Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Conclusion.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
XVII.—Conclusion.
“Old” you are, if we will say the
truth, you who are so indulgent to appetite, and justly do you vaunt
your “priority:” always do I recognise the savour of
Esau, the hunter of wild beasts: so unlimitedly studious are you
of catching fieldfares, so do you come from “the field” of
your most lax discipline, so faint are you in spirit.1117
| 1117 Comp. Gen. xxiii. 2, 3, 4, 31, and xxv.
27–34. | If I offer you a paltry lentile dyed
red with must well boiled down, forthwith you will sell all your
“primacies:” with you “love” shows its
fervour in sauce-pans, “faith” its warmth in kitchens,
“hope” its anchorage in waiters; but of greater account is
“love,” because that is the means whereby your young men
sleep with their sisters! Appendages, as we all know, of appetite
are lasciviousness and voluptuousness. Which alliance the apostle
withal was aware of; and hence, after premising, “Not in
drunkenness and revels,” he adjoined, “nor in couches and
lusts.”1118
To the indictment of your appetite pertains (the charge)
that “double honour” is with you assigned to your presiding (elders) by
double shares (of meat and drink); whereas the apostle has given them
“double honour” as being both brethren and
officers.1119
Who, among
you, is superior in holiness, except him who is more frequent in
banqueting, more sumptuous in catering, more learned in cups? Men
of soul and flesh alone as you are, justly do you reject things
spiritual. If the prophets were pleasing to such, my
(prophets) they were not. Why, then, do not you constantly
preach, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall
die?”1120
just as we
do not hesitate manfully to command, “Let us fast, brethren and
sisters, lest to-morrow perchance we die.” Openly let us
vindicate our disciplines. Sure we are that “they who are
in the flesh cannot please God;”1121
not, of course, those who are in the substance of the flesh, but
in the care, the affection, the work, the
will, of it. Emaciation displeases not us; for it is not
by weight that God bestows flesh, any more than He does “the
Spirit by measure.”1122
More easily,
it may be, through the “strait gate”1123
of salvation will slenderer flesh enter;
more speedily will lighter flesh rise; longer in the sepulchre will
drier flesh retain its firmness. Let Olympic cestus-players and
boxers cram themselves to satiety. To them bodily ambition is
suitable to whom bodily strength is necessary; and yet they also
strengthen themselves by xerophagies. But ours are other thews
and other sinews, just as our contests withal are other; we whose
“wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the
world’s1124
power, against the
spiritualities of malice.” Against these it is not by
robustness of flesh and blood, but of faith and spirit, that it behoves
us to make our antagonistic stand. On the other hand, an over-fed
Christian will be more necessary to bears and lions, perchance, than to
God; only that, even to encounter beasts, it will be his duty to
practise emaciation.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
