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the long patience of Providence. "And I said, It is mine own infirmity, but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest."' Bishop Stubbs, Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History, p. 207 (see also on ch. v. 7, in commentary).

There are many other ways in which the stern and practical words of St James have a special message for our own day, and some attempt has been made to show this in the notes on the text.

We can scarcely fail, for example, to see how he would rebuke the common tendency to throw the blame of sinful action or moral failure upon our circumstances, our heredity, our weakness of mind or body, upon anything or anyone except ourselves. And so here, as elsewhere, we may mark the practical character of St James's teaching. He deals with temptation not merely as a philosopher, but after the manner of one of the old prophets, a preacher of righteousness. At the same time he gives us what we may perhaps call the first attempt at an analysis of temptation as a Christian moralist would view it; outward circumstances alone cannot become an incentive to sin, unless there is in the man's own heart, in the man himself, some irregular, uncontrolled desire, his own lust, as St James calls it, by which he is enticed to a love altogether alien from the love of God (see notes on i. 13).

Or, again, we may see how in an intellectual age, in an age which boasts itself in the irresistible maturing of the general mind,' St James would recall men to the knowledge that true wisdom is first of all pure; not primarily intellectual, or metaphysical, but spiritual and moral. And if we ask from what source St James derived these qualities of wisdom, it is not unreasonable, in view of his Christian experience, to answer from the life of Christ, 'Learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly of heart.' Our Lord had spoken of a wisdom revealed to those who had taken upon them His yoke, and so St James could speak of the 'meekness of wisdom.' Our Lord had spoken of a vision of God which was granted to the pure in heart, and so St James could speak of a Divine wisdom which was not sensual or earthly, but first of all pure. Our Lord had spoken of the peacemakers as the sons of God, and so for St James the wisdom of the Christian was pure, then peaceable. Our Lord had warned men against a divided heart, 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,' He had condemned the religious teachers of the day as hypocrites, and so St James exhorts to the possession of a wisdom. free from doubtfulness and hypocrisy. Our Lord had called him

a wise man who heard His words and did them, and so St James in answer to the question 'Who is wise and understanding among you?' makes answer, 'Let him show by his good life his works in meekness of wisdom.'

And this same question and answer of St James may be of further and wider import in our own day, when we are so repeatedly told that the lives of professing Christians, of those who are hearers only and not doers of the word, present the greatest obstacle to the spread of Christianity, when the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ is tested by its power to guide and influence human conduct. A few months before the war broke out with Russia the leader of the Progressive party in Japan, speaking to a society of young men in the capital, maintained that the new education had left the moral evils of Japan untouched, and that development had been intellectual, not moral. 'But,' he added, 'the efforts which Christians are making to supply to the country a high standard of conduct are welcomed by all rightthinking people. As you read your Bible you may think that it is out of date. The words it contains may so appear. But the noble life which it holds up to admiration is something which will never be out of date, however much the world may progress. Live and preach this life, and you will supply to the nation just what it wants at the present juncture.' It is no wonder that the attitude of Japan towards Christianity is stated to be one of keen and yet respectful sympathy, and what men are chiefly looking for in Japan, as everywhere, is the evidence of Christianity in conduct. And in this Epistle of St James we may hear from end to end not only the bracing call of duty, but the call to go on to perfection: 'ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.' We have been well reminded that the word 'perfect' occurs more frequently in this short Epistle than in any other book of the New Testament; before the Christian there is set the standard of a 'perfect law' and the character of a 'perfect man.'

With this ideal before him, we cannot wonder at the indignant protest of St James against the servile fawning upon the rich and the studied disregard of the poor, a protest loud and deep against the temper of mind which prompts men to estimate everything not by moral but by material wealth and worth, a temper which injures rich and poor alike, engendering intolerable arrogancy in the one, and envious dissatisfaction in the other. In the manifestation of this temper men become not only judges, but judges 'with evil

thoughts,' ii. 4; in this respect of persons they cannot preserve the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Whom even His enemies witnessed that He 'regarded not the person of men.'

