The life and work of St. Paul

246 THK LIFE AND WORK O ST. PAT7I*
the thing forbidden is the sin of fornication, 1 not idolatry, or mixe td marriages,
or marriages between blood relations (1 Cor. v. 1), or second marriages
(1 Tim. iii. 2), or any of the other explanations in which an astonished exegesis
has taken refuge, must be regarded as certain. How, then, can the fact be
accounted for ? Only by the boundless profligacy of heathendom ; only by
the stern purity of Christian morals. The Jews, as a nation, were probably
the purest among all the races of mankind ; yet even they did not regard this
sin as being the moral crime which Christianity teaches us to consider it; *
and they lived in the midst of a world which regarded it as so completely a
matter of indifference that Socrates has no censure for it, 3 and Cicero declares
that no Pagan moralist had ever dreamt of meeting it with an absolute prohibition.
4 What is it that has made the difference in the aspect which sensu-
ality wears to the ancient and to the modern conscience P I have no hesitation
in answering that the reason is to be found in the purity which every page of
the New Testament breathes and inspires, and specially in the words of our
Blessed Lord, and in the arguments of St. Paul. If the blush of modesty on
youthful cheeks is a holy thing, if it be fatal alike to individuals and to nations
"
to burn away in mad waste " the most precious gifts of life, if debauchery
be a curse and stain which more than any other has eaten into the heart of
human happiness, then the saintly benefactor to whose spirituality we owe the
inestimable boon of having impressed these truths upon the youth of every
Christian land is he who taught by the Spirit of the Lord showed more
clearly, more calmly, more convincingly than any human being has ever
shown, the true heinousness, the debasing tendency, the infusive virulence of
sins which, through the body, strike their venom and infix their cancer into
('lovato Qarrov o.v an-odavoi ij \oipelov a.yoi, Sext. Emp. ; see Tac. H, v. 4 ; Sen. Ep. 108, 22 ;
Macrob. Sat. ii. 4). This abstinence was common in the East (Dion Cass. Ixxix. 11).
'
, The notion that Tropi'ei'a can mean things told in the market after idol
(wtpvyiu)
feast*
is also utterly untenable. See the question examined by Baur, Paul. i. 14G, teq.
Besides, the four prohibitions correspond to those attributed to Peter in Ps. Clem. Horn,
Vil. 4, Where ^.7) atcaSapria^ filovv = iropvfia.
5 In point of fact the Jews probably regarded the other three things with infinitely
greater horror than tliis. The practice even of their own Rabbis, though veiled under
certain decent forms, was far looser than it should have been, as is proved by passages
in the Talmud (Gittin, f. 90 ; Joma, f. 18, 2 ; Selden, Ux. Hebr. iii. 17).
s Xen. Mem. iii. 13.
* This passage is remarkable as coming from one of the purest of all ancient writers
(Cio. pro Gael. xx. ; cf. Ter. Addph, i. 2, 21). The elder Cato was regarded as a model
of stern Roman virtue, yet what would be thought in Christian days of a man who spoke
and acted as he did? (I [or. Sat. i. 2, 31.) If Cato could so regard the sin, what must
have been the vulgar estimate of it? Nor must it be forgotten that the letter was
addressed to Jews and Gentiles alike familiar with an epoch in which, as indeed for
many previous centuries, this crtme, and crimes yet more heinous, formed a recognised
part of the religious of certain divinities Baruch vi.
worship^ {cf. 43; Strabo, viii. 6);
and in which the pages of writers who reek with stains like these formed a port -of the
current literature. Few circumstances can show more clearly the change which Christianity
has wrought. But to every reader of the letter the immediate link of connexion
between iJw\o0vTa and iroprei'a would be but too obvious. Further, it should be steadily
observed that the allusions stern yet tender, uncompromising yet merciful of St.
Paul's own Epistles to the preraleuce of this sin, show most decidedly that if conversion
at once revealed to Christians its true heinousness, it often failed to shield them against
temptation to its commission.