Fleming (A. G.), Silver Wings, 70.
Garbett (E.), Experiences of the Inner Life, 127.
Holland (H. S.), Logic and Life, 163.
Jones (J. D.), The Unfettered Word, 260.
Kenrick (C. W. H.), in Sermons for the People, iii. 80.
Lewis (R. C), in Sermons by Welshmen, 296.
Llewellyn (D.), The Forgotten Sheaf, 45.
Maclaren (A.), Christ's Musts, 239.
Mortimer (A. G.), Lenten Preaching, 26.
Newman (J. H.), Oxford University Sermons, 37.
Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 178.
Trench (R. C.), Sermons in Ireland, 133.
Children's Pulpit : First Sunday in Advent, i. 6 (Shore).
Christian World Puplit, Ixviii. 161 (Waggett).
Glergymayi's Magazine, New Ser., i. 155 (Tillotson).
Literary Churchman, xxxviii. (1892) 105.
^9
i
The Fruit of the Light.
For the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.— Eph. V. 9.
This is one of the cases in which the Kevised Version has done service by giving currency to an unmistakably accurate and im- proved reading. That which stands in our Authorized Version, " the fruit of the Spirit," seems to have been a correction made by some one who took offence at the violent metaphor, as he con- ceived it, that " light " should bear " fruit," and desii-ed to tinker the text so as to bring it into verbal correspondence with another passage in the Epistle to the Galatians, where " the fruits of the Spirit " are enumerated. But the reading " the fruit of the light " has not only the preponderance of manuscript authority in its favour, but is also preferable because it preserves a striking image, and is in harmony with the whole context.
The Apostle has just been exhorting his Ephesian friends to walk as " children of light," and before he goes on to expand and explain that injunction he interjects this parenthetical remark, as if he would say. To be true to the light that is in you is the sum of duty, and the condition of perfectness, "for the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth." That connexion is entirely destroyed by the substitution of " Spirit." The whole context, both before and after the text, is full of references to the light as working in the life ; and two verses after it we read about " the unfruitful works of darkness," an expression which evidently looks back to the text.
Calvin showed his judgment and independence in preferring
this reading to that of the received Greek text ; similarly Bengel,
and most of the later critics. The sentence is parenthetical, and
contains a singular and instructive figure. It is one of those sparks
from the anvil in which great writers not infrequently give us
729
230 THE FRUIT OF THE LIGHT
their finest utterances — sentences that get a pecuUar point from the eagerness with which they are struck off in the heat and clash of thought, as the mind reaches forward to some thought lying beyond. The clause is an epitome, in five words, of Christian virtue, whose qualities, origin and method are all defined. It sums up exquisitely the moral teaching of the Epistle. Gal. v. 22, 23 (" the fruit of the Spirit") and Phil. iv. 8 ("Whatsoever things are true," etc.) are parallel to this passage, as Pauline defini- tions, equally perfect, of the virtues of a Christian man. This has the advantage of the others in brevity and epigrammatic point.
^ Great Christian teachers have spoken of the virtues of the heathen as " splendid sins." But Christ and His Apostles never said so. He said : " Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold." And they said : " In every nation he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." The Christian creed has no jealousy in regard to human excellence. Whatsoever things are true and honourable and just and pure, wherever and in whomsoever they are found, our faith honours and delights in them, and accepts them to the utmost of their worth. But then it claims them all for its own — as the fruit of the one "true light which lighteth every man." Wherever this fruit appears, we know that that light has been, though its ways are past finding out. Through secret crevices, by subtle refractions and multiplied reflections, the true light reaches many a life lying far outside its visible course.^
The Fhuit-producing Light.
1. In the context the Apostle has been speaking of " light " ; here he boldly says, " the light," and the change of expression is not accidental. He wishes to point to some specific source from which all light flows. And this is quite clear from the exp?:ession " Now are ye light in the Lord " — a phrase which implies that the light which he has in view is not natural to men, but is the result of the entrance into their darkness of a new element. The words evidently imply that the light which blesses and hallows humanity is no diffused glow, but is all gathered and concentrated into one blazing centre, from which it floods the hearts of men. Or, to put ^ G. G. Find lay, Tlic Epistle to tlie Ejthesians, 324.
EPHESIANS V. 9 231
away the metaphor, he is here asserting that the only way by which any man can cease to be, in the doleful depths of his nature, darkness in its saddest sense, is by opening his heart through faith, that into it there may rush, as the light ever does where an open- ing— be it only a single tiny cranny — is made, the light which is Christ, and without whom is darkness.