We see further how this same disposition of mind leads men to take a wrong estimate not merely of their relationship to their fellow-men, but of their relationship to God, how the passionate pursuit of pleasure and gain overrides the claims of God and banishes the thought of God; and those who best know the sorts and conditions of life characteristic of our great cities also know that in the love of money and the restless craving for amusement the moral and spiritual energies are exhausted, and that covetousness is idolatry, whether the lust of impurity banishes the vision of God, or the greed of gain rules the heart and mind. We may be sure that in days characterised not always by high thinking, but in every grade of life by much talking, St James would point us not merely to the moralist who regards speech as of silver, and silence as golden, but to the judgment of a greater than any moralist, of One before Whom we must one day be made manifest and stand to be judged, 'By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned'; he would remind us that however widely man has been enabled to replenish the earth and subdue it, however loudly he may boast of his increasing knowledge of himself, of his moral and mental powers, one little member of the human body, the tongue, is still untamed; and if St Paul bids men to speak the truth because of their membership one of another in the One Lord, St James would warn them against hasty judgments and intemperate speech by the constant reminder of their brotherhood in Christ.

In that word 'brother,' so often repeated, St James declares himself 'a man of like passions,' v. 17, with those whom he would help to save, and in its utterance mercy rejoiceth against judgment.

St James in his love of man and of nature has recently been compared in some striking words to St Francis of Assisi, whilst his sternness and insistence on the moral law suggest a comparison with another great teacher of Italy, Savonarola (Bartlet, Apostolic Age, p. 248').

But the Epistle of St James presents not only, as we might expect, points of likeness to the lives of great Christian teachers of

1 Dean Plumptre sees in Macarius of Egypt, in Thomas à Kempis, in Bishop Wilson the same ideal of life, the aim at the wisdom which is from above, pure, peaceable, and carrying with it the persuasive power of gentleness, St James,

a later date, it is in itself an Imitatio Christi. The tenderness, and yet the severity of St James, his sympathy with nature and with man, and yet his hatred and denunciation of man's sin, his sense of man's supreme dignity, and yet of his entire dependence upon God, as we note all this in the pages of St James are we not reminded of the human life of Him in Whom St James had learnt to see his Master and his Lord?

But the Master and Lord of men was also their servant, I am amongst you as he that serveth' (Luke xxii. 27), and for St James the Christian life is a life of service; in his opening sentence he proclaims himself as the bondservant of Jesus Christ, 'the greatest servant in the world,' as Lacordaire was wont to call Him; his closing exhortation bids a man to be ready to do a service for his brother-man which most resembles the work of Him Who came to seek and to save; he is the servant of Christ; but as such he is also servus servorum Dei,' of men made in the image of God.

EPISTLE OF ST JAMES.

Contents of the Epistle.

Ir is not easy to make an analysis of the contents of this Epistle, and the varied nature of the attempts to do so may be seen by a comparison of the elaborate table of Cellérier, L'Épître de St Jaques, pp. xxiii-v. (1850), with the few lines given to the subject in more recent Commentaries. The terseness and abruptness which characterise parts of the letter sometimes seem to lend countenance to the view that we are dealing with what was originally a homily, full of earnest exhortation to newness and perfection of life, and of wholesome warning against worldliness and degeneracy. This view that the Epistle was in the first instance a homily, delivered perhaps primarily to the Jerusalem Church and then circulated in its present form amongst the Churches of the Jewish Diaspora (Sieffert speaks of it as a circular pastoral letter), is held to account for the want of close systematic construction in the letter. Harnack, indeed, would see in the Epistle not one homily but a collection of homilies, but even if we admit the lack of continuous argument, there seems to be no need for such an elaborate hypothesis.

But those who adopt an earlier date for the compilation of the Epistle also justly lay stress upon the moral advice and hortatory form of its pages, as contrasted with some of the more dogmatic of the New Testament books, and they see in it, as noted above (see Introd. p. xxxiv.), references not only to the duties of daily Christian life, but also to the special features of a life lived amidst the religious, social and commercial surroundings of the Jewish Diaspora, in the first half of the first Christian century. And this consideration may help us to see that the writing before us is not merely an 'Epistle,' not merely a piece of literature containing a purely ideal address and dealing with nothing but general questions; it is rather characterised by some, at least, of the personal and intimate relationships of a 'letter'; it treats of special circumstances, and by no means of vague generalities, it is not the product of art and of man's device, but of stern and actual experiences of life (on the distinction between an 'Epistle' and a 'letter,' see Deissmann's Art. 'Epistolary Literature,' Encycl. Bibl. 11.)1. It is of course quite possible that one of the most marked features in the writer's style of repeating a leading word of a sentence, or one allied to it, in the sentence which succeeds, may also have influenced not only the

1 In his valuable and suggestive Jesus Christ and the Social Question, Professor Peabody is perhaps also open to the charge of forgetting that the strong denunciations of St James were prompted by the special social conditions around him, pp. 197 ff.

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