3. The third feature is the leading of a holy life in purity and brotherly fellowship and in the expectation of Christ’s speedy return. The course which the history of the Church followed resulted in the dogmatic details in the New Testament being selected for investigation, rather than those parts of it which depicted the life of the first Christians and exhorted men to morality. And yet not only are the New Testament epistles largely taken up with these moral exhortations, but not a few of the so-called dogmatic portions were also written solely for moral admonition. Jesus directed his disciples to give these exhortations the first place, and the earliest Christians were well aware that the first business of life was to do the will of God and present themselves as a holy community. Upon this their whole existence and their mission in the world were based. There were two points which, in accordance pith Jesus’ teaching, they put first and foremost, and they were points which at bottom embraced the whole range of moral action: purity and brotherly fellowship. They took purity in the deepest and lost comprehensive sense of the word, as the horror of everything that is unholy, and as the inner pleasure in everything that is upright and true, lovely and of good report. They also meant purity in regard to the body: “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost-which is in you? therefore glorify God in your body.” In this sublime consciousness the earliest Christians took up the struggle against the sins of impurity, which in the heathen world were not accounted sins at all. As sons of God, “blameless and harmless in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation,” they were to “shine as lights in the world.” It was thus that they were to show of what they were made, and it was thus that they showed it: to be holy as God was holy, to be pure as disciples of Christ. Here too, we get the measure of the renunciation of the world which this community imposed upon itself. “To keep oneself unspotted from the world” was the asceticism which it practised itself and required of its adherents. The other point is brotherly fellowship. In joining the love of God with the love of neighbour in his sayings, Jesus himself had a new union of men with one another in view. The earliest Christians understood him. From the very first they constituted themselves into a brotherly union, not in word only but in deed—a living realisation of what he meant. In calling themselves “brothers,” they felt all the obligations which the name imposes and tried to come up to them, not by legal regulations but by voluntary service, each according to the measure of his own powers and gifts. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that in Jerusalem they went so far as to have a voluntary community of goods. Paul says nothing about it; and if we are to accept this obscure report as really trustworthy, then neither Paul nor the Christian communities among the Gentiles took pattern by the enterprise. They seem not to have been required, nor to have thought it desirable, to order their lives afresh in externals. The brotherly fellowship which “the holy” were to cultivate, and did cultivate, was distinguished by two principles: “Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it,” and “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.”
LECTURE X
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