and soon he must die. In the very same way
Jesus Himself had spent His strength and died, and in that life of
weakness and suffering which was always bringing him nearer the grave,
Paul felt himself in intimate sympathetic communion with his Master: it
was "the dying _of Jesus_" that he carried about in his body. But that
was not all. In spite of the dying, he was not dead. Perpetually in
peril, he had a perpetual series of escapes; perpetually at his wits
end, his way perpetually opened before him. What was the explanation of
that? It was _the life of Jesus_ manifesting itself in his body. The
life of Jesus can only mean the life which Jesus lives now at God's
right hand; and these repeated escapes of the Apostle, these
restorations of his courage, are manifestations of that life; they are,
so to speak, a series of resurrections. Paul's communion with Jesus is
not only in His dying, but in His rising again; he has the evidence of
the Resurrection, because he has its power, present with him, in these
constant deliverances and renewals. Nay, the very purpose of his
sufferings and perils is to provide occasion for the manifestation of
this resurrection life. Unless he were exposed to death, God could not
deliver him from it; unless he were pressed in the spirit, God could not
give him relief; there could be no setting off of the exceeding
greatness of His power in contrast with the exceeding frailty of the
earthen vessel. The use of body and of mortal flesh in these verses has
been appealed to in support of an interpretation which would limit the
meaning to what is merely physical: "I am in daily danger of death, God
daily delivers me from it, and thus the life of Jesus is manifested in
me." This is of course included in the interpretation given above; but I
cannot suppose it is all the Apostle meant. The truth is, there is no
such thing in the passage, or indeed in human life, as a merely physical
experience. To be delivered to death _for Jesus' sake_ is an experience
which is at once and indissolubly physical and spiritual; it could not
be, unless the soul had its part, and that the chief part, in it. To be
delivered _from_ such death is also an experience as much spiritual as
physical. And in both aspects, and not least in the first, is the life
of Jesus manifested. Nor can I see that it is in the least degree
unnatural for one who feels this to speak of that life as being
manifested in his "body," or in his "mortal flesh"; it is a way which
all men understand of describing the human nature, which is the scene of
the manifestation, as a frail and powerless thing.

The moral of the passage is similar to that of chap. i. 3-11.
Suffering, for the Christian, is not an accident; it is a divine
appointment and a divine opportunity. To wear life out in the service
of Jesus is to open it to the entrance of Jesus' life; it is to
receive, in all its alleviations, in all its renewals, in all its
deliverances, a witness to His resurrection. Perhaps it is only by
accepting this service, with the daily dying it demands, that that
witness can be given to us; and "the life of Jesus" on His throne may
become inapprehensible and unreal in proportion as we decline to bear
about in our bodies His dying. All who have commented on this passage
have noticed the iteration of the name of Jesus. _Singulariter sensit
Paulus dulcedinem ejus._ Schmiedel explains the repetition as partly
accidental, and partly indicative of the fact that Christ's death is
here regarded as a purely human occurrence, and not as a redemptive
deed of the Messiah. This points in the right direction, though it may
fairly be doubted whether Paul would have drawn this distinction, or
could even have been made to understand it. The analytic tendency of
the modern mind often disintegrates what depends for its virtue on
being kept whole and entire, and this seems to me a case in point. The
use of the name Jesus rather indicates that, in recalling the actual
events of his own career, Paul saw them run continually parallel to
events in the career of Another; they were one in kind with that
painful series of incidents which ended in the death of the historical
Saviour. People have often sought in the Epistles of Paul for traces
of a knowledge of Christ like that which is conserved in the first
three Gospels; in this expression, τὴν νέκρωσιν τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, and in the
repetition of the historical proper name, there is an indirect but
quite convincing proof that the general character of Christ's life was
known to the Apostle. And though he does not dwell on Christ's
sympathy with the fulness and power of the writer to the Hebrews, it
is evident from this passage that he was in sympathetic fellowship
with One who had suffered as he suffered, and that even to name His
human name was consolation.

In ver. 12 an abrupt conclusion is drawn from all that precedes: "So
then death worketh in us, but life in you." _Ironice dictum_, is
Calvin's comment, and the words are at least intelligible if so taken.
The stinging passage beginning at chap. iv. 8 of the First Epistle is
ironical in precisely this sense--"We are fools for Christ's sake, but
ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye have glory,
but we have dishonour": this is as it were a variation on the theme
"death worketh in us, but life in you." Still, the irony does not seem
in place here: Paul writes in all seriousness that the sufferings
which he endures as a preacher of the Gospel, and which eventually
bring death to him--which are the approaches of death, or death itself
at work--are the means by which life, in the most unqualified sense,
comes to be at work in the Corinthians. If the death and life which
are in view wherever the Gospel appears are to be distributed among
them, the death is his, and the life theirs; the dying of Jesus is
borne about by the Evangelist, while those who accept the message he
brings at this cost are made partakers in Jesus' life.

Not indeed that the contrast can be thus absolute: the thirteenth
verse corrects this hasty inference. If death alone were at work in
St. Paul, it would frustrate his vocation; he would not be able to
preach at all. But he is able to preach. In spite of all the
discouragement which his sufferings might beget, his faith remains
vigorous; he is conscious of possessing that same confidence toward
God which animated the ancient Psalmist to sing, "I believed,
therefore I spoke." "We also," he says, "believe, and therefore also
we speak." What he believes, and what prompts his utterance, we read
in the thirteenth verse: "We speak; knowing that He who raised Jesus
shall raise us also like[40] Jesus, and shall present us with you.
With you, I say: for the whole thing is for your sakes, that the
grace, having become abundant, may by means of many[41] cause the
thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God."

What an interesting illustration this is of the communion of the saints!
Paul recognises a spiritual kinsman in the writer of the Psalm;[42]
faith in God, the power which faith confers, the obligations which
faith imposes, are the same in all ages. He recognises spiritual kinsmen
in the Corinthians also. All his sufferings have their interest in view,
and it is part of his joy, as he looks on to the future, that when God
raises him from the dead, as He raised His own Son, He will present him
_along with them_. Their unity will not be dissolved by death. The word
here rendered "present" has often a technical sense in Paul's Epistles;
it is almost appropriated to the presenting of men before the
judgment-seat of Christ. Good scholars insist on that meaning here; but
even with the proviso that acceptance in the judgment is taken for
granted, I cannot feel that it is quite congruous. There is such a thing
as presentation to a sovereign as well as to a judge--the presenting of
the bride to the bridegroom on the wedding day as well as of the
criminal to the justice--and it is the great and glad occasion which
answers to the feeling in the Apostle's mind. The communion of the
saints, in virtue of which his sufferings bring blessing to the
Corinthians, has its issue in the joyful union of all before the throne.
As Paul thinks of that, he sees an end in the Gospel lying beyond the
blessing it brings to men. That end is God's glory. The more he toils
and suffers, the more God's grace is made known and received; and the
more it is received, the more does it cause thanksgiving to abound to
the glory of God.

Two practical reflections present themselves here, nearly related to
each other. The first is that faith naturally speaks; the second, that
grace merits thanksgiving. Put the two into one, and we may say that
grace received by faith merits articulate thanksgiving. Much modern
faith is inarticulate, and it is far too soothing to be true if we
say, Better so. Of course the utterance of faith is not prescribed to
it; to be of any value it must be spontaneous. Not all the believing
are to be teachers and preachers, but all are to be confessors. Every
one who has faith has a witness to bear to God. Every one who has
accepted God's grace by faith has a thankful acknowledgment of it to
make, and at some time or other to make in words. It is not the
faculty of speech that is wanting where this is not done; it is
courage and gratitude; it is the same Spirit of faith which prompted
the Psalmist and St. Paul. It is true that hypocrites sometimes speak,
and that testimonies and thanksgivings are apt to be discredited on
their account; but bad money would never be put in circulation unless
good money was indisputably valuable. It is not the dumb, but the
confessing Christian, not the taciturn, but the outspokenly thankful,
who glorifies God, and helps on the Gospel. Calvin is properly severe
on our "pseudo-nicodemi," who make a merit of their silence, and boast
that they have never by a syllable betrayed their faith. Faith is
betrayed in another and more serious sense when it is kept secret.

But to return to the Apostle, who himself, at ver. 16, returns to the
beginning of the chapter, and resumes the οὐκ ἐγκακοῦμεν of ver. 1:
"Wherefore we faint not." "Wherefore" means "With all that has been said
in view"; not only the glorious future in which Paul and his disciples
are to be raised and presented together to Christ, but his daily
experience of the life of Jesus manifested in his mortal flesh. This
kept him brave and strong. "We faint not; but though our outward man is
decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day." The outward man
covers the same area as "our body," or "our mortal flesh." It is human
nature as it is constituted in this world--a weak, fragile, perishable
thing. Paul could not mistake, and did not hide from himself, the effect
which his apostolic work had upon him. He saw it was killing him. He was
old long before the time. He was a sorely broken man at an age when many
are in the fulness of their strength. The earthen vessel was visibly
crumbling. Still, that was not the _whole_ of his experience. "The
inward man is renewed day by day." The meaning of these words must be
fixed mainly by the opposition in which they stand to οὐκ ἐγκακοῦμεν
("we faint not"). The same word (ἀνακαινοῦσθαι) is used of the renewal
of the soul in the Creator's image (Col. iii. 10)--_i.e._, of the work
of sanctification; but the opposition in question proves that this is
not contemplated here. We must rather think of the daily supply of
spiritual power for apostolic service--of the new strength and joy which
were given to St. Paul every morning, in spite of the toils and
sufferings which every day exhausted him. Of course we can say of all
people, bad as well as good, "The outward man is decaying." Time tires
the stoutest runner, crumbles the compactest wall. But we cannot say of
all, "The inward man is renewed day by day." That is not the
compensation of every one; it is the compensation of those whose outward
man has decayed in Jesus' service, who have been worn out in labours for
His sake. It is they, and they only, who have a life within which is
independent of outward conditions, which sufferings and deaths cannot
crush, and which never grows old. The decay of the outward man in the
godless is a melancholy spectacle, for it is the decay of everything; in
the Christian it does not touch that life which is hid with Christ in
God, and which is in the soul itself a well of water springing up to
life eternal.

