LECTURE VII.

ST. PAUL'S POSITION IN REFERENCE TO ESTABLISHED CUSTOMS AND INSTITUTIONS.

The powers that be are ordained of God.-ROMANs, xiii. 1.

THE law's delay may be a modern phrase, but the fact which it expresses is old. It was exemplified in the case of St. Paul. He arrived in Rome in the spring of the year A.D. 61. His accusers were not there. The Jews in Rome had not even heard that they were coming. By the Roman law it was essential to a process that the accuser should be personally present. A trial might therefore be long delayed. An accused person might suffer more by delay than by an adverse judgment. Hence, personal malignity might hold one a long time accused, in restraint or imprisonment and obloquy, without trial. If he or his friends had not sufficient influence to bring the trial on, it might be suspended for years. When it was probable that the accused might be acquitted, it is evident that a malicious. accuser might wish to delay the trial. By thus delaying justice, he might obtain what he sought

-revenge.

This was probably the policy of St. Paul's accusers. The case was one which evidently had no Roman law to rest upon. Agrippa had openly declared that St. Paul might have been released if he had not appealed unto Cæsar.

But quite apart from the intent of his accusers, Paul's case was one which would be likely to be long delayed. Witnesses were to be brought from the remotest portions of the empire. The convenience or caprice of the Emperor in hearing the case was to be waited for. Tiberius was in the habit of putting off trials for years. Nero, immersed in guilty pleasures and frivolous pursuits, would not be likely to be more prompt.

But the period of delay was not lost or wasted by St. Paul. He had been sent by the Master to Rome to preach and teach Christ and his kingdom. Diligently and faithfully he discharged that mission. Many of his hearers were brought to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus.

The case of Onesimus, the fugitive slave of Philemon, is one of peculiar interest. Converted by St. Paul to the faith of Christ, he was sent back to his master. It is a case which furnishes a proper occasion on which to consider the whole subject of St. Paul's views and feelings in relation to established customs and institutions.

The great principle on which St. Paul proceeded in reference to all established customs and institutions, by which we shall be able to understand all that he did and all that he left undone in reference to them,-is one which is extremely simple and intelligible. It is this: he did not attack established customs and institutions, how much soever of evil sprang from them directly or indirectly, unless they interfered with, or prevented the personal duty, or personal access of the soul, to God. He attacked indeed, directly and vigorously, all heathen worship, because it was treason to God and a sacrifice to

devils; because it robbed the soul of its privilege of access to its Heavenly Father, and prevented the discharge of its duties of love and service to him. He also attacked the doctrine of the present obligation of the abrogated Jewish economy, because it destroyed the Gospel. These were the interests of that spiritual kingdom which he came to administer. Everything which obtruded itself into this kingdom, as truth which was falsehood, as duty which was sin, as obligation which was a matter of indifference, he confuted, resisted, denounced, forbade. A law of man which should forbid him to profess faith in Christ and to perform his spiritual duties in the world, he would disobey, even under the penalty of death, because it was an unlawful intrusion of the power of a human government into the sphere of divine things, which would have compelled him to sin, and to omit the discharge of his highest obligations. While it was no part of his mission as an Apostle to define what acts of human governments were lawful within their sphere, it was his right and duty to resist and disobey such laws as would forbid him to discharge his duty in the higher sphere of the kingdom of God.

Hence those customs, and those established institutions, and laws of human society, which he found in existence, however evil in themselves or their results, he did not directly attack and denounce, and preach the duty of destroying. He denounced evil in all its forms, and in all institutions, whether of divine or human origin. Even those which were the outgrowth of human depravity, or the perversion of such divinely established institutions as the Church and State, he did not declare should be at

once destroyed. He inculcated principles which, if practically and universally established, would destroy every evil custom and institution in the world. He knew that it would be useless to cut off the evil fruit and leave the tree evil, because its next growth would be the same; and because if the tree were made good, the fruit through all time would be also good. There were all around St. Paul at Rome vast structures of iniquity,-evil from their base to their summit, and yet, what did he do? He preached the kingdom of God, and taught those things which concerned the Lord Jesus. There was at Rome the awful despotism of Nero; there was a system of concubinage; there were cruel gladiatorial fights; there were the horrible slaughters of beasts and men in the amphitheaters; there was a dreadful system of slavery; and yet not against one of them is there a denunciation in the Epistles which he wrote from Rome. But no doubt the presence of these awful iniquities added fervor to his earnest exhortations to the love of God and man, to purity, and righteousness, and mercy, before which all these pollutions and cruelties would flee away!

Let us examine the mode in which St. Paul treated some established customs and institutions while he sojourned at Rome. During that period he wrote the Epistle to Philemon, to the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Philippians; and during his second sojourn his second Epistle to Timothy. To these Epistles I shall particularly refer. And in order that we may have a complete view of St. Paul's mode of proceeding in reference to them, let the facts be borne in mind which we have already mentioned, viz., that the general description of St. Paul's work at Rome

was that he preached Christ and the kingdom of God, and that, in the midst of customs and institutions which were utterly evil, he did not turn aside from his great work to denounce them, but inculcated principles and fostered feelings in the presence and ascendency of which they could not survive.

We will speak first of those institutions which were of divine origin and obligation.

I. The Jewish economy was of divine origin, and had been of divine obligation. Many of the Jewish Christians, as we have seen, still contended that its rites were obligatory. Now these rites, and indeed the whole Jewish economy, St. Paul contended had been done away and were no longer obligatory. Nay, he contended that it was wrong to observe them as of present obligation. In the Epistle to the Colossians, (ii. 16, 17,) he writes: "Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days, which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is of Christ." To condemn this institution as of present obligation, was a duty which he owed to the Gospel, which he was commissioned to proclaim.

II. The family was a divine institution and of perpetual obligation. It was founded in Eden; it was regulated by the law; it was enjoined in the Gospel. Its one divine form was that of man and wife, and their offspring. To break the marriage bonds was one of the greatest of crimes. It was to violate a specific law of God; and it was to fill society with pollution, violence, and manifold evil.

During the Republic, and even in the age of Au