after all, so overwhelming as to blot out every point of light from our sky, and to sweep every resource from the face of the earth? Is no blessing left us, no alleviation of our pain, no comfort in our care, no sacred and sustaining affection, no imperative but helpful and consoling duty? If our foot has slipped, has there been no lovingkindness to hold us up? However low we have fallen, we have not yet fallen into the silence of death; or how should we still mourn and complain?

I for one have never yet seen a man so impoverished by loss, so vexed by pain, so enfeebled by the infirmities of sickness or age, but that, if he were rightly approached, he would gratefully confess that he could recall many deliverances in the past, and that he still had to be thankful for many mercies. And if we would but let our past deliverances speak to us of a Love that can never fail, and see in our present and remaining mercies the proofs of a Love still working for our good, even from the midst of our misgivings and fears, whatever their number and whatever their pressure, we should be able to look up to Heaven and say, "In the multitude of my cares within me, thy comforts delight my soul." And, therefore, I can honestly commend the Psalmist's method of dealing with his cares, and hold up to admiration the noble temper of his soul.

For the most part we refuse to learn from the experience of our fellows. We insist on going to the more costly school of our own experience, in which the lessons are beaten into us with many stripes. Let us at least, then, not refuse to learn from our own experience, but gather from it ever new food for the conviction that, because God, the righteous Judge, the loving Friend, of man is in heaven, the cause of Righteousness and Love must prosper on the earth, and that, in the end, evil must be overcome of good.

S. Cox.

283

THE EPISTLE TO TITUS.

V.-DUTIES OF THE HOUSEHOLD. Chapter ii. 1-10.

THE errors which prevailed in Crete, although they rested upon a basis of theory, were in the main errors of conduct. They required to be met not merely by preaching correct doctrine, but likewise by the enforcement of Christian duty. It is rarely sufficient for the teacher to expatiate upon the lofty doctrines of revelation alone, trusting that their appropriate lessons for daily life will follow, by mere force of inference, or spontaneously, under a law of spiritual growth. For, although it is true that to preach the "grace of God that bringeth salvation" is the best way of schooling men into sobriety, justice, and piety, yet the careful pastor will find it needful to indicate and urge the practical consequences of his teaching as well-rebuking and exhorting with all authority the souls entrusted to his care. It is, indeed, a rare point of wisdom when the pulpit knows how to set forth these two, grace and duty, in their just proportions and in their vital relationship to one another. The extreme of a lifeless morality, divorced from the warm gospel of God's grace on the one side, and on the other the extreme of a barren evangelism, puffing men into a shew of piety without real goodness, are equally to be avoided. Equally have they wrought serious mischief in the past experience of the Church.

This task of enforcing Christian duty becomes, of course, much more delicate when the teacher attempts, like St. Paul, to descend into details. There is, indeed, one uniform type of character which is appropriate for all Christians. Like a broad substructure, the cardinal virtues of sobriety, righteousness, and godliness, are to underlie every social relationship. Yet it is not sufficient for the healthy progress of a Christian community that its members be admonished

in identical terms to practise these universal graces. This ground type of a good character has to undergo, it is obvious, specific modifications according to age, sex, and the social position of the individual. For Christianity respects, and consecrates, the natural ties both of the home and of the commonwealth. It possesses no such anarchic tendency as Paul detected in the pernicious views of the Cretan Jews. Far from upsetting, it sanctifies those seemly and wholesome relationships which it finds established among men ; relationships upon the due maintenance of which the wellbeing of society must always depend. It is called upon, therefore, to shew how its general principles of virtue will apply to the several relations of rich and poor, of ruler and ruled, of master and servant, of old and young, of parent and child, of husband and wife. Nor can the overseer and guide of a Christian society claim to have exhausted his functions, until, after apostolic models, he has done his best to develop in each class that character which belongs to it, that both the Christian state and the Christian household may be strengthened and adorned with every virtue which becomes "sound doctrine."

These remarks are suggested by the section of this Apostolic Letter to the opening of which we are come. It follows up the polemic in the opening chapter by instructing Titus, how, in counteracting the errorists of Crete, he was to press upon every class of Christians, in detail, those practical virtues which have their roots in the doctrines of the Gospel. The section is marked as important by its length as well as by its central position; for it fills the whole of the second, with eleven verses of the third chapter. It breaks easily into two paragraphs, of which the former, occupying Chapter ii., deals with the family, and the latter, in Chapter iii. 1-11, with civil and social life. What is carefully to be noted, as significant of the Writer's strong conviction on the internal connexion betwixt homely duty

and gospel doctrine, is that each of these two paragraphs contains a splendid appeal to the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and the gratuitous benefits which have been poured forth upon sinners by the advent of our Saviour. The spontaneous love of the Father, the ransoming self-sacrifice of Jesus, the regeneration of the soul by the Holy Ghost, our justification by free grace, our filial standing, and the blessed hope of our Lord's appearing:-all these are among the most mysterious and abstract doctrines of the evangelical faith; yet from these are fetched the motives which are to make old men sober and young women chaste, to teach fidelity to the slave and loyalty to the citizen!

Before proceeding to notice the particular duties of home life in detail, the reader will not fail to remark once more the frequent occurrence of a single epithet which may almost be said to characterize Christian behaviour, as St. Paul, in his later days, came to conceive of it. The repetition of the word I mean is veiled from readers of the Authorised Version by variations in the rendering of it. In one form or another it really occurs in these verses four times. First, old men are to be "temperate": that is its first occurrence. Then, elderly females are to teach the young wives to be "sober," another use of the same word. Next, the younger women are to be "discreet," the same word. Finally, it is the solitary requirement for young men that they be "sober-minded," where once more the same word is retained. What is this moral quality which Paul felt it to be so necessary to enforce upon every age and on both sexes? It denotes (as was before explained in an earlier paper) that moral health which results from a complete mastery over the passions and desires, "so that," in Archbishop Trench's words, "they receive no further allowance than that which the law and the right reason admit and approve." Self-control would probably come as near the

1 See ii. 11-14 and iii. 4-7.

idea as any single word we can employ. But it includes such moral sanity or wisdom of character as is only to be attained through the habitual control of the reason over loose, illicit, or excessive desires of every kind.

It is by no means to be wondered at that St. Paul should have laid much emphasis on this virtue. Heathen society in its later periods was remarkable for the weakening of selfcontrol. Self-indulgence became at once its danger and its disgrace. When religion came to be thoroughly divorced from ethics, no curb remained strong enough to restrain the bulk of men either from angry passion or from sensual gratification. Multitudes cast off every curb, religious reverence, fear for consequences, public opinion, domestic authority, even self-respect; and a laxity of manners set in, in conversation, in dress, in deportment, in the intercourse of the sexes, and in the enjoyment of every whimsical or extravagant invention which could stimulate the jaded capacity for enjoyment, such as almost passes belief. Against this tendency of the later classical period, philosophers and moralists were never weary of inveighing. The very word which St. Paul here uses was with them the technical name for a cardinal virtue, the praises of which, as "the fairest of the gifts of the gods" they were always sounding. But the foolish excess which heathen religion had failed to check, defied heathen philosophy too. The time had come for Christianity to try its hand. The task was a hard one. I have no doubt Paul beheld with anxiety the growing inroads which, before his death, the loose and reckless habits of his age had begun to make even upon those little sheltered companies that had sought a new refuge beneath the Cross. In these latest writings, he reiterates the warning to be soberminded with no less urgency than Plato or Aristotle. We may well thank God that he based the admonition on more prevailing pleas. It took a long time for Christianity to lay the foundations