But who shall speak of the two great verses in which the Apostle,
leaving controversy out of sight, solemnly weighs against each other
time and eternity, the seen and the unseen, and claims his inheritance
beyond? "Our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us
more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look
not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not
seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which
are not seen are eternal." One can imagine that he was dictating quick
and eagerly as he began the sentence; he "crowds and hurries and
precipitates" the grand contrasts of which his mind is full.
Affliction in any case is outweighed by glory, but the affliction in
question is a light matter, the glory a great weight: the light
affliction is but momentary--it ends with death at the latest, it may
end in the coming of Jesus to anticipate death; the weight of glory is
eternal; and as if this were not enough, the light affliction which is
but for a moment works out for us the weight of glory which endures
for ever, "in excess and to excess," in a way above conception, to a
degree above conception: it works out for us the things which eye hath
not seen, nor ear heard, nor man's heart conceived, "all that God has
prepared for them that love Him" (1 Cor. ii. 9). If Paul spoke fast
and with beating heart as he crowded all this into two brief lines, we
can well believe that the pressure was relaxed, and that the pen moved
more steadily and slowly over the contemplative words that follow:
"while we look not to the things which are seen, but to the things
which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but
the things which are not seen are eternal." This sentence is sometimes
translated conditionally: "provided we look," etc. This is legitimate,
but unnecessary. The Apostle is speaking, in the first instance, of
himself, and the looking is taken for granted. The look is not merely
equivalent to vision; it means that the unseen is the goal of him who
looks. The eye is to be directed to it, not as an indifferent object,
but as a mark to aim at, an end to attain. This observation goes some
way to limit the application of the whole passage. The contrast of
things seen and things unseen is sometimes taken in a latitude which
deprives it of much of its force: psychology and metaphysics are
dragged in to define and to confuse the Apostle's thought. But
everything here is practical. The things seen are to all intents and
purposes that tempest-tossed life of which St. Paul has been speaking,
that daily dying, that pressure, perplexity, persecution, and
downcasting, which are for the present his lot. To these he does not
look: in comparison with that to which he does look, these are a light
and momentary affliction which is not worth a thought. Similarly, the
things unseen are not everything, indefinitely, which is invisible; to
all intents and purposes they are the glory of Christ. It is on this
the Apostle's eye is fixed, this which is his goal. The stormy life,
even when most is made of its storms, passes; but Christ's glory can
never pass. It is infinite, inconceivable, eternal. There is an
inheritance in it for all who keep their eyes upon it, and, sustained
by a hope so high, bear the daily death of a life like Paul's as a
light and momentary affliction. The connexion between the two is so
close that the one is said to work for us the other. By divine
appointment they are united; fellowship with Jesus is fellowship all
through--in the daily dying, which soon has done its worst, and then
in the endless life. We may say, if we please, that the glory is the
reward of the suffering; it would be truer to say that it was its
compensation, truer still that it was its fruit. There is a vital
connexion between them, but no one can imagine he is reading Paul's
thought who should find here the idea that the trivial service of man
can make God his debtor for so vast a sum. The excellency of the power
which raises the earthen vessel to this height of faith, hope, and
inspiration is itself God's, and God's alone.

Distrust of the supernatural, insistence on the present and the
practical, and the pride of a self-styled common sense, have done much
to rob modern Christianity of this vast horizon, to blind it to this
heavenly vision. But wherever the life of Jesus is being manifested in
mortal flesh--wherever in His service and for His sake men and women
die daily, wearing out nature, but with spirit ceaselessly
renewed--there the unseen becomes real again. Such people know that
what they do is not for one dead, but for One who lives; they know
that the daily inspirations they receive, the hopes, the deliverances,
are wrought in them, not by themselves, but by One who has all power
in heaven and on earth. The things that are unseen and eternal stand
out as what they are in relation to lives like these; to other lives,
they have no relation at all. A worldly and selfish career does not
work out an exceeding and eternal weight of glory, and therefore to
the worldly and selfish man heaven is for ever an unpractical,
incredible thing. But it not only comes out in its brightness, it
comes out as a mighty inspiration and support, to every one who bears
about in his body the dying of Jesus; as he fastens his eye upon it,
he takes heart anew, and in spite of daily dying "faints not."

FOOTNOTES:

[40] Σὺν Ἰησοῦ is the true reading: sameness of kind is meant, not of
time.

[41] Διὰ τῶν πλειόνων is construed in the R.V. with πλεονάσασα (so
Meyer): De Wette takes it as above; in the A.V. the διὰ is made to
govern τὴν εὐχαριστίαν. There is no grammatical decision certain here.

[42] The Hebrew Psalm cxvi. 10 is at this precise point practically
unintelligible, but that does not justify any one in saying that the
fine thought of the Apostle is utterly foreign to the original text.
The open confession of God, as a duty of faith, pervades the psalm
from this point to the end (the verses beginning Ἐπίστευσα διὸ ἐλάλησα
make a psalm by themselves in the LXX.).

                                  XIII

                          _THE CHRISTIAN HOPE_

    "For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be
    dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands,
    eternal, in the heavens. For verily in this we groan, longing to be
    clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven: if so be that
    being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in
    this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be
    unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal
    may be swallowed up of life. Now He that wrought us for this very
    thing is God, who gave unto us the earnest of the Spirit. Being
    therefore always of good courage, and knowing that, whilst we are at
    home in the body, we are absent from the Lord (for we walk by faith,
    not by sight); we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather
    to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.
    Wherefore also we make it our aim, whether at home or absent, to be
    well-pleasing unto Him. For we must all be made manifest before the
    judgment-seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things _done_
    in the body, according to what he hath done, whether _it be_ good or
    bad."--2 COR. v. 1-10 (R.V.).

That outlook on the future, which at the close of chap. iv. is presented
in the most general terms, is here carried out by the Apostle into more
definite detail. The passage is one of the most difficult in his
writings, and has received the most various interpretations; yet the
first impression it leaves on a simple reader is probably as near the
truth as the subtlest ingenuity of exegesis. It is indeed to such first
impressions that one often returns when the mind has ceased to sway this
way and that under the impact of conflicting arguments.

The Apostle has been speaking about his life as a daily dying, and in
the first verse of this chapter he looks at the possibility that this
dying may be consummated in death. It is only a possibility, for to
the end of his life it was always conceivable that Christ might come,
and forestall the last enemy. Still, it _is_ a possibility; the
earthly house of our tabernacle may be dissolved; the tent in which we
live may be taken down. With what hope does the Apostle confront such
a contingency? "If this befall us," he says, "we have a building from
God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens." Every word
here points the contrast between this new house and the old one, and
points it in favour of the new. The old was a tent; the new is a
building: the old, though not literally made with hands, had many of
the qualities and defects of manufactured articles; the new is God's
work and God's gift: the old was perishable; the new is eternal. When
Paul says we have this house _in the heavens_, it is plain that it is
not heaven itself; it is a new body which replaces and surpasses the
old. It is in the heavens in the sense that it is God's gift; it is
something which He has for us where He is, and which we shall wear
there. "We have it" means "it is ours"; any more precise definition
must be justified on grounds extraneous to the text.

The second verse brings us to one of the ambiguities of the passage.
"For verily," our R.V. reads, "in this we groan, longing to be clothed
upon with our habitation which is from heaven." The meaning which the
English reader finds in the words "in this we groan" is in all
probability "in our present body we groan." This is also the meaning
defended by Meyer, and by many scholars. But it cannot be denied that
ἐν τούτῳ does not naturally refer to ἡ ἐπίγειος ἡμῶν οἰκία τοῦ
σκήνους. If it means "in this body," it must be attached specially to
σκήνους, and σκήνους is only a subordinate word in the clause.
Elsewhere in the New Testament ἐν τούτῳ means "on this account," or
"for this reason" (see 1 Cor. iv. 4; John xvi. 30: Ἐν τούτῳ πιστεύομεν
ὅτι ἀπὸ Θεοῦ ἐξῆλθες), and I prefer to take it in this sense here:
"For this cause--_i.e._, because we are the heirs of such a hope--we
groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from
heaven." If Paul had no hope, he would not sigh for the future; but
the very longing which pressed the sighs from his bosom became itself
a witness to the glory which awaited him. The same argument, it has
often been pointed out, is found in Rom. viii. 19 ff. The earnest
expectation of the creation, waiting for the manifestation of the sons
of God, is evidence that this manifestation will in due time take
place. The spiritual instincts are prophetic. They have not been
implanted in the soul by God only to be disappointed. It is of the
longing hope of immortality--that very hope which is in question
here--that Jesus says: "If it were not so, I would have told you."

The third verse states the great gain which lies in the fulfilment of
this hope: "Since, of course, being clothed [with this new body], we
shall not be found naked [_i.e._, without any body]." I cannot think,
especially looking on to ver. 4, that these two verses (2 and 3) mean
anything else than that Paul longs for Christ to come before death. If
Christ comes first, the Apostle will receive the new body by the
transformation, instead of the putting off, of the old; he will, so to
speak, put it on _above_ the old ἐπενδύσασθαι; he will be spared the
shuddering fear of dying; he will not know what it is to have the old
tent taken down, and to be left houseless and naked. We do not need to
investigate the opinions of the Hebrews or the Greeks about the
condition of souls in Hades in order to understand these words; the
conception, figurative as it is, carries its own meaning and
impression to every one. It is reiterated, rather than proved, in the
fourth verse:[43] "For we who are in the tabernacle groan also, being
burdened, in that our will is not to be unclothed, but to be clothed
upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life." It is natural
to take βαρούμενοι ("being burdened") as referring to the weight of
care and suffering by which men are oppressed while in the body; but
here also, as in the similar case of ver. 2, the proper reference of
the word is forward. What oppresses Paul, and makes him sigh, is the
intensity of his desire to escape "being unclothed," his immense
longing to see Jesus come, and, instead of passing through the
terrific experience of death, to have the corruptible put on
incorruption, and the mortal put on immortality, without that trial.

