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| Sundry Objections or Excuses Dealt with.
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Chapter V.185
| 185 Cf. chaps. viii. and
xii. | —Sundry
Objections or Excuses Dealt with.
We will certainly take more pains in answering the
excuses of artificers of this kind, who ought never to be admitted into
the house of God, if any have a knowledge of that Discipline.186
| 186 i.e., the Discipline of
the house of God, the Church. Oehler reads, “eam
disciplinam,” and takes the meaning to be that no artificer of
this class should be admitted into the Church, if he applies for
admittance, with a knowledge of the law of God referred to in the
former chapters, yet persisting in his unlawful craft. Fr. Junius would
read, “ejus disciplinam.” | To begin with, that speech, wont to be cast
in our teeth, “I have nothing else whereby to live,” may be
more severely retorted, “You have, then, whereby to live?
If by your own laws, what have you to do with God?”187
| 187 i.e., If laws of your
own, and not the will and law of God, are the source and means of your
life, you owe no thanks and no obedience to God, and therefore need not
seek admittance into His house (Oehler). | Then, as to the argument they have the
hardihood to bring even from the Scriptures, “that the apostle
has said, ‘As each has been found, so let him
persevere.’”188
| 188 1 Cor. vii. 20. In Eng. ver., “Let every man
abide in the same calling wherein he was called.” | We may all,
therefore, persevere in sins, as the result of that
interpretation! for there is not any one of us who has not been found
as a sinner, since no other cause was the source of
Christ’s descent than that of setting sinners free. Again,
they say the same apostle has left a precept, according to his own
example, “That each one work with his own hands for a
living.”189
If this precept is
maintained in respect to all hands, I believe even the
bath-thieves190
| 190 i.e., thieves who
frequented the public baths, which were a favorite resort at Rome. | live by their hands,
and robbers themselves gain the means to live by their hands; forgers,
again, execute their evil handwritings, not of course with their feet,
but hands; actors, however, achieve a livelihood not with hands alone,
but with their entire limbs. Let the Church, therefore, stand open to
all who are supported by their hands and by their own work; if
there is no exception of arts which the Discipline of God receives not.
But some one says, in opposition to our proposition of
“similitude being interdicted,” “Why, then, did Moses
in the desert make a likeness of a serpent out of bronze?” The
figures, which used to be laid as a groundwork for some secret future
dispensation, not with a view to the repeal of the law, but as a type
of their own final cause, stand in a class by themselves. Otherwise, if
we should interpret these things as the adversaries of the law do, do
we, too, as the Marcionites do, ascribe inconsistency to the Almighty,
whom they191
in this manner
destroy as being mutable, while in one place He forbids, in another
commands? But if any feigns ignorance of the fact that that effigy of
the serpent of bronze, after the manner of one uphung, denoted the
shape of the Lord’s cross,192
which
was to free us from
serpents—that is, from the devil’s angels—while,
through itself, it hanged up the devil slain; or whatever other
exposition of that figure has been revealed to worthier men193
| 193 [On which see Dr.
Smith, Dict. of the Bible, ad vocem
“Serpent.”] | no matter, provided we remember the apostle
affirms that all things happened at that time to the People194
| 194 i.e., the
Jewish people, who are generally meant by the expression
“the People” in the singular number in Scripture. We shall
endeavour to mark that distinction by writing the word, as here, with a
capital. | figuratively.195
It is
enough that the same God, as by law He forbade the making of
similitude, did, by the extraordinary precept in the case of the
serpent, interdict similitude.196
| 196 On the principle that
the exception proves the rule. As Oehler explains it: “By the
fact of the extraordinary precept in that particular case, God gave an
indication that likeness-making had before been forbidden and
interdicted by Him.” | If you reverence the
same God, you have His law, “Thou shalt make no
similitude.”197
| 197 Ex. xx. 4, etc. [The absurd “brazen
serpent” which I have seen in the Church of St. Ambrose, in
Milan, is with brazen hardihood affirmed to be the identical serpent
which Moses lifted up in the wilderness. But it lacks all
symbolic character, as it is not set upon a pole nor in any way
fitted to a cross. It greatly resembles a vane set upon a
pivot.] | If you look back,
too, to the precept enjoining the subsequently made similitude, do you,
too, imitate Moses: make not any likeness in opposition to the law,
unless to you, too, God have bidden it.198
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