(2) "Salute Prisca and Aquila my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus. . . . Salute Urbanus our fellow- worker in Christ " (Eom. xvi. 3, 9). " In Christ " is a sphere of work as well as a sphere of freedom. The nature of the work is tolerably clear from the connexion in which the words occur. Aquila and Priscilla had a "church in their house," where they and others constantly endeavoured to justify the ways of God to men; and brought men to the knowledge of God through Christ. To be " in Christ " was to be a fellow-worker with St. Paul in this great endeavour. "In Christ" they found a solution of the problem of man's relation to the unseen world. They found the " good news of God " which lifted away the uncertainties that hung like a mist over man's destiny ; and they felt the news so great that they must make it known. They became fellow- workers in the endeavour to bring men into a life which was to be a conscious fellowship with God.
^ Love is more often the child of service than its parent. Out of the experience of difficulties overcome, of the hearts of men answering to the word of Christ, and the minds of men responding to His Spirit, comes the confidence which is the renewal of faith. It is an old recipe for dealing with scepticism to send it to teach in a slum or a ragged-school. The worth of the spiritual element
' D. Macfadyen, Truth in Beligion, 246.
170 IN CHRIST A NEW CREATION
in life is never so manifest as when we come to know the meaning of life stripped bare of that element. It is then we know what it is to be " fellow- workers in Christ." ^
(3) Sometimes one gets a flash of insight into St. Paul's mind through a single casual phrase, as when he says, " I speak the truth in Christ, I lie not " ; or, " minds corrupted from simplicity toward Christ." The life of humanity as St. Paul sees it in Christ is a clean, sweet, ordered, simple life. Of late much has been said and written of the simple life. But the simple life is not life in a cottage or life in a flat, but life " in Christ." And it is that wherever it is lived.
^ The talk about the simple life is a natural revolt against the complications of a cumbrous civilization which is at some points becoming too heavy for the shoulders that have to carry it. Our churches are like the Italian condottieri in the days when defensive armour had reached its highest point of development, and before guns had been introduced to make armour useless. They were so smothered in armour that when a man fell from his horse he could not rise. He might expire on the ground un- less some friend came to release him. With us it is the elaborate organization of life, and the increasing demands of ecclesiastical dominion that are destroying the spontaneity of nature in the soul's life.2
(4) But the climax of St. Paul's way of interpreting the Christian life is reached in the phrase in this text — "a new creation" in Christ. Men who live in this sphere of spiritual freedom, work in this atmosphere, and admit the force of this d3mamic, undergo a new spiritual creation. The fact has its physical analogy with which every one is familiar. We may have known someone condemned to exile by the doctors. He was told that he could not live in this climate, but if he would go to South Africa or New Zealand or Australia, breathe a drier atmosphere, live in the open air, he might indefinitely prolong his life. He went, and we lost sight of him for a time, but in ten or fifteen years he came back, broad-shouldered, sun-browned, vigorous, hearty, strong. When we saw him we said instinctively, " My friend, you are a new man, one would hardly have known you." And the phrase is true enough. The body has been rebuilt, new elements built into it, new energies stored in it,
' D. Maofadyen. ^ D. Macfadyon,
2 COR. V. 17 171
years of hope and service have now become possible for it which were once impossible.
^ On an early morning of February, his wife awoke, to hear that the light they had waited for more than they that watch for the morning, had risen indeed. She asked, "What have you seen ? " He replied, " The Gospel." It came to him at last, after all his thought and study, not as something reasoned out, but as an inspiration — a revelation from the mind of God Himself. The full meaning of his answer he embodied at once in a sermon on " Christ the Eorm of the Soul," from the text, " Until Christ be formed in you." The very title of this sermon expresses his spiritually illuminated conception of Christ as the indwelling, formative life of the soul, the new creating power of righteousness for humanity. And this conception was soon after more adequately set forth in his book, " God in Christ." That he regarded this as a crisis in his spiritual life is evident from his not infrequent reference to it among his Christian friends. He regarded this experience as a "personal discovery of Christ, and of God as represented in Him." To those about him he seemed " a new man," or rather, the same man with a heavenly investiture. Or, as he himself explained it : "I seemed to pass a boundary. I had never been very legal in my Christian life, but now I passed from those partial seeings, glimpses, and doubts, into a clearer knowledge of God and into His inspirations, which I have never wholly lost. The change was into faith — a sense of the freeness of God, and the ease of approach to Him." ^