This seems plain enough, but we must remember that the confidence
which Paul has been expressing in the first verse is meant to meet the
very case in which this desire is _not_ gratified, the case in which
death _has_ to be encountered, and the tabernacle taken down. "_If_
this should befall us," he says, "we have another body awaiting us,
far better than that which we leave, and hence we are confident." The
confidence which this hope inspires would naturally, we think, be most
perfect, if in the very act of dissolution the new body were assumed;
if death were the initial stage in the transformation scene in which
an that is mortal is swallowed up by life; if it were, not the
ushering of the Christian into a condition of "nakedness," which,
temporary though it be, is a mere blank to the mind and imagination,
but his admission to celestial life; if "to be absent from the body"
were immediately, and in the fullest sense of the words, the same
thing as "to be at home with the Lord." This is, in point of fact, the
sense in which the passage is understood by a good many scholars, and
those who read it so find in it a decisive turning-point in the
Apostle's teaching on the last things. In the First Epistle to the
Thessalonians, they say, and indeed in the First to the Corinthians
also, Paul's eschatology was still essentially Jewish. The Christian
dead are ὁι κοιμώμενοι, or ὁι κοιμηθέντες ("those that sleep");
nothing definite is said of their condition; only it is implied that
they do not get the incorruptible body till Jesus comes again and
raises them from the dead. In other words, those who die before the
Parousia have the soul-chilling prospect of an unknown term of
"nakedness." Here this terror is dispelled by the new revelation made
to the Apostle, or the new insight to which he has attained: there is
no longer any such interval between death and glory; the heavenly body
is assumed at once; the state called κοιμᾶσθαι ("being asleep")
vanishes from the future. Sabatier and Schmiedel, who adopt this view,
draw extreme consequences from it. It marks an advance, according to
Schmiedel, of the highest importance. The religious postulate of an
uninterrupted communion of life with Christ, violated by the
conception of a κοιμᾶσθαι, or falling asleep, is satisfied; Christ's
descent from heaven, and a simultaneous resurrection and judgment,
become superfluous; judgment is transferred to the moment of death,
or rather to the process of development during life on earth; and,
finally, the place of eternal blessedness passes from earth (the
Jewish and early Christian opinion, probably shared by Paul, as he
gives no indication of the contrary) to heaven. All this, it is
further pointed out, is an approximation, more or less close, to the
Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and may even have been
excogitated in part under its influence; and it is at the same time a
half-way house between the Pharisaic eschatology of First
Thessalonians and the perfected Christian doctrine of a passage like
John v. 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word,
and believeth Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into
judgment, but hath passed out of death into life."

There is no objection to be made in principle to the idea that the
Apostle's outlook on the future was subject to modification--that he
was capable of attaining, or even did attain, a deeper insight, with
experience, into the connexion between that which is and that which is
to come. But it is surely somewhat against the above estimate of the
alleged change here that Paul himself seems to have been quite
unconscious of it. He was not a man whose mind wrought at unawares,
and who passed unwittingly from one standpoint to another. He was
nothing if not reflective. According to Sabatier and Schmiedel, he had
made a revolutionary change in his opinions--a change so vast that on
account of it Sabatier reckons this Epistle, and especially this
passage, the most important in all his writings for the comprehension
of his theological development; and yet, side by side with the new
revolutionary ideas, uttered literally in the same breath with them,
we find the old standing undisturbed. The simultaneous resurrection
and judgment, according to Schmiedel, should be impossible now; but in
chap. iv. 14 the resurrection appears precisely as in Thessalonians
and in chap. v. 10 the judgment, precisely as in all his Epistles from
the first to the last. As for the inconsistency between going to be at
home with the Lord and the Lord's coming, it also recurs in later
years: Paul writes to the Philippians that he has a desire to depart
and to be with Christ; and in the same letter, that the Lord is at
hand, and that we wait for the Saviour from heaven. Probably the
misleading idea in the study of the whole subject has been the
assumption that the κοιμώμενοι--the dead _in Christ_--were in some
dismal, dreary condition which could fairly be described as
"nakedness." There is not a word in the New Testament which favours
this idea. Where we see men die in faith, we see something quite
different. "_To-day_ shalt thou be with Me in Paradise." "Lord Jesus,
receive my spirit." "I saw the souls of them which had been slain for
the Word of God ... and there was given them, to each one, a white
robe." When Paul speaks of those who have fallen asleep, in First
Thessalonians, it is with the express intention of showing that those
who survive to the Parousia have no advantage over them. "Jesus Christ
died for us," he writes (1 Thess. v. 10), "that, whether we wake or
sleep, we may live together with Him." And he uses one most expressive
word in a similar connexion (1 Thess. iv. 14): "Them also that sleep
in Jesus will God _bring_ [ἄξει] with Him." _Suave verbum_, says
Bengel: _dicitur de viventibus_. May we not say with equal cogency,
not only "de viventibus," but "de viventibus _cum Iesu_"? Those who
are asleep are with Him; they are in blessedness with Him; what their
mode of existence is it may be impossible for us to conceive, but it
is certainly not a thing to shrink from with horror. The taking down
of the old tent in which we live here _is_ a thing from which one
cannot but shrink, and that is why Paul would rather have Christ come,
and be saved the pain and fear of dying. With death in view he
mentions the new body as the ground of his confidence, because it is
the final realisation of the Christian hope, the crown of redemption
(Rom. viii. 23). But he does not mean to say that, unless the new body
were granted in the very instant of dying, death would usher him into
an appalling void, and separate him from Christ. This assumption, on
which the interpretation of Sabatier and Schmiedel rests, is entirely
groundless, and therefore that interpretation, in spite of a
superficial plausibility, is to be decidedly rejected. It is to be
rejected all the more when we are invited to see the occasion which
produced Paul's supposed change of opinion in the danger which he had
lately incurred in Asia (chap. i. 8-10). Paul, we are to imagine, who
had always been confident that he would live to see the Parousia, had
come to very close quarters with death, and this experience
constrained him to seek in his religion a hope and consolation more
adequate to the terribleness of death than any he had yet conceived.
Hence the mighty advance explained above. But is it not absurd to say
that a man, whose life was constantly in peril, had never thought of
death till this time? Can any one seriously believe that, as Sabatier
puts it, "the image of death, with which the Apostle had not hitherto
concerned himself, [here] enters for the first time within the scope
of his doctrine"? Can any one who knows the kind of man Paul was
deliberately suggest that fear and self-pity conferred on him an
enlargement of spiritual vision which no sympathy for bereaved
disciples, and no sense of fellowship with those who had fallen asleep
in Jesus, availed to bestow? Believe this who will, it seems utterly
incredible to me. The passage says nothing inconsistent with
Thessalonians, or First Corinthians, or Philippians, or Second
Timothy, about the last things: it expresses in a special situation
the constant Christian faith and hope--"the redemption of the body";
_that_ is the possession of the believer ἔχομεν; it is ours; and the
Apostle is not concerned to fix the moment of time at which hope
becomes sight. "Come what will," he says, "come death itself, _this_
is ours; and because it is ours, though we dread the possible
necessity of having to strip off the old body, and would fain escape
it, we do not allow it to dismay us."

The Apostle cannot look to the end of the Christian hope without
referring to its condition and guarantee. "He that wrought us for this
very thing is God, who gave us the earnest of the Spirit." The future
is never considered in the New Testament in a speculative fashion;
nothing could be less like an apostle than to discuss the immortality
of the soul. The question of life beyond death is for Paul not a
metaphysical but a Christian question; the pledge of anything worth
the name of life is not the inherent constitution of human nature, but
the possession of the Divine Spirit. Without the Spirit, Paul could
have had no such certainty, no such triumphant hope, as he had;
without the Spirit there can be no such certainty yet. Hence it is
idle to criticise the Christian hope on purely speculative grounds,
and as idle to try on such grounds to establish it. That hope is of a
piece with the experience which comes when the Spirit of Him who
raised up Christ from the dead dwells in us, and apart from this
experience it cannot even be understood. But to say that there is no
eternal life except in Christ is not to accept what is called
"conditional immortality"; it is only to accept conditional glory.

The fifth verse marks a pause: in the three which follow Paul
describes the mood in which, possessed of the Christian hope, he
confronts all the conditions of the present and the alternatives of
the future. "We are of good courage at all times," he says. "We know
that while we are at home in the body we are away from home as far as
the Lord is concerned--at a distance from Him." This does not mean
that fellowship is broken, or that the soul is separated from the love
of Christ; it only means that earth is not heaven, and that Paul is
painfully conscious of the fact. This is what is proved by ver. 7: We
are absent from the Lord, our true home, "for in this world we are
walking through the realm of faith, not through that of actual
appearance."[44] There _is_ a world, a mode of existence, to which
Paul looks forward, which is one of actual appearance; he will be in
Christ's presence there, and see Him face to face (1 Cor. xiii. 12).
But the world through which his course lies meanwhile is _not_ that
world of immediate presence and manifestation; on the contrary, it is
a world of faith, which realises that future world of manifestation
only by a strong spiritual conviction; it is through a faith-land that
Paul's journey leads him. All along the way his faith keeps him in
good heart; nay, when he thinks of all that it ensures, of all that
is guaranteed by the Spirit, he is willing rather to be absent from
the body, and to be at home with the Lord.

          "For, ah! the Master is so fair,
           His smile so sweet on banished men,
           That they who meet it unaware
           Can never turn to earth again;
           And they who see Him risen afar,
           At God's right hand to welcome them,
           Forgetful stand of home and land,
           Desiring fair Jerusalem."

