_Kindness_ in act, _tenderheartedness_ of feeling are to take the place of malice with its brood of bitter passions. Where injury used to be met with reviling and insult retorted in worse insult, the men of the new life will be found "forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave" them. Here we touch the spring of Christian virtue, the master motive in the apostle's theory of life. The cross of Jesus Christ is the centre of Pauline ethics, as of Pauline theology. The sacrifice of Calvary, while it is the ground of our salvation, supplies the standard and incentive of moral attainment. It makes life _an imitation of God_.
The commencement of the new chapter at this point makes an unfortunate division; for its first two verses are in close consecution with the last verse of chapter iv. By kindness and pitifulness of heart, by readiness to forgive, God's "beloved children" will "show themselves imitators" of their Father. The apostle echoes the saying of his Master, in which the law of His kingdom was laid down: "Love your enemies, and do good, and lend never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and you shall be called children of the Highest: for He is kind to the thankless and evil. Be ye therefore pitiful, as your Father is pitiful" (Luke vi. 35, 36). Before the cross of Jesus was set up, men could not know how much God loved the world and how far He was ready to go in the way of forgiveness. Yet Christ Himself saw the same love displayed in the Father's daily providence. He bids us imitate Him who makes His sun shine and His rain fall on the just and unjust, on the evil and the good. To the insight of Jesus, nature's impartial bounties in which unbelief sees only moral indifference, spoke of God's compassion; they proceed from the same love that gave His Son to taste death for every man.
In chapter iv. 32-v. 2 the Father's love and the Son's self-sacrifice are spoken of in terms precisely parallel. They are altogether one in quality. Christ does not by His sacrifice persuade an angry Father to love His children; it is the Divine compassion in Christ that dictates and carries into effect the sacrifice. At the same time it was "an _offering_ and a _sacrifice_ to God." God is love; but love is not everything in God. Justice is also Divine, and absolute in its own realm. Law can no more forgo its rights than love forget its compassions. Love must fulfil all righteousness; it must suffer law to mark out its path of obedience, or it remains an effusive, ineffectual sentiment, helpless to bless and save. Christ's feet followed the stern and strait path of self-devotion; "He humbled Himself and became obedient," He was "born under law." And the law of God imposing death as the penalty for sin, which shaped Christ's sacrifice, made it acceptable to God. Thus it was "an odour of a sweet smell."
Hence the love which follows Christ's example, is love wedded with duty. It finds in an ordered devotion to the good of men the means to fulfil the all-holy Will and to present in turn its "offering to God." Such love will be above the mere pleasing of men, above sentimentalism and indulgence; it will aim higher than secular ideals and temporal contentment. It regards men in their kinship to God and obligation to His law, and seeks to make them worthy of their calling. All human duties, for those who love God, are subordinate to this; all commands are summed up in one: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The apostle pronounced the first and last word of his teaching when he said: _Walk in love, as the Christ also loved us._
6. Above all others, one sin stamped the Gentile world of that time with infamy,--its _uncleanness_.