ST PAUL THE EPISTLE OF TO THE ROMANS. CHAPTER VI. VERSES 12, 13. 12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. 13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. The apostle, without giving any countenance to the dogma that identified moral evil with matter, earnestly enjoined a control of the bodily members necessary to hinder them from becoming the 'servants of sin.' This control, if it is to be effectual, demands the exclusion of whatever tends to convert those members into 'instruments of unrighteousness'; but who can name such an agency at all comparable to intoxicating drink? Comparatively small quantities of these liquors will often exert a distinctly vitiating influence, and their slightest sensible effect is unfavourable to the perfect control of the animal by the spiritual nature. The ordinary social use of alcoholics, as all experience attests, stimulates every irregular and depraved desire. Christian prudence cannot but approve the rejection of such incentives to vice; and if any one should say that they have not proved so to himself, he is bound to consider whether he may not have suffered some loss without a perception of it; whether he is justified in risking the many mischiefs that intoxicating liquors are capable of inflicting; and whether he acts advisedly and kindly at least in sanctioning the use of articles by which so many persons around him are tempted, betrayed, and undone. CHAPTER XIII. VERSES 1, 3. Wilt Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same. Most explicitly is it here affirmed that Civil Government is in its essence a Divine institution, and entrusted by God with powers of prohibition and punishment that i ought not to lie in abeyance where preventible evil is concerned. True, Nero was a monster; yet the fact that even he was the legal head of the Roman empire did not weaken the apostolic argument; and in whatever degree representative government is superior to arbitrary rule and tyranny, the moral authority of human law becomes the more binding and exalted. But where any government permits and sanctions pursuits that deprave, impoverish, and destroy its subjects by wholesale, it is neglecting its proper function, and frustrating those great ends of social security and progress for which government, and society itself, exist. In the patronage extended by the British Government to the traffic in strong drink, this social anomaly and contradiction is seen upon a scale of colossal magnitude; and the enormous revenues (upwards of twenty millions of pounds annually) raised from the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors make it the more needful that this illegitimate connection should be exposed. The very least that should be done under such circumstances is, that legally-defined districts should be enabled to determine whether a business so anti-social in its results should be licensed and tolerated. A local veto-power of this kind would permit districts to protest against the national policy, while it would protect them against the consequences of a legislation so caustically described by the poet Cowper : "Pass where we may, through city or through town, Village, or hamlet, of this merry land, Though lean and beggared, every twentieth pace Drink and be drunk, then! 'tis your country bids ;- CHAPTER XIII. VERSE 10. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Love, embodied in the Christian, will effectually prevent him 'working ill to his neighbour,' whether by carrying on occupations that seduce and deprave, or by extending his sanction to dangerous and evil customs. On the contrary, 'love is the fulfilling of the law,'-viz. of that second department of the law which comprehends all a man's relations to his fellow-creatures. As love is an ever-active, ever-operative principle, if it does not work evil, it works out the welfare of all within its own reach; and it does this not least by removing from their path all that can delude and betray. To this love the Temperance cause appeals for aid in the war against the causes of intemperance, whether residing objectively in the properties of strong drink, and in its general circulation and public sale, or subjectively in the fallacies and false tastes excited by its consumption as a beverage. Love cannot behold without grief the ravages of intoxicating liquors; and when enlightened as to the true nature of such drinks, it must prompt to efforts for their exclusion from the home, the place of public concourse, and the Church of Christ. Love will ever do, as well as desire, what is best for the cure and prevention of intemperance. CHAPTER XIII. VERSE 13. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. Y HONESTLY] Euscheemonōs, ‘becomingly' (from eu, 'well,' and scheema, ‘deportment' or 'condition'), = in a manner well-suited to moral obligation and Christian character. NOT IN RIOTING] Mee kōmois, 'not in revelries.' Wiclif has 'not in superflue feestis.' Tyndale and Cranmer have 'not in eatynge;' the Geneva V., 'not in glotonie;' the Rheims V., 'not in banketings.' Comus, the god of revelry, is represented as a young man wearing a garland, and with a torch falling from his hand, or burning his side, as he lies in a drunken sleep. The kōmos was either a festival in his honour, or a private feast, when the revellers were accustomed to sally out after supper, attired as bacchanals, and behaving themselves as such. AND DRUNKENNESS] Kai methais, 'and in intemperances'—all intemperate indulgences of the appetite, whether in food or drink, whether attended by intoxication or not. A great error is committed by those who regard 'drunkenness,' in the scriptural sense, as synonymous with mad or helpless intoxication. Philosophy likewise teaches that the sin of drinking is not in the mere physical degree of disturbance, but in the motive-in the relation of the mind of the drinker to the law of God. Another apostle taught that he who breaks one law breaks all, so far as God is concerned; and it is a mere commonplace that the law of honesty is equally violated in stealing a penny as in stealing a pound. Drinking for pleasure, in defiance of need and fitness, is the essence of the vice of drunkenness. CHAPTER XIV. VERSE 13. Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother's way. A STUMBLINGBLOCK] Proskomma, 'a stumbling' a cause of stumbling. Codex B omits this word, and Codex C, instead of proskomma, reads proskosma. Wiclif has 'hirtynge.' OR AN OCCASION TO FALL] Ee skandalon, or snare' [see Note on Matt. v. 30]. The meaning of the passage is, that Christians are not hastily to pass judgments upon one another, and are to be exceedingly careful not to do aught that may cause a brother to fall or be ensnared. Whether this command has any application to the drinking customs of our country must depend upon the reply to the question whether these customs do prove a stumblingblock and snare to Christian brethren. If they do—and he must be strangely ignorant who should deny it,— any sanction of the customs must be at variance with the apostolic precept. Nor is it any excuse to say, 'Such customs are not causes of evil to me,' for it is not for his own sake, but for his brother's, that the Christian is here enjoined to be disconnected from stumblingblocks and snares. The danger to others is to be as carefully avoided by him as if it were danger to himself. In this, as in all respects, he is to do to others as he would wish them to do to him, were their circumstances mutually reversed. If he is to be willing to 'lay down his life for the brethren,' the least he can do for them is not to bring them, by act of his, into temptation and transgression; yet, to carry out this negative principle of Christian fraternity, there must be thoughtfulness and intelligence; for evil, wrought by ignorance and inconsideration, is not wrought without sin to the unintentional doer. If he who will not know to do good' is not innocent, still less is he blameless who does evil because he will not learn to do well.' CHAPTER XIV. VERSE 14. I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean. The apostle is not discussing the question whether some things are unfit for food. He is proceeding on the supposition that this fitness exists, and then affirms that there is nothing koinon, unclean,' of itself: in other words, that ceremonial uncleanness, however defined, is not identical with moral uncleanness; consequently, that no moral guilt is contracted by the use of food. Yet he allows that if even food is regarded as unclean by any one, it becomes to him unclean in such a sense that he would contract guilt by using it, seeing that he would be doing what he believed was an unclean action. CHAPTER XIV. VERSE 15. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died. The argument of the apostle may be thus paraphrased:-"No food (properly so called) is unclean, but if on account of food (broma)—that is, any particular kind or preparation of food (in the A. V. 'thy' is aptly supplied)—thy brother is grieved-feels distressed or aggrieved by it as unclean,-now walkest thou not charitably, if thou puttest it in his way and temptest him to eat it. Do not with thy food destroy him for whom Christ died. If he transgresses his conscience, and so falls away through your example, you will be chargeable with his loss, though you never intended it." How affecting is the apostle's appeal!"Let not your meat be his destruction to whom the Lord has given His body as spiritual meat and His blood as spiritual drink. If Christ died for him, you ought to abstainin his presence at least-from the meat which to him is unclean." CHAPTER XIV. VERSES 16, 17. 16 Let not then your good be evil spoken of: 17 For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. You, continues the apostle, may partake of such food with a good conscience, but if your act is liable to be evil spoken of (blaspheemeisthō, 'blasphemed '), and is an act not positively required by Christian duty, leave it undone. Your personal benefit is small, the injury to the cause of Christ may be great. "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink (brōsis kai posis); but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." Neither directly nor indirectly ought 'what shall we eat?' to be balanced in the scale with what concerns the advancement of the Divine kingdom upon earth, CHAPTER XIV. VERSES 18-20. 18 For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of men. 19 Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and things wherewith one may edify another. 20 For meat destroy not the work of God. All things indeed are pure; but it is evil for that man who eateth with offence. Instead of en toutois, 'in these things,' all the chief MSS. read en toutō, 'in this.' He who in this manner serves Christ-by making questions of food subordinate to spiritual things—is acceptable (euarestos)—well-pleasing to God, and 'approved of men' (dokimos tois anthrōpois),—approves himself to men as being what he professes, i. e. spiritually and not carnally minded. Let us then follow (diōkōmen)—pursue the things of peace,' the things that promote brotherly peace, ' and the things of edification for one another '-things by which Christians build one another up in the strength and completeness of the Christian life. The idea of a 'building' suggests the reiterated appeal,—-do not on any account destroy (kataluō, dissolve, or cast down) the work of God-the living workmanship of God's Spirit-in the person of a Christian brother. The apostle then returns to the thought expressed in ver. 14, asserting the undeniable truth, that though a thing is pure (katharon) in itself, it becomes evil (kakon) to the conscience of the man who regards it as such, and yet joins himself to it; so that good food is converted into a stumbling (proskomma)—a cause of sin-to him who eats it while he considers it unclean. CHAPTER XIV. VERSE 21. It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak. The apostle had been alluding to the case of a Christian who considered meat offered to idols as having become polluted; and he had been showing that by inadvertently tempting him to eat such food, his fellow-Christians were eating uncharitably, and imperilling his salvation. He now proceeds to state the general principle underlying this case, and all others of the same class. It is good (kalon) -morally beautiful or excellent, calculated to call forth the admiration of all good beings-not to eat flesh (krea), nor to drink wine (oinon), nor "to do anything by means of which thy brother stumbles, or offends, or is made weak"; that is, by which his conscience is impaired, as would be the case if its dictates were disobeyed. No text has been more frequently and successfully quoted than this, on behalf of total abstinence from intoxicating liquors; yet many objections to such an application of it have been taken from opposite quarters. Opponents have objected (1) that the apostle's reference was to a particular case, and not to the question of abstaining from flesh or wine, as such, under all circumstances. True, but the principle is broad enough to include all circumstances and occasions, where the main point is involved-the stumbling and sin of a brother. The question is not what particular case St Paul had in his eye, but whether the principle he enunciates is applicable to the use of intoxicating liquors |