If he had to make his choice, it would incline this way, rather than the
other; but it is not his to make a choice, and so he does not express
himself unconditionally. The whole tone of the passage anticipates that
of Phil. i. 21 ff.: "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
But if to live in the flesh,--_if_ this is the fruit of my work, then
what I shall choose I wot not. But I am in a strait betwixt the two,
having the desire to depart and to be with Christ; for it is very far
better: yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake."
Nothing could be less like the Apostle than a monkish, unmanly wish to
die. He exulted in his calling. It was a joy to him above all joys to
speak to men of the love of God in Jesus Christ. But nothing, on the
other hand, could be less like him than to lose sight of the future in
the present, and to forget amid the service of men the glory which is to
be revealed. He stood between two worlds; he felt the whole attraction
of both; in the earnest of the Spirit he knew that he had an inheritance
there as well as here. It is this consciousness of the dimensions of
life that makes him so immensely interesting; he never wrote a dull
word; his soul was stirred incessantly by impulses from earth and from
heaven, swept by breezes from the dark and troubled sea of man's life,
touched by inspirations from the radiant heights where Christ dwelt. We
do not need to be afraid of the reproach of "other worldliness" if we
seek to live in this same spirit; the reproach is as false as it is
threadbare. It would be an incalculable gain if we could recover the
primitive hope in something like its primitive strength. It would not
make us false to our duties in the world, but it would give us the
victory over the world.

In bringing this subject to a close, the Apostle strikes a graver
note. A certain moral, as well as a certain emotional temper, is
evoked by the Christian hope. It fills men with courage, and with
spiritual yearnings; it braces them also to moral earnestness and
vigour. "Wherefore also we make it our aim"--literally, we are
ambitious, the only lawful ambition--"whether at home or absent, to be
well-pleasing unto Him." Modes of being are not of so much
consequence. It may agree with a man's feelings better to live till
Christ comes, or to die before He comes, and go at once to be with
Him; but the main thing is, in whatever mode of being, to be accepted
in His sight. "For we must all be manifested before the judgment-seat
of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body,
according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad." The
Christian hope is not clouded by the judgment-seat of Christ; it is
sustained at the holy height which befits it. We are forbidden to
count upon it lightly. "Every man," we are reminded, "that hath this
hope set on Him purifieth himself even as He is pure." It is not
necessary for us to seek a formal reconciliation of this verse with
Paul's teaching that the faithful are accepted in Christ Jesus; we can
feel that both must be true. And if the doctrine of justification
freely, by God's grace, is that which has to be preached to sinful
men, the doctrine of exact retribution, taught in this passage, has
its main interest and importance for Christians. It is Christians only
who are in view here, and the law of requital is so exact that every
one is said to get back, to carry on for himself, the very things done
in the body. In this world, we have not seen the last of anything. We
shall all be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ; all that
we have hidden shall be revealed. The books are shut now, but they
will be opened then. The things we have done in the body will come
back to us, whether good or bad. Every pious thought, and every
thought of sin; every secret prayer, and every secret curse; every
unknown deed of charity, and every hidden deed of selfishness: we will
see them all again, and though we have not remembered them for years,
and perhaps have forgotten them altogether, we shall have to
acknowledge that they are our own, and take them to ourselves. Is not
that a solemn thing to stand at the end of life? Is it not a true
thing? Even those who can say with the Apostle, "Being justified by
faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and
rejoice in hope of His glory," know how true it is. Nay, they most of
all know, for they understand better than others the holiness of God,
and they are especially addressed here. The moral consciousness is not
maintained in its vigour and integrity if this doctrine of retribution
disappears; and if we are called by a passage like this to encourage
ourselves in the Lord, and in the hope which He has revealed, we are
warned also that evil cannot dwell with God, and that He will by no
means clear the guilty.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] The true rendering here is that in the margin of the R.V.

[44] This translation is Schmiedel's. For the use of διὰ cf. Rev. xxi.
24: Καὶ περιπατήσουσιν τὰ ἔθνη διὰ τοῦ φωτὸς αὐτης. It cannot mean
"by" faith, in the sense of "according to" faith, or as faith directs.
Nor can it be proved that εῖδος ever means "sight."

                                  XIV

                     _THE MEASURE OF CHRIST'S LOVE_

    "Knowing therefore the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are
    made manifest unto God; and I hope that we are made manliest also in
    your consciences. We are not again commending ourselves unto you,
    but _speak_ as giving you occasion of glorying on our behalf, that
    ye may have wherewith to answer them that glory in appearance and
    not in heart. For whether we are beside ourselves, it is unto God;
    or whether we are of sober mind, it is unto you. For the love of
    Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that One died for
    all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they which live
    should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their
    sakes died and rose again."--2 COR. v. 11-15 (R.V.).

The Christian hope of immortality is elevated and solemnised by the
thought of the judgment-seat of Christ. This is no strange thought to
St. Paul; many a time he has set himself in imagination in that great
presence, and let the awe of it descend upon his heart. This is what
he means when he writes, "Knowing the fear of the Lord." Like the
pastors addressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews, he exercises his
office as one who must render an account. In this spirit, he says, he
persuades men. A motive so high, and so stern in its purifying power,
no minister of Christ can afford to dispense with. We need something
to suppress self-seeking, to keep conscience vigorous, to preserve the
message of reconciliation itself from degenerating into good-natured
indifference, to prohibit immoral compromises and superficial healing
of the soul's hurts. Let us familiarise our minds, by meditation, with
the fear due to Christ the judge, and a new element of power will
enter into our service, making it at once more urgent and more
wholesome than it could otherwise be.

The meaning of the words "we persuade men" is not at once clear.
Interpreters generally find in them a combination of two ideas--we try
to win men for the Gospel, and we try to convince them of our own
purity of motive in our evangelistic work. The word is suitable enough
to express either idea; and though it is straining it to make it carry
both, the first is suggested by the general tenor of the passage, and
the second seems to be demanded by what follows. "We try to convince
men of our disinterestedness, but we do not need to try to convince
God; we have been manifested to Him already;[45] and we trust also
that we have been manifested in your consciences." Paul was well aware
of the hostility with which he was regarded by some of the
Corinthians, but he is confident that, when his appeal is tried in the
proper court, decision must be given in his favour, and he hopes that
this has really been done at Corinth. Often we do not give people in
his position the benefit of a fair trial. It is not in our consciences
they are arraigned--_i.e._, in God's sight, and according to God's
law--but at the bar of our prejudices, our likes and dislikes,
sometimes even our whims and caprices. It is not their _character_
which is taken into account, but something quite irrelevant to
character. Paul did not care for such estimates as these. It was
nothing to him whether his appearance made a favourable impression on
those who heard him--whether they liked his voice, his gestures, his
manners, or even his message. What he did care for was to be able to
appeal to their consciences, as he could appeal to God, to whom all
things were naked and opened, that in the discharge of his functions
as an evangelist he had been absolutely simple and sincere. In
speaking thus, he has no intention of again recommending himself.
Rather, as he says with a touch of irony, it is for their convenience
he writes; he is giving them occasion to boast on his behalf, that
when they encounter people who boast in face and not in heart they may
not be speechless, but may have something to say for themselves--and
for him. It is easy to read between the lines here. The Corinthians
had persons among them--Jewish and Judaising teachers evidently--who
boasted "in face"; in other words, who prided themselves on outward
and visible distinctions, though as Paul asserts, they had nothing
within to be proud of. There are suggestions of these distinctions
elsewhere, and we can imagine the claims men made, the airs they gave
themselves, or at least the recognition they consented to accept, on
the ground of them. Their eloquence, their knowledge of the
Scriptures, their Jewish descent, their acquaintance with the Twelve,
above all acquaintance with Jesus Himself--these were their
credentials, and of these their followers made much. Perhaps even on
their own ground Paul could have met and routed most of them, but
meanwhile he leaves them in undisturbed possession of their
advantages, such as they are. He only sums up these advantages in the
disparaging word "face," or "appearance"; they are all on the outside;
they amount to "a fair show in the flesh," but no more. He would not
like if _his_ disciples could make no better boast of their master,
and all the high things he has written, from chap. ii. 14 on to chap.
v. 10, especially his vindication of the absolute purity of his
motives, furnish them, if they choose to take it so, with grounds of
counter-boasting, far deeper and more spiritual than those of his
adversaries. For _he_ boasts, not "in appearance, but in heart." The
ironical tone in this is unmistakable, yet it is not merely ironical.
From the beginning of Christianity to this day, Churches have gathered
round men, and made their boast in them. Too often it has been a boast
"in face," and not "in heart"--in gifts, accomplishments, and
distinctions, which may have given an outward splendour to the
individual, but which were entirely irrelevant to the possession of
the Christian spirit. Often even the imperfections of the natural man
have been gloried in, simply because they were his; and the Lutheran
and Calvinistic Churches, for example, owe some of their most
distinctive features to an exaggerated appreciation of those very
characteristics of Luther and Calvin which had no Christian value. The
same thing is seen every day, on a smaller scale, in congregations.
People are proud of their minister, not for what he is in heart, but
because he is more learned, more eloquent, more naturally capable,
than other preachers in the same town. It is a pity when ministers
themselves, like the Judaists in Corinth, are content to have it so.
The true evangelist or pastor will choose rather, with St. Paul, to be
taken for what he is as a Christian, and for nothing else; and if he
_must_ be spoken about, he will be spoken of in this character, and in
no other. Nay, if it really comes to glorying "in face," he will glory
in his weaknesses and incapacities; he will magnify the very
earthenness of the earthen vessel, the very coarseness of the clay, as
a foil to the power and life of Christ which dwell in it.

