Thus the subject is detachment from the world. There ii mentioned —
I COR. — 14
210 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
I. An Encouragement to Detachment.
II. Three Eelationships of life towards which the Detachment may be practised : —
1. Marriage.
2. Sorrowing and Eejoicing.
3. Business.
III. A general Direction regarding the proper Attitude to
the World.
IV. A good Eeason for this Attitude.
TJ Christianity is a spirit, not a law ; it is a set of principles, not a set of rules ; it is not a saying to us, You shall do this, you shall not do that — you shall use this particular dress, you shall not use that — you shall lead, you shall not lead, a married life. Christianity consists of principles, but the application of those principles is left to every man's individual conscience. With respect not only to this particular case, but to all the questions which had been brought before him, the Apostle applies the same principle; the cases upon which he decided were many and various, but the large, broad principle of his decision remains the same in all. You may marry, and you have not sinned: you may remain unmarried, and you do not sin; if you are invited to a heathen feast, you may go, or you may abstain from going ; you may remain a slave, or you may become free ; not in these things does Christianity consist. But what it does demand is this : whether married or unmarried, whether a slave or free, in sorrow or in joy, you are to live in a spirit higher and loftier than that of the world.1
I.
An Encouragement to Detachment.
" The time is shortened."
1. There is no tremor of dismay or sadness in the voice. St. Paul was in the midst of work, full of the interest and joy of living, holding the reins of many complicated labours in his hands, and he quietly said, " This is not going to last long. Very soon it will be over." It is what men often say to themselves with terror, clutching all the more closely the things which they hold, as if they would hold on to them for ever. There is nothing of
1 F. W. Robertson.
i CORINTHIANS vn. 29-31 211
that about St. Paul. And on the other hand, there is nothing of morbidness or discontent, no rejoicing that the time is short, and wishing that it were still shorter. There is no hatred of life which makes him want to be away. There is no mad impatience for the things which lie beyond. There is simply a calm and satisfied recognition of a fact. There is a reasonable sense of what is good and dear in life, and yet, at the same time, of what must lie beyond life, of what life cannot give us. It is as when the same pen wrote those sublime and simple words, " This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on im- mortality " ; the quiet statement of a great, eternal necessity, at which the wise man must feel the same kind of serious joy as that with which he follows the movements of the stars, and looks to see day and night inevitably give place to one another.
2. It does not matter what St. Paul was thinking of when he said the time was short. He may have had his mind upon the death which they were all approaching. He may have thought of the coming of Christ, which he seems to have expected to take place while he was yet alive. We cannot be quite certain which it was. And perhaps the very vagueness about this helps us to his meaning. For he is not, evidently, dwelling upon the nature of the event which is to limit the " time," only upon the simple fact that there is a limit; that the period of earthly life and work lies like an island in the midst of a greater sea of being, the island of time in the ocean of a timeless eternity ; and that it is pressed upon and crowded into littleness by the infinite. Not the shore where the sea sets the island its limits, but only the island in the sea, hearing the sea always on its shores ; not the experience by which this life should pass into another, but only the compression and intensifying of this life by the certainty that there is another ; not death, but the shortness of life — that is what his thoughts are fixed upon, and it is of this that the best men always think the most.
3. Time is short in reference to two things.
(1) First, it is short in reference to the person who regards it, — That mysterious thing Time is a matter of sensation, and not a reality; a modification merely of our own consciousness, and not actual existence ; depending upon the flight of ideas — long
212 SPIRITUAL DETACHMENT
to one, short to another. The span granted to the butterfly, the child of a single summer, may be long ; that which is given to the cedar of Lebanon may be short. The shortness of time, therefore, is entirely relative, belonging to us, not to God.
If In poetry and ordinary talk, we are obliged to look at time as an agent in itself; but in reality time does nothing and is nothing; we use it as an easy familiar expression for all those causes which are working slowly, and which we cannot see. Unless some positive cause is in action, no change takes place even in a thousand years. There are probably empty regions in the universe where no light comes, and nothing occurs ; in such places there can be no time. It is simply that we are here, and that things are happening around us. The earth has gone a certain course round the sun, and brought us again to the same point where we were twelve months ago. We have for 365 days been careering through different parts of space. That is the meaning of a year. We are only allowed to join in the career, and to come back to the same point a certain number of repeti- tions in our lives — the same point, I mean, in reference to the solar system ; but the solar system itself is moving onward through space. During each period, certain causes are leading either to the completion, the maintenance, or the decay of our bodies ; and after we have spun round with our little globe for some 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, or at the most 100 circuits, then comes the end. We can see no further. Others take our place, and we are what is called dead.1