[[1]] 1 Thess. v. 1: 'The day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.' To know this is to have answer enough to questions about the times and seasons of the coming (v. 1).
[[2]] It is interesting to compare this passage with the closely similar one of Thess. v. 1-4. Cf. Eph. v. 14 ff.; vi. 11.
[[3]] Christ is 'put on' in baptism by all, Gal. iii. 27; but we all still need to appropriate what we have received, and so 'put Him on' for ourselves; cf. Eph. iv. 24; Col. iii. 12.
[[4]] See app. note G, p. [238], for an admirable prayer by Jeremy Taylor based on this thought.
[[5]] Conf. viii. 12.
DIVISION V. § 6. CHAPTER XIV. 1-23.
Mutual toleration.
St. Paul's practical exhortations show no definite scheme, but flow out of one another in a natural sequence. He began with the fundamental moral disposition required by life in the Christian community (xii). He proceeded to the relation between the Christian community and the government of the world outside (xiii. 1-7). This led him to lay brief and vigorous emphasis upon the universal range of Christian obligation (8-10), and the motive which is to make Christians zealous in rising to its fulfilment (11-14). Now[[1]] he comes back to the difficulties which arise among Christians—the difficulties in actually living together as members of the same community—difficulties on those small points of religious observance which seem so unimportant in the abstract, and which, in the actual experience of intercourse, prove to be so terribly important, and so easily give rise to a 'crisis in the Church.' How were the reasonably-minded majority[[2]], who thought that all kinds of food were morally indifferent, to behave towards the scrupulous who would only eat vegetables? How were those Christians, who recognized no distinction between one day and another, to behave towards people who still held the mind of the writer of Ecclesiasticus, that 'some days God had exalted and hallowed, and some he had made ordinary days[[3]]'?