The connexion of ver. 13 with what precedes is very obscure. Perhaps
as fair a paraphrase as any would run thus: "And well may you boast of
our complete sincerity; for whether we are beside ourselves, it is to
God; or whether we are of sober mind, it is unto you; that is, in no
case is self-interest the motive or rule of our conduct." Connexion
apart, there is a further difficulty about εἴτε ἐξέστημεν. The Revised
Version renders it "whether we _are_ beside ourselves," but in the
margin gives "_were_" for "are." It makes a very great difference
which tense we accept. If the proper meaning is given by "are," the
application must be to some constant characteristic of the Apostle s
ministry. His enthusiasm, his absolute superiority to common selfish
considerations such as are ordinarily supreme in human life, his
resolute assertion of truths lying beyond the reach of sense, the
unearthly flame which burned unceasingly in his bosom, and never more
brightly than when he wrote the fourth and fifth chapters of the
Second Epistle to the Corinthians--all these constitute the temper
which is described as being "beside oneself," a kind of sacred
madness. It was in this sense that the accusation of being beside
himself was brought on a memorable occasion against Jesus (Mark iii.
21, ἐξέστη). The disciple and the Master alike seemed to those who did
not understand them to be in an overstrained, too highly wrought
condition of spirit; in the ardour of their devotion they allowed
themselves to be carried beyond all natural limits, and it was not
improper to speak of applying some kindly restraint. At first sight
this interpretation seems very appropriate, and I do not think that
the tense of ἐξέστημεν is decisive against it.[46] Those who think it
is point to the change to the present tense in the next clause, εἴτε
σωφρονοῦμεν, and allege that this would have no motive unless
ἐξέστημεν were a true past. But this may be doubted. On the one hand,
ἐξέστη in Mark iii. 21 can hardly mean anything but "He is beside
Himself"--_i.e._, it is virtually a present; on the other, the
grammatical present ἐξιστάμεθα would not unambiguously convey the idea
of madness, and would therefore be inappropriate here. But assuming
that the change of tense has the effect of making ἐξέστημεν a real
past, and that the proper rendering is "whether we _were_ beside
ourselves," what is the application then? We must suppose that some
definite occasion is before the Apostle and his readers, on which he
had been in an ecstasy (cf. ἐν ἐκστάσει, Acts xi. 5; ἐγένετο ἐπ' αὐτὸν
ἔκστασις, Acts X. 10), and that his opponents availed themselves of
this experience, in which he had passed, for a time, out of his own
control, to whisper the malicious accusation that he had once not been
quite right in his mind, and that this explained much. The Apostle, we
should have to assume, admits the fact alleged, but protests against
the inference drawn from it, and the use made of the inference. "I
_was_ beside myself," he says; "but it was an experience which had
nothing to do with my ministry; it was between God and my solitary
self; and to drag it into my relations with you is a mere
impertinence." That the "ecstasis" in question was his vision of Jesus
on the way to Damascus, and that his adversaries sought to discredit
that, and the apostleship of Paul as grounded on that, is one of the
extravagances of an irresponsible criticism. Of all experiences that
ever befell him, his conversion is the very one which was _not_ solely
his own affair and God's, but the affair of the whole Church; and
whereas he speaks of his ecstasies and visions with evident reluctance
and embarrassment, as in chap. xii. 1 ff., or refuses to speak of them
at all, as here (assuming this interpretation to be the true one), he
makes his conversion and the appearance of the Lord the very
foundation of his preaching, and treats of both with the utmost
frankness. It must be something quite different from this--something
analogous perhaps to me speaking with tongues, in which "the
understanding was unfruitful," but for which Paul was distinguished (1
Cor. xiv. 14-18)--that is intended here. Such rapt conditions are
certainly open to misinterpretation; and as their spiritual value is
merely personal, Paul declines to discuss any allusion to them, as if
it affected his relation to the Corinthians.

The strongest point in favour of this interpretation seems to me not
the tense of ἐξέστημεν, but the use of Θεῷ: "it is unto God." If the
meaning were the one first suggested, and the madness were the holy
enthusiasm of the Evangelist, that would be distinctly a thing which
did concern the Corinthians, and it would not be natural to withdraw
it from their censure as God's affair. Nevertheless, one can conceive
Paul saying that he was answerable for his extravagances, not to them,
but to his Master; and that his sober-mindedness, at all events, had
their interests in view. On a survey of the whole case, and especially
with Mark iii. 21, and the New Testament use of the verb ἐξίσταμαι
before us, I incline to think that the text of the Revised Version is
to be preferred to the margin. The "being beside himself" with which
Paul was charged will not, then, be an isolated incident in his
career--an incident which Jewish teachers, remembering the ecstasies
of Peter and John, could hardly object to--but the spiritual tension
in which he habitually lived and wrought. The language, so far as I
can judge, admits of this interpretation, and it brings the Apostle's
experience into line, not only with that of his Master, but with that
of many who have succeeded him. But how great and rare is the
self-conquest of the man who can say that in his enthusiasm and his
sobriety alike--when he is beside himself, and when his spirit is
wholly subject to him--the one thing which never intrudes, or troubles
his singleness of mind, is the thought of his own private ends.

In the verses which follow, Paul lets us into the secret of this
unselfishness, this freedom from by-ends and ambition: "For the love of
Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that One died for all,
therefore all [of them] died." "Constraineth" is one of the most
expressive words in the New Testament; the love of Christ has hold of
the Apostle on both sides, as it were, and urges him on in a course
which he cannot avoid. It has him in its grasp, and he has no choice,
under its irresistible constraint, but to be what he is, and to do what
he does, whether men think him in his mind or out of his mind. That the
love of Christ means Christ's love to us, and not our love to Him, is
shown by the fact that Paul goes on at once to describe in what it
consists. "It constrains us," he says, "because we have come to this
mind about it: One died for all; so then all died." Here, we may say, is
the content of Christ's love, the essence of it, that which gives it
its soul-subduing and constraining power: He loved us, _and gave Himself
for us_; He died for all, _and in that death of His all died_.

It may seem a hazardous thing to give a definition of love, and
especially to shut up within the boundaries of a human conception that
love of Christ which passes knowledge. But the intelligence must get
hold somehow even of things inconceivably great, and the New Testament
writers, with all their diversity of spiritual gifts, are at one as to
what is essential here. They all find Christ's love concentrated and
focussed in His death. They all find it there inasmuch as that death
was a death _for us_. Perhaps St. Paul and St. John penetrated
further, intellectually, than any of the others into the mystery of
this "for"; but if we cannot give it a natural interpretation, and an
interpretation in which an absolutely irresistible constraint is
hidden for heart and will, we do not know what the Apostles meant when
they spoke of Christ's love. There has been much discussion about the
"for" in this place. It is ὑπέρ, not ἀντί, and many render it simply
"on our behalf," or "for our advantage." That Christ did die for our
advantage is not to be questioned. Neither is it to be questioned that
this is a fair rendering of ὑπέρ. But what _does_ raise question is
whether this interpretation of the "for" supplies sufficient ground
for the immediate inference of the Apostle "so then all died." Is it
logical to say, "One died for the benefit of all: _hence_ all died"?
From that premiss is not the only legitimate conclusion "hence all
remained alive"? Plainly, if _Paul's_ conclusion is to be drawn, the
"for" must reach deeper than this mere suggestion of our advantage: if
we all _died_, in that Christ died _for_ us, there must be a sense in
which that death of His is _ours_; He must be identified with _us_ in
it: there, on the cross, while we stand and gaze at Him, He is not
simply a person doing us a service; He is a person doing us a service
_by filling our place and dying our death_. It is out of this deeper
relation that all services, benefits, and advantages flow; and that
deeper sense of "for," to which Christ in His death is at once the
representative and the substitute of man, is essential to do justice
to the Apostle's thought. Without the ideas involved in these words we
cannot conceive, as he conceived it, the love of Christ. We cannot
understand how that force, which exercised such absolute authority
over his whole life, appealed to his intelligence. We do not mean what
he meant even when we use his words; we gain currency, under cover of
them, for ideas utterly inadequate to the spiritual depth of his.

If this were an exposition of St. Paul's theology, and not of the
Second Epistle to the Corinthians, I should be bound to consider the
connexion between that outward death of Christ in which the death of
all is involved, and the appropriation of that death to themselves by
individual men. But the Apostle does not directly raise this question
here; he only adds in the fifteenth verse a statement of the purpose
for which Christ died, and in doing so suggests that the connecting
link is to be sought, in part at least, in the feeling of gratitude.
"He died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto
themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again." In dying
our death Christ has done something for us so immense in love that we
ought to be His, and only His, for ever. To make us His is the very
object of His death. Before we know Him we are naturally selfish; we
are an end to ourselves, in the bad sense; we are our own. Even the
sacrifices which men make for their families, their country, or their
order, are but qualifications of selfishness; it is not eradicated and
exterminated till we see and feel what is meant by this--that _Christ
died our death_. The life we have after we have apprehended this can
never be our own; nay, we ourselves are not our own; we are bought
with a price; life has been given a ransom for us, and our life is due
to him "who died for us and rose again." I believe the Authorised
Version is right in this rendering, and that it is a mistake to say,
"who for our sakes died and rose again." The Resurrection has
certainly significance in the work of Christ, but not in precisely the
same way as His death; and Paul mentions it here, not to define its
significance, but simply because he could not think of living except
for One who was Himself alive.

One point deserves especial emphasis here--the universality of the
expressions. Paul has been speaking of himself, and of the constraint
which the love of Christ, as he apprehends it, exercises upon him. But
he no sooner begins to define his thought of Christ's love than he
passes over from the first person to the third. The love of Christ was
not to be limited; what it is to the Apostle it is to the world: He
died for all, and so all died. Whatever blessing Christ's death
contained, it contains for all. Whatever doom it exhausts and removes,
it exhausts and removes for all. Whatever power it breaks, it breaks
for all. Whatever ideal it creates, whatever obligation it imposes, it
creates and imposes for all. There is not a soul in the world which is
excluded from an interest in that knowledge-surpassing love which made
our death its own. There is not one which ought not to feel that
omnipotent constraint which enchained and swayed the strong, proud
spirit of Paul. There is not one which ought not to be pouring out its
life for Him who died in its place, and rose to receive its service.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] The φανερωθῆναι of the last judgment, ver. 10, has as good as
taken place--for God.

