24o ADAPTABILITY
jealous and passionate champion. He, if any man, might have been expected to pour contempt upon a worthless scruple — to brand, with the sternest note of disapprobation, the forms, whether of life or of thought, which, however unintentionally, did dishonour to the work of the Redeemer. We know how he could express himself upon occasions when great principles were at stake, as when he told the Galatians sharply that if they were circumcised Christ would profit them nothing. But, as a rule, how tender he is, how full of consideration and charity, how tolerant, how hopeful ! The prejudice against the meat exposed for sale in the Corinthian market was a weakly superstition; but for himself he would rather eat no flesh whatever while the world lasted than offend the conscience of a weak brother. The private observance of days, Jewish or other, at Kome, was no part of the Church's rule, and might easily engender Jewish errors ; but the Apostle insists that those who kept these days did so to the Lord, and should be respected in the observance. The strong, he says, with a touch of quiet irony, ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please themselves. And — to the scandal of some, no doubt, at the time, but for the instruction of the Church of all ages — what he preached he practised.
U There was another aspect of the anxiety of this matter regarding the Bible to which Dr. Eainy was peculiarly sensitive. He had the keenest sense of the shock which the new view occasioned in many simple believing minds to whom the plenary inspiration of every word of Scripture had been an unquestioned assumption. And he had further an even stern feeling that those were blameworthy who by any regardlessness of utterance unnecessarily wounded the faith of such. It may be admitted that both Professor Dods and Professor Bruce were men who made what the ecclesiastical mind calls " unguarded statements." Dr. Dods — one of the most absolutely truthful men who ever breathed, and a man incapable of choosing a word for any other reason than that it seemed the true one — spoke about the " errors " and "immoralities" in the Scripture narrative. Dr. Bruce, who had a Carlylean strain in his rugged nature, showed at times a brusquerie in dealing even with the most sacred themes which was not, but which was easily taken to be, irreverence and which jarred even on those who did not misunderstand it. Principal Rainy, along with all his tolerance on the general question, was extraordinarily sensitive to the hurting of tender
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 241
consciences. I remember his once saying to me of some utterances of one of the professors just named. " He does not realize the sheer pain words like these cause to many of our most believing people " ; and, as he said it, there crossed his own face a look of " sheer pain " such as assuredly he would never have shown for any suffering inflicted on himself. Here surely is real breadth. So many men who pride themselves on their theological liberality are but one-sided in their sympathy. Here was a man who, on the one hand, resolutely supported the scholar's liberty to criticize with the frankest freedom the structure of the sacred narrative, but who, on the other, really saw and shared the pain such criticism caused in the mind of some simple and perhaps ignorant pious woman who, like Cowper's lace-worker, "just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true." l
3. St. Paul's life has ever been an enigma to those who have failed to appreciate this ruling principle of his conduct. To his contemporaries he seemed altogether inconsistent and unintelligible. The Jewish converts were at a loss to understand how one who had conceded so much to Judaism in the case of Timothy should refuse everything to Judaism in the case of the Galatians. The Gentile converts could not reconcile the utterances of a teacher who in the same breath declared that an idol was nothing in the world, and denounced the feasters in an idol's temple as having fellowship with devils. The party of tradition reviled him, because he broke loose from the time-honoured usages of his race and country. The friends of liberty suspected him, because he denounced in no sparing terms the practical licence which they grafted on his doctrine. And to modern critics also his conduct has appeared not less perplexing. The Paul of the Acts, they say, is a different person from the Paul of St. Paul's Epistles. They cannot identify the facile pupil of James, who to win over those many thousands of his fellow-countrymen lent himself to a complicity in Nazirite vows, with the stern master of Peter, who declared that those seeking justification through the Law had fallen from grace. The one character is to them irreconcilable with the other. Irreconcilable, yes, to those who do not appreciate the infinite power of love in concession, in adaptation, in expedient, in varying sympathy with the wants and the weaknesses and the prejudices and the ignorances of men, while
1 P. C. Simpson, The Lift of Principal Rainy, ii. 117. I COR. — 16
242 ADAPTABILITY
holding firmly and maintaining boldly the great eentral truths of God. There is a concession which springs from cowardice, and there is a facility which is born of indifference. There is an adaptation which is the slave of self-interest, and there is a versatility which is leagued with fraud. Not such was the Apostle's principle of action. His was the elasticity of a keen, absorbing, dominating love, which concentrates its entire energies for the time on the one object before it, which watches every moment, seizes every opportunity, fastens on every rising emotion, and ingratiates itself with every transient thought, that it may force an entrance for the truth which shall save a soul from self and sin, and gain it for God.