i. The Night. 1. In the night St. Paul sees a picture of the original spiritual state of those to whom he is writing. From such passages in
* Confessions, riii. 2. ROMANS — 25
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the Epistle as, " ITevertheless, brethren, I have written the more boldly unto you in some sort, as putting you in mind, because of the grace that is given me of God, that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles" (xv. 15), we learn that a great proportion of them must have been born and brought up in heathenism ; but other and important parts of the letter are evi- dently addressed to those who were originally Jews, Now, when the Apostle used the word " night " to describe the early religious condition of his correspondents, he must, of course, have been thinking first and foremost of the Gentile section of the Eoman Church. Notwithstanding the glitter of their civilization, the inhabitants of the imperial city had been lost in a state of religious darkness. As much as to the Athenians God was to them " Unknown." The Sun of their souls was deep below the horizon. The of&cial religion was believed in by few or none, and, if it had been believed in, it would have taught its deluded votaries to acknowledge " lords many and gods many."
Even the philosophers, who tried to think out something better than the popular religion, illuminated the spiritual darkness only as the stars light up the gloom of natural night. The Stoics knew of nothing better than a mechanical fate overruling all things; and the Epicureans, despairing of finding the truth, taught only some variation or another of the precept, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may ! " Thus in the past, God had been a God who had hidden Himself from those Gentiles to whom St. Paul was now writing.
2. But, having thus used the term " night " in connection with the converts from heathenism, the Apostle was willing to let it Btand as a description of the original condition of the Jewish Christians in the imperial city also. He habitually thought of his own unconverted days as a season of gloom, and therefore it came natural to him to regard that of his brethren after the flesh in the same light. Thus had those to whom he was writing in the world's capital, both Jews and Gentiles, each in their own particular way, been till recently in a condition of spiritual darkness.
^ The comparison of night is used of Christ's absence from His Church, and of the brooding darkness which overcasts the
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world. The night is the emblem of indolence and lethargy. And are not the majority of men sluggish towards God, however keen and alert they may be towards the concerns of this world ? Night is also the time of illusion. Ugliness and beauty, gold and stone, friend and foe, are all one when night has drawn her curtains. Are not most men mistaking the counterfeit for the real, the false for the true ? Again, night is pregnant with danger. Whether to the traveller across the morass, or to the ship feeling her way along a rock-bound coast, darkness is danger. " He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth, because that the darkness hath blinded his eyes." For vast tracks of time " dark- ness hath covered the earth, and gross darkness the people " — the night of Satan's reign, of the power of darkness, of creation's travail and anguish, of the absence of Jesus from His Church.^
All moveless stand the ancient cedar-trees Along the drifted sandhills where they grow;
And from the dark west comes a wandering breeze, And waves them to and fro.
A murky darkness lies along the sand.
Where bright the sunbeams of the morning shone,
And the eye vainly seeks by sea and land Some light to rest upon.
No large pale star its glimmering vigil keeps;
An inky sea reflects an inky sky, And the dark river, like a serpent, creeps
To where its black piers lie.
Strange salty odours through the darkness steal. And, through the dark, the ocean-thunders roll ;
Thick darkness gathers, stifling, till I feel Its weight upon my soul.
I stretch my hands out in the empty air;
I strain my eyes into the heavy night; Blackness of darkness ! — Father, hear my prayer !
Grant me to see the light!*
ii. The Dawn.
1. As St. Paul thinks of his correspondents while he is writing, he describes them as living in the dawn. " The night," he says, 1 F. B. Meyer. a George Arnold, In the Dark.
388 READY FOR THE DAWNING
" has advanced towards the dawn " (so the word may be trans- lated). When the sun begins to rise towards the eastern ridges from below, the darkness takes flight and shining rays show themselves increasingly along the horizon. Even so, the Apostle says, through their late conversion to Christ, the gloom of heathenism is effectually lifting from these Eoman disciples, and the true spiritual light is shining ever more and more upon them unto the perfect day.
2. But why only " unto the perfect day " ? "Why speak of them as only in the dawn and not declare them to be already in the perfect day, seeing that they are in Christ ? In the general current of New Testament teaching two states, and only two, are broadly defined and distinguished : there are " children of the night " and " children of the day." Nor is any interval generally assumed be- tween the " darkness " of sin and the " marvellous light " of holiness. But the peculiarity of the present passage is that it gives special prominence to the spiritual phenomena of a certain interval of transition, which reality requires and Scripture never denies. The Apostle means that the Christian state is, at the best, in many respects no better than " the dawn."