[46] According to Winer ἐξέστη in Mark iii. 21 has the present sense =
_insanity_; and so it might be with ἐξέστημεν here. The verb occurs
fifteen times in the New Testament, and except in these two passages
has always the sense of being amazed or astonished beyond measure.

                                   XV

                            _THE NEW WORLD_

    "Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though
    we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know _Him so_ no
    more. Wherefore if any man _is_ in Christ, _he_ is a new creature
    [or, _there is_ a new creation]: the old things are passed away;
    behold, they are become new."--2 COR. v. 16, 17 (R.V.).

The inferences which are here drawn depend upon what has just been
said of Christ's death for all and the death of all in that death of
His. In that death, as inclusive of ours, the old life died, and with
it died all its distinctions. All that men were, apart from Christ,
all that constituted the "appearance" (πρόσωπον, ver. 12) of their
life, all that marked them off from each other as such and such
outwardly, ceased to have significance the moment Christ's death was
understood as Paul here understands it. He dates his inference with
ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν ("henceforth"). This does not mean from the time at which
he writes, but from the time at which he saw that One had died for
all, and so all died. Here, as in other places, he divides his life
into "now" and "then," the Christian and the pre-Christian stage (Rom.
v. 9; Eph. ii. 11-13). The transition from one to the other was
revolutionary, and one of its most startling results is that which he
here describes. "Then," the distinctions between men, the
"appearances" in which they boasted, had been important in his eyes;
"now," they have ceased to be, _He_[47] never asks whether a man is
Jew or Greek, rich or poor, bond or free, learned or unlearned; these
are classifications "after the flesh," and have died in Christ's death
_for all_. To recognise them any longer, to admit the legitimacy of
claims based upon them--such claims as his opponents in Corinth seem
to have been putting forth--would be to make Christ's death, in a
sense, of no effect. It would be to deny that when He died for all,
all died in Him; it would be to reanimate distinctions that should
have been annihilated in His death.

To this rule of knowing no one after the flesh Paul can admit no
exception. Not even Christ is excepted. "Even though we have known
Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more." This is a
difficult saying, and has been very variously interpreted. The English
reader inevitably supposes that Paul _had_ known Christ "after the
flesh," but had outgrown that kind of knowledge; and that he is
intimating these two facts. But it is quite possible to take the
words[48] as purely hypothetical: "Supposing us to have known even
Christ after the flesh--a case which in point of fact was never
ours--yet now we know Him so no more." Grammar does not favour this
last rendering, though it does not preclude it; and however the matter
may be settled, the bare supposition, as much as the fact, requires us
to give a definite meaning to the words about knowing Christ after the
flesh, and ceasing so to know Him.

Some have inferred from them that when Paul became a Christian, and
for some time after, his conception of Christ had resembled that of
the persons whom he is here controverting: his Christ had been to all
intents and purposes a Jewish Messiah, and he had only been able by
degrees to overcome, though he had at last overcome, the narrowness
and nationalism of his early years as a disciple. To know Christ after
the flesh would be to know Him in the character of a deliverer of the
Jews: His Jewish descent, His circumcision, His observance of the
Temple worship, His limitation of His ministry to the Holy Land, would
be matters of great significance; and Jewish descent might naturally
be supposed to establish a prerogative in relation to the Messiah for
Jews as opposed to Gentiles. Probably there were Christians whose
original conception of the Saviour was of this kind, and it is a fair
enough description to say that this amounts only to a knowing of
Christ after the flesh; but Paul can hardly have been one of them. His
Christian knowledge of Christ dates from his vision of the Risen Lord
on the way to Damascus, and in that appearance there was no room for
anything that could be called "flesh." It was an appearance of the
Lord of Glory. It determined all Paul's thoughts thenceforth. Nothing
is more remarkable in his Epistles than the strong sense that what he
calls his Gospel is one, unchanged, and unchangeable. It is not Yes
and No. Neither man nor angel may modify it by preaching another Jesus
than he preaches. He is quite unconscious of any such transformation
of his Christology as is indicated above; and in the absence of any
trace elsewhere of a change so important, it is impossible to read it
into the verse before us.

Another interpretation of the words would make "knowing Christ after the
flesh" refer to a knowledge at first hand of the facts and outward
conditions of Christ's life in this world: a knowledge which Paul had
in his early Christian days valued highly, but for which he no longer
cared. There were numbers of men alive then who had known Christ in this
sense. They had seen and heard Him in Galilee and Jerusalem; they had
much to tell about Him which would no doubt be very interesting to
believers; and more than likely some of them emphasised this distinction
of theirs, and were disposed to be pretentious on the strength of it.
Whether Paul had ever known Christ in this sense, it is impossible to
say. But it is certain that to such knowledge he would have assigned no
Christian importance whatever. And in doing so, he would have been
following the example of Christ Himself. "Then shall ye begin to say, We
have eaten and drunk in Thy presence, and Thou hast taught in our
streets. And He shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are."
But it is impossible to suppose that this is a matter on which Paul as a
Christian had ever needed to change his mind.

It is an interpretation in part akin to this which makes St. Paul here
decry all knowledge of the historical Christ in comparison with the
understanding of His death and resurrection. To know Christ after the
flesh is in this case to know Him as He is represented in Matthew,
Mark, and Luke; and Paul is supposed to say that, though narratives
like these once had an interest and value for him, they really have it
no longer: they are not essential to his Gospel, which is constituted
by the death and resurrection alone. These great events and their
consequences are all he is concerned with; to know Christ after the
Evangelists is merely to know Him after the flesh; and flesh, even
_His_ flesh, ought to have no significance since His death.

It is a little difficult to take this quite seriously, though it has a
serious side. St. Paul, no doubt, makes very few references to incidents
in the life of our Lord, or even to words which He spoke.[49] But he is
not singular in this. The Epistles of Peter and John are historically as
barren as his. They do not add a word to the Gospel story; there is no
new incident, no new trait in the picture of Jesus, no new oracle.
Indeed, the only genuine addition to the record is that one made by Paul
himself--"the word of the Lord Jesus, how He said, It is more blessed to
give than to receive." The truth seems to be that it is not natural for
an apostle, nor for any inspired man, to fall back on quotations, like a
preacher gravelled for lack of matter, or conscious of wanting
authority. Paul and his colleagues in apostleship had Christ living in
them, and recognised the spirit by which they spoke as the spirit of
their Master. So far as this was the case, it was certainly a matter of
indifference to them whether they were acquainted with this or that
incident in His life, with this or that syllable that He spoke on such
and such an occasion. One casual occurrence, one scene in Christ's
sufferings, one discourse which He delivered, would inevitably be known
with more exact and literal precision to one person than to another; and
there is no difficulty in believing that the casual advantage which any
individual might thus possess was regarded by St. Paul as a thing of no
Christian consequence. Similar differences exist still, and in principle
are to be disregarded. But it is another thing to say that all knowledge
of the historical Christ is irrelevant to Christianity, and yet another
to father such an opinion on St. Paul. The attempt to do so is due in
part, I believe, to a misinterpretation of κατὰ σάρκα. Paul has been
read as if what he disclaimed and decried were knowledge of Christ ἐν
σαρκί. But the two things are quite distinct. Christ lived _in the
flesh_; but the life that He lived in the flesh He lived _after the
spirit_, and when its spiritual import is regarded, it is safe to say
that no one ever knew Christ as He was _in the flesh_--the Christ of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke--better than Paul. No one had been initiated
into Christ's character, as that character is revealed in the story of
the Evangelists, more fully than he. No one ever knew the mind, the
temper, the new moral ideal of Christianity, better than Paul, and there
is no ultimate source for this knowledge but the historical Christ. Paul
could not in his work as an evangelist preach salvation through the
death and resurrection of an unknown person; the story which was the
common property of the Church, and with which her catechists everywhere
indoctrinated the new disciples, must have been as familiar to him, in
substance, as it is to us; and his evident knowledge and appreciation of
the character embodied in it forbids us to think of this acquaintance
with Christ as what he means by knowing Him after the flesh. He might
have had the Gospel narratives by heart, and counted them inestimably
precious, and yet have spoken exactly as he speaks here.

Nevertheless, this interpretation, though mistaken, has a certain truth
in it. There _is_ a historical knowledge of Christ which is a mere
irrelevance to Christianity, and it has sometimes a stress laid upon it
by its possessors which tempts one to speak of it in St. Paul's
scornful tone. Many so-called "Lives" of Christ abound in it. They aim
at a historical realism which, to speak the plain truth, has simply no
religious value. Knowledge of localities, customs, costumes, and so
forth, is interesting enough; but if it should be ever so full and ever
so exact, it is not the knowledge of Jesus Christ in any sense which
makes a Gospel. It is quite possible, nay it is more than possible, that
such knowledge may come between the soul and the Lord. It was so when
Jesus lived. There were people who knew so well what He was like that
they were blind to what He was. In St. Paul's phrase we may say that
they knew Him "after the flesh," and it kept them from knowing Him
truly. They asked, "Is not this the carpenter?" as if that were a piece
of undeniable insight; and they were not conscious that only men blind
to what He really was could ever have asked a question so absurd. It was
_not_ the carpenter who spoke with authority in the synagogues, and cast
out devils, and brought in the kingdom; it was the Son of Man, the Son
of God; and whether Paul meant it so or not, we may use his language in
this passage to express the conviction, that one may really know Christ,
to whom the whole outward aspect of His life, represented by "the
carpenter of Nazareth," is indifferent; nay, that one cannot know Him in
any real sense until these external things _are_ indifferent. Or to put
the same thing in other words, we may say that the knowledge of Christ
which constitutes the Christian is not the knowledge of what He was, but
of what he is; and if we know what He is, then all that is merely
outward in the history may pass away.

