and he brake it,
and began to eat.'

[35] Matt. xxvi. 26; cf. Luke xxiv. 30.

{159}

DIVISION V. Sec. 7. CHAPTER XV. 1-13.

_Unselfish forbearance and inclusiveness._

It was essential, as has been said, that men whose prejudices and
instincts were different should live in the same church and eat at the
same love feast. This would require a large-hearted and unselfish
self-control. Formerly, as in Syria and Palestine, it was the Jews who
occupied the position of vantage in the Christian communities, and were
not disposed to tolerate the ways of the Gentiles. Now the tables are
turned, and the Gentiles are in the majority. The danger is now that
those whose instincts are Gentile should bear hardly upon the minority
whose prejudices are more or less Jewish. Such St. Paul anticipates,
or knows from Priscilla and Aquila, will be the danger among the Roman
Christians. Formerly Judaic narrowness had been a formidable danger.
It had developed a most perilous heresy, and St. Paul had dealt with it
as a deadly poison. Now what remained {160} of Jewish feeling was a
weakness to be generously borne with. It affords St. Paul an
opportunity of falling back on the general principle, that the measure
of Christian strength and full-grown manhood is the readiness to bear
the weaknesses of others.

To be told he must not use his normal liberty, must not eat his usual
meal or drink his usual cup of wine, because it might scandalize some
Christian with the ascetic prejudices of an Essene, or even induce him
to do the same against his own conscience--to be told this was annoying
to a man who held the 'strong' Christian conviction that all kinds of
food were indifferently allowable. The weak scruple of his brother
Christian had become an annoying burden of self-denial and
self-restraint laid on himself. But this, St. Paul says, is how
Christian strength--whether it be the moral strength of clear
convictions, or any other sort of faculty[1]--must show itself, in
readiness to suffer on account of other people's deficiencies, in not
resenting the restraints they lay on us, in not expecting to do as we
please, but being {161} ready to accommodate ourselves to our
neighbour's tastes where it is for his good. That is what our great
example did. Plainly His whole human life was putting Himself under
the restraints which our weaknesses and narrownesses and slownesses
laid on Him. The righteous man in the psalm complains