At this epoch, writes M. Renan,[123] “Nero and Jesus, Christ and Antichrist, stand opposed, confronting each other, if I may dare to say so, like heaven and hell.... In face of Jesus there presents itself a monster, who is the ideal of evil as Jesus of goodness.... Nero’s was an evil nature, hypocritical, vain, frivolous, prodigiously given to declamation and display; a blending of false intellect, profound wickedness, cruel and artful egotism carried to an incredible degree of refinement and subtlety.... He is a monster who has no second in history, and whose equal we can only find in the pathological annals of the scaffold.... The school of crime in which he had grown up, the execrable influence of his mother, the stroke of parricide forced upon him, as one might say, by this abominable woman, by which he had entered on the stage of public life, made the world take to his eyes the form of a horrible comedy, with himself for the chief actor in it. At the moment we have now reached [when St Paul entered Rome], Nero had detached himself completely from the philosophers who had been his tutors. He had killed nearly all his relations. He had made the most shameful follies the common fashion. A large part of Roman society, following his example, had descended to the lowest level of debasement. The cruelty of the ancient world had reached its consummation.... The world had touched the bottom of the abyss of evil; it could only reascend.”
Such was the man who occupied at this time the summit of human power and glory,—the man who lighted the torch of Christian martyrdom and at whose sentence St Paul’s head was destined to fall, the Wild Beast of John’s awful vision. Nero of Rome, the son of Agrippina, embodied the triumph of Satan as the god of this world. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, reigned only in a few loving and pure hearts. Future history, as the scroll of the Apocalypse unfolded it, was to be the battle-field of these confronting powers, the war of Christ with Antichrist.
Could it be doubtful, to any one who had measured the rival forces, on which side victory must fall? St Paul pronounces the fate of the whole kingdom of evil in this world, when he declares that “the old man” is “perishing, according to the lusts of deceit.” It is an application of the maxim he gave us in Galatians vi. 8: “He that soweth to his own flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.” In its mad sensuality and prodigal lusts, the vile Roman world he saw around him was speeding to its ruin. That ruin was delayed; there were moral forces left in the fabric of the Roman State, which in the following generations re-asserted themselves and held back for a time the tide of disaster; but in the end Rome fell, as the ancient world-empires of the East had fallen, through her own corruption, and by “the wrath” which is “revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” For the solitary man, for the household, for the body politic and the family of nations the rule is the same. “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”
The passions which carry men and nations to their ruin are “lusts of deceit.” The tempter is the liar. Sin is an enormous fraud. “You shall not die,” said the serpent in the garden; “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be as God!” So forbidden desire was born, and “the woman being deceived fell into transgression.”
“So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the tree
Of prohibition, root of all our woe.”
By its baits of sensuous pleasure, and still more by its show of freedom and power to stir our pride, sin cheats us of our manhood; it sows life with misery, and makes us self-despising slaves. It knows how to use God’s law as an incitement to transgression, turning the very prohibition into a challenge to our bold desires. “Sin taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me.” Over the pit of destruction play the same dancing lights that have lured countless generations,—the glitter of gold; the purple robe and jewelled coronet; the wine moving in the cup; fair, soft faces lit with laughter. The straying foot and hot desires give chase, till the inevitable moment comes when the treacherous soil yields, and the pursuer plunges beyond escape into sin’s reeking gulfs. Then the illusion is over. The gay faces grow foul; the glittering prize proves dust; the sweet fruit turns to ashes; the cup of pleasure burns with the fire of hell. And the sinner knows at last that his greed has cheated him, that he is as foolish as he is wicked.
Let us remember that there is but one way of escape from the all-encompassing deceit of sin. It is in “learning Christ.” Not in learning about Christ, but in learning Him. It is a common artifice of the great deceit to “wash the outside of cup and platter.” The old man is improved and civilized; he is baptized in infancy and called a Christian. He puts off many of his old ways, he dresses himself in a decorous garb and style; and so deceives himself into thinking that he is new, while his heart is unchanged. He may turn ascetic, and deny this or that to himself; and yet never deny himself. He observes religious forms and makes charitable benefactions, as though he would compound with God for his unforsaken sin. But all this is only a plausible and hateful manifestation of the lusts of deceit. To learn the Christ, is to learn the way of the cross. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me,” He bids us; “for I am meek and lowly in heart.” Till we have done this, we are not even at the beginning of our lesson.
From the perishing old man the apostle turns, in verses 23, 24, to the new. These two clauses differ in their form of expression more than the English rendering indicates.[124] When he writes, “that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” it is a continual rejuvenation that he describes; the verb is present in tense, and the newness implied is that of recency and youth, newness in point of age. But the “new man” to be “put on” (ver. 24) is of a new kind and order; and in this instance the verb is of the aorist tense signifying an event, not a continuous act. The new man is put on when the Christian way of life is adopted, when we enter personally into the new humanity founded in Christ. We “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. xiii. 14), who covers and absorbs the old self, even as those who await in the flesh His second advent will “put on the house from heaven,” when “the mortal” in them will be “swallowed up of life” (2 Cor. v. 2–4). Thus two distinct conceptions of the life of faith are placed before our minds. It consists, on the one hand, of a quickening, constantly renewed, in the springs of our individual thought and will; and it is at the same time the assumption of another nature, the investiture of the soul with the Divine character and form of its being.
Borne on the stream of his evil passions, we saw “the old man” in his “former manner of life,” hastening to the gulf of ruin. For the man renewed in Christ the stream of life flows steadily in the opposite direction, and with a swelling tide moves upward to God. His knowledge and love are always growing in depth, in refinement, in energy and joy. Thus it was with the apostle in his advancing age. The fresh impulses of the Holy Spirit, the unfolding to his spirit of the mystery of God, the fellowship of Christian brethren and the interests of the work of the Church renewed Paul’s youth like the eagle’s. If in years and toil he is old, his soul is full of ardour, his intellect keen and eager; the “outward man decays, but the inward man is renewed day by day.”
This new nature had a new birth. The soul reanimating itself perpetually from the fresh springs that are in God, had in God the beginning of its renovated life. We have not to create or fashion for ourselves the perfect life, but to adopt it,—to realize the Christian ideal (ver. 24). We are called to put on the new type of manhood as completely as we renounce the old (ver. 22). The new man is there before our eyes, manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, in whom we live henceforth. When we “learn the Christ,” when we have become His true disciples, we “put on” His nature and “walk in Him.” The inward reception of His Spirit is attended by the outward assumption of His character as our calling amongst men.