But if none of these interpretations answers exactly to the Apostle's
thought, where are we to seek the meaning of his words? All these, it
will be observed, assume that Paul knew Christ "after the flesh,"
subsequent to his conversion; that he shared, as a Christian, views
about Christ which he is now combating. As these interpretations,
however, are untenable, we must assume that the time when he thus knew
Christ was _before_ his conversion. He could look back to days when
his Messianic conceptions were carnal; when the Christ was to be
identified, for him, by tokens in the domain of "appearance," or
"flesh"; when He was to be a national, perhaps merely a political
deliverer, and the Saviour of the Jews in a sense which gave them an
advantage over the Gentiles. But these days were gone for ever.
"Henceforth"--from the very instant that the truth flashed on him, One
died _for all_, and so _all_ died--they belonged to a past which could
never be revived or recalled. One died for all: that means that Christ
is Universal Redeemer. That same One rose again: that means He is
Universal Lord. He has done the same infinite service for all, He
makes the same infinite claim upon all; there are no prerogatives for
any race, for any caste, for any individual men, in relation to Him.
In presence of His cross, there is no difference: in His death, and in
our death in Him, all carnal distinctions die; "henceforth we know no
man after the flesh." Even kinship to Jesus "after the flesh" does not
base any prerogative in the kingdom of God; even to have eaten and
drunk in His presence, and listened to His living voice, confers no
distinction there; He has not done more for His brethren and His
companions than He has done for us all. And not only the carnal
distinctions of men have vanished away; the carnal Jewish conception
of Christ has vanished with them.

The seventeenth verse seems a new inference from the same ground as
the fifteenth. Indeed, it connects so naturally with ver. 15 that one
critic has suggested that ver. 16 is spurious, and another that it was
a later insertion by the Apostle. Perhaps we may assume that St. Paul,
who had no fear of such critics before his eyes, was capable of
setting his sentences down just as they occurred to him, and did not
mind an occasional awkwardness. When he writes "Wherefore if any man
is in Christ, he is a new creature," he is indeed drawing an inference
from ver. 15, but he is at the same time generalising and carrying on
the thought of ver. 16. The idea of the new creature occurs in other
places in his writings (_e.g._, Eph. ii. 10; Gal. vi. 15), but both
here and in Gal. vi. 15 I prefer the rendering in the margin of the
Revised Version--"If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation:
the things passed away (when he died in Christ);[50] behold, they have
become new." We may say, if we please, that it is the new creature
which makes the new creation; the change in the soul which
revolutionises the world. Still, it is this universal change which the
Apostle, apparently, wishes to describe; and in the sudden note of
triumph with which he concludes--"Behold! all is become new"--we feel,
as it were, one throb of that glad surprise with which he had looked
out on the world after God had reconciled him to Himself by His Son.
The past was dead to him, as dead as Christ on His cross; all its
ideas, all its hopes, all its ambitions, were dead; _in Christ_, he
was another man in another universe.

This is the first passage in 2 Corinthians in which this Pauline
formula for a Christian--a man in Christ--is used.[51] It denotes the
most intimate possible union, a union in which the believer's faith
identifies him with Jesus in His death and resurrection, so that he
can say, "I live no longer, but Christ liveth in me." It is the
Apostle's profoundest word, not on the Gospel, but on the
appropriation of the Gospel; not on Christ, but on the Christian
religion.[52] It is mystical, as every true word must be which speaks
of the relation of the soul to the Saviour; but it is intelligible to
every one who knows what it is to trust and to love, and through trust
and love to lose self in another whose life is greater and better than
his own. And when we have seen, even for a moment, what it is to live
in self or in the world, and what to live in Christ, we can easily
believe that this union is equivalent to a re-creating and
transfiguring of all things.

It is impossible to point to all the applications of this truth: "all
things" is too wide a text. Every reader knows the things which bulked
most largely in his life before he knew Christ, and it is easy for him
to tell the difference due to being in the Lord. In a sense the new
creation is in process as long as we live; it is ideally that faith in
Christ means death in His death; ideally that with faith the old
passes and the new is there; the actual putting away of the old, the
actual production of the new, are the daily task of faith as it unites
the soul to Christ. We are _in_ Him the moment faith touches Him, but
we have to grow up _into_ Him in all things. Only as we do so does
the world change all around us, till the promise is fulfilled of new
heavens and a new earth.

But there is one application of these words, directly suggested by the
context, which we ought not to overlook: I mean their application to
men, and the old ways of estimating men. Those who are in Christ have
died to the whole order of life in which men are judged "after the
flesh." Perhaps the Christian Church has almost as much need as any
other society to lay this to heart. We are still too ready to put
stress upon distinctions which are quite in place in the world, but
are without ground in Christ. Even in a Christian congregation there
is a recognition of wealth, of learning, of social position, in some
countries of race, which is not Christian. I do not say these
distinctions are not real, but they are meaningless in relation to
Christ, and ought not to be made. To make them narrows and
impoverishes the soul. If we associate only with people of a certain
station, and because of their station, all our thoughts and feelings
are limited to a very small area of human life; but if distinctions of
station, of intelligence, of manners, are lost in the common relation
to Christ, then life is open to us in all its length and breadth; all
things are ours, because we are His. To be guided by worldly
distinctions is to know only a few people, and to know them by what is
superficial in their nature; but to see that such distinctions died in
Christ's death, and to look at men in relation to Him who is Redeemer
and Lord of all, is to know all our brethren, and to know them not on
the surface, but to the heart. People lament everywhere the want of a
truly social and brotherly feeling in the Church, and try all sorts of
well-meant devices to stimulate it, but nothing short of this goes to
the root of the matter. The social, in this universal sense, is
dependent upon the religious. Those who have died in Christ to the
world in which these separative distinctions reign will have no
difficulty in recognising each other as one in Him. Society is
transfigured for each of us when this union is accomplished; the old
things have passed, and all has become new.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] The "we" in the first clause of ver. 16 is emphatic.

[48] As Heinrici does.

[49] See the excellent section on Paul and the Historical Christ in
Sabatier's _The Apostle Paul_ (English Translation, pp. 76-85).

[50] Observe the aorist παρῆλθεν.

[51] Chap. ii. 14, 17, and chap. iii. 14, are more limited.

[52] Perhaps the use of ἐν Χριστῷ here may be determined by the wish
to express tacitly his opposition to those who claimed to be in a
special sense τοῦ Χριστοῦ. Paul's formula really asserts a much more
intimate relation to Christ than theirs.

                                  XVI

                            _RECONCILIATION_

    "But all things are of God, who reconciled us to Himself through
    Christ, and gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit,
    that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not
    reckoning unto them their trespasses, and having committed unto us
    the word of reconciliation. We are ambassadors therefore on behalf
    of Christ, as though God were intreating by us: we beseech _you_
    on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God. Him who knew no sin
    He made _to be_ sin on our behalf; that we might become the
    righteousness of God in Him."--2 COR. v. 18-21 (R.V.).

    "Est hic insignis locus, si quis alius est in toto Paulo: proinde
    diligenter excutere singulas particulas convenit."--CALVIN.

"If any man be in Christ," Paul has said, "there is a new creation; he
is another man and lives in another world. But the new creation has the
same Author as the original one: it is all of God, who reconciled us to
Himself by Jesus Christ, and gave to us the ministry of reconciliation."
It is plain from these last words that "us" does not mean Christians in
general, but in the first instance Paul himself. He is a typical example
of what it is to be in Christ; he understands what his own words
mean--"the old things passed away; behold, they have become new"; he
understands also how this stupendous change has been brought about. "It
is due to God," he says, "who reconciled us to Himself through Christ."

The great interest of this passage is its bearing upon the Christian
doctrine of reconciliation, and before we go further it is necessary
to explain precisely what this word means. It presupposes a state of
estrangement. Now, a state of estrangement may be of two kinds: the
feeling of alienation and hostility may exist upon one side only, or
it may exist upon both. What, then, is the character of that state of
estrangement which subsists between God and man independently of the
Gospel, and which the Gospel, as a ministry of reconciliation, is
designed to overcome? Is it one-sided, or two-sided? Is there
something to be put away in man only, or something to be put away in
God as well, before reconciliation is effected?

These questions have been answered very confidently in different ways.
Many, especially in modern times, assert with passionate eagerness that
the estrangement is merely one-sided. Man is alienated from God by sin,
fear, and unbelief, and God reconciles him to Himself when He prevails
with him to lay aside these evil dispositions, and trust Him as his
Father and his Friend. "All things are of God, who reconciled us to
Himself through Christ," would mean in this case, "All things are of
God, who has won our friendship through His Son." That this describes in
part the effect of the Gospel, no one will deny. It is one of its
blessed results that fear and distrust of God are taken away, and that
we learn to trust and love Him. Nevertheless, this is not what the New
Testament means by reconciliation, though it is one of its fruits.

To St. Paul the estrangement which the Christian reconciliation has to
overcome is indubitably two-sided; there is something in God as well
as something in man which has to be dealt with before there can be
peace. Nay, the something on God's side is so incomparably more
serious that in comparison with it the something on man's side simply
passes out of view. It is God's earnest dealing with the obstacle on
His own side to peace with man which prevails on man to believe in the
seriousness of His love, and to lay aside distrust. It is God's
earnest dealing with the obstacle on His own side which constitutes
the reconciliation; the story of it is "the word of reconciliation";
when men receive it, they _receive_ (Rom. v. 10) the reconciliation.
"Reconciliation" in the New Testament sense is not something which _we
accomplish_ when we lay aside our enmity to God; it is something which
_God accomplished_ when in the death of Christ He put away everything
that on His side meant estrangement, so that He might come and preach
peace. To deny this is to take St. Paul's Gospel away root and branch.
He always conceives the Gospel as the revelation of God's wisdom and
love in view of a certain state of affairs as subsisting between God
and man. Now, what is the really serious element in this situation?
What is it that makes a Gospel necessary? What is it that the wisdom
and love of God undertake to deal with, and do deal with, in that
marvellous way which constitutes the Gospel? Is it man's distrust of
God? is it man's dislike, fear, antipathy, spiritual alienation? Not
if we accept the Apostle's teaching. The serious thing which makes the
Gospel necessary, and the putting away of which constitutes the
Gospel, is God's condemnation of the world and its sin; it is God's
wrath, "revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men" (Rom. i. 16-18). The putting away of this is
"reconciliation": the preaching of _this_ reconciliation is the
preaching of the Gospel.

Much impatience has been shown in the criticism of this conception.
Clever men have exhibited their talent and courage by calling it
"heathenish"; and others have undertaken to apologise for St. Paul by
describing this objection as "modern." I cannot understand how any one
should feel entitled either to flout the Apostle on this matter, or to
take him under his patronage. If any one ever had the sense to
distinguish between what is real and unreal in regard to God, between
what is true and false spiritually, it was he; even with Ritschl on
one side and Schmiedel on the other he is not dwarfed, and may be
permitted to speak for himself. The wrath of God, the condemnation of
God resting on the sinful world, are not, whatever speculative
theologians may think, unreal things: neither do they belong only to
ancient times. They are the most real things of which human nature has
any knowledge till it receives the reconciliation. They are as real as
a bad conscience; as real as misery, impotence, and despair. And it is
the glory of the Gospel, as St. Paul understood it, that it deals with
them as real. It does not tell men that they are illusions, and that
only their own groundless fear and distrust have ever stood between
them and God. It tells them that God has dealt seriously with these
serious things for their removal, that awful as they are He has put
them away by an awful demonstration of His love; it tells them that
God has made peace at an infinite cost, and that the priceless peace
is now freely offered to them.

When St. Paul says that God has given him the ministry of
reconciliation, he means that he is a preacher of this peace. He
ministers reconciliation to the world. His work has no doubt a
hortatory side, as we shall see, but that side is secondary. It is not
the main part of his vocation to tell men to make their peace with
God, but to tell them that God has made peace with the world. At
bottom, the Gospel is not good advice, but good news. All the good
advice it gives is summed up in this--Receive the good news. But if
the good news be taken away; if we cannot say, God has made peace, God
has dealt seriously with His condemnation of sin, so that it no longer
stands in the way of your return to Him; if we cannot say, Here _is_
the reconciliation, receive it,--then for man's actual state we have
no Gospel at all.

In the nineteenth verse St. Paul explains more fully the way in which
he is looking at the subject:[53] "to wit, that God was in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning unto them their
trespasses, and having committed unto us the word of reconciliation."
The English Authorised Version puts a comma at Christ: "God was in
Christ, reconciling the world to Himself." It is safe to say that "God
was in Christ" is a sentence which neither St. Paul nor any other New
Testament writer could have conceived; the "was" and the "reconciling"
must be taken together, and "in Christ" is practically equivalent to
"through Christ" in the previous verse--God was by means of Christ
reconciling the world to Himself. "Reconciling," of course, must be
taken in the sense already explained. The sentence does not mean that
God was trying to convert men, or to prevail with them to lay aside
their enmity, but that He was disposing of everything that on His part
made peace impossible. When Christ's work was done, the reconciliation
of the world was accomplished. When men were called to receive it,
they were called to a relation to God; not in which they would no more
be against Him--though that is included--but in which they would no
more have Him against them (Hofmann). There would be no condemnation
thenceforth to those who were in Christ Jesus.

The connexion of the words "not reckoning unto them their trespasses,
and having committed unto us the word of reconciliation," is rather
difficult. The last clause certainly refers to something which took
place after the work of reconciliation had been wrought; Paul was
commissioned to tell the story of it. It seems most probable that the
other is co-ordinate with this, so that both are in a sense the
evidence for the main proposition. It is as if he had said: "God was
by means of Christ establishing friendly relations between the world
and Himself, as appears from this, that He does not reckon their
trespasses unto them,[54] and has made us preachers of His grace." The
very universality of the expression--reconciling a world to
Himself--is consistent only with an objective reconciliation. It
cannot mean that God was overcoming the world's enmity (though that is
the ulterior object) it means that God was putting away His own
condemnation and wrath. When this was done, He could send, and did
send, men to declare that it was done; and among these men, none had a
profounder appreciation of what God had wrought, and what he himself
had to declare as God's glad tidings, than the Apostle Paul.

This is the point we reach in ver. 20: "We are ambassadors therefore
on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating you by us; we
beseech you, on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God." The
Apostle has just told us that all is of God, but all is at the same
time "in Christ," or "through Christ." Hence it is on Christ's behalf
he comes forward; it is the furtherance of Christ's interests he has
at heart. Nay, it is that same interest which is at the heart of the
Father, who desires now to glorify the Son; so that when Paul appeals
to men on Christ's behalf it is as though God Himself entreated them.
Most expositors notice the amazing contrast between πρεσβεύομεν ("we
are ambassadors") and δεόμεθα ("we beseech you"). The ambassador, as a
rule, stands upon his dignity; he maintains the greatness of the
person whom he represents. But Paul in this lowly passionate entreaty
is not false to his Master; he is preaching the Gospel in the spirit
of the Gospel; he shows that he has really learned of Christ; the very
conception of the ambassador descending to entreaty is, as Calvin
says, an incomparable commendation of the grace of Christ. One can
imagine how Saul the Pharisee would have spoken on God's behalf; with
what rigour, what austerity, what unbending, uncompromising assurance.
But old things have passed away; behold, they have become new. This
single verse illumines, as by a lightning flash, the new world into
which the Gospel has translated Paul, the new man it has made of him.
The fire that burned in Christ's heart has caught hold in his; his
soul is tremulous with passion; he is conscious of the grandeur of his
calling, yet there is nothing that he would not do to win men for his
message. It would go to his heart like a sword if he had to take up
the old lament, "Who hath believed our report?" In his dignity as
Christ's ambassador and as the mouthpiece of God, in his humility, in
his passionate earnestness, in the urgency and directness of his
appeal, St. Paul is the supreme type and example of the Christian
minister. In the passage before us he presents the appeal of the
Gospel in its simplest form: wherever he stands before men on Christ's
behalf his prayer is, "Be ye reconciled unto God." And once more we
must insist on the apostolic import of these words. It is the
misleading _nuance_ of "reconcile" in English that makes so many take
them as if they meant, "Lay aside your enmity to God; cease to regard
Him with distrust, hatred, and fear"; in other words, "Show yourselves
His friends." In St. Paul's lips they cannot possibly mean anything
but, "Accept _His_ offered friendship; enter into that peace which He
has made for the world through the death of His Son; believe that He
has at infinite cost put away all that on His part stood between you
and peace; _receive_ the reconciliation."

The Received Text and the Authorised Version attach the twenty-first
verse to this exhortation by γὰρ ("for"): "For Him who knew no sin He
made _to be_ sin on our behalf." The "for" is spurious, and though it
is not inept the sentence gains greatly in impressiveness by its
omission. The Apostle does not point out the connexion for us: in
simply declaring the manner in which God reconciled the world to
Himself--the process by which, the cost at which, He made peace--he
leaves us to feel how vast is the boon which is offered to us in the
Gospel, how tremendous the responsibility of rejecting it. To refuse
"the reconciliation" is to contemn the death in which the Sinless One
was made sin on our behalf.

This wonderful sentence is the inspired commentary on the statement
of ver. 15--"One died for all." It takes us into the very heart of the
Apostolic Gospel. Just because it does so, it has always been felt to
be of critical importance, alike by those who welcome and by those who
reject it; it condenses and concentrates in itself the attraction of
Christ and the offence of Christ. It is a counsel of despair to evade
it. It is not the puzzle of the New Testament, but the ultimate
solution of all puzzles; it is not an irrational quantity that has to
be eliminated or explained away, but the key-stone of the whole system
of apostolic thought. It is not a blank obscurity in revelation, a
spot of impenetrable blackness; it is the focus in which the
reconciling love of God burns with the purest and intensest flame; it
is the fountain light of all day, the master light of all seeing, in
the Christian revelation. Let us look at it more closely.

God, we must observe in the first place, is the subject. "All" is of
him in the work of reconciliation, and this above all, that He made
the Sinless One to be sin. I have read a book on the Atonement which
quoted this sentence three times, or rather misquoted it, never once
recognising that an action of God is involved. But without this, there
is no coherence in the Apostle's thoughts at all. Without this, there
would be no explanation of reconciliation as God's work. God
reconciled the world to Himself--made peace into which the world might
enter--in making Christ sin on its behalf. What precisely this means
we shall inquire further on; but it is essential to remember, whatever
it mean, that God is the doer of it.

Observe next the description of Christ--"Him that knew no sin." The
Greek negative (μὴ), as Schmiedel remarks, implies that this is
regarded as the verdict of some one else than the writer. It was
Christ's own verdict upon Himself. He whose words search our very
hearts, and bring to light unsuspected seeds of badness, never Himself
betrays the faintest consciousness of guilt. He challenges His enemies
directly: "Which of you convinceth Me of sin?" It is the verdict of
all sincere human souls, as uttered by the soldier who watched His
cross--"Truly this was a righteous man." It is the verdict even of the
great enemy who assailed Him again and again, and found nothing in
Him, and whose agents recognised Him as the Holy One of God. Above
all, it is the verdict of God. He was the beloved Son, in whom the
Father was well pleased. For three-and-thirty years, in daily contact
with the world and its sins, Christ lived and yet knew no sin. To His
will and conscience it was a foreign thing. What infinite worth that
sinless life possessed in God's sight! When He looked down to earth it
was the one absolutely precious thing. Filled full of righteousness,
absolutely well-pleasing in His eyes, it was worth more to God than
all the world beside.

Now, God reconciled the world to Himself--He made a peace which could
be proclaimed and offered to the world--when, all sinless as Christ
was, He made Him to be sin on our behalf. What does this mean? Not,
exactly, that He made Him a sin-offering on our behalf. The expression
for a sin-offering is distinct (περὶ ἁμαρτίας), and the parallelism
with δικαιοσύνη in the next clause forbids that reference here. The