“Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.... He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastening of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.... He shall see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied: by His knowledge shall my righteous Servant justify many; for He shall bear their iniquities” (Isa. liii.).
[62] See above, pp. [113], [114].
[63] If the experiment of “communism” in the early Christian Church was ever tried, it was in the congregation of Jerusalem, and there it is clear that the results were simply disastrous; very soon the Church of Jerusalem was reduced to the direst straits. There are very many allusions to this state of things in S. Paul’s Epistles, where collections for the “poor saints in Jerusalem” are constantly mentioned; yet even in that Church, where apparently some attempt at a community of goods was evidently made, entire renunciation was evidently, as we see in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, never obligatory, but was ever purely voluntary.
[64] The writer here evidently means “atones for a multitude of our own sins”; so Tertullian, Scorpiace, 6 (see Bishop Lightfoot, Clement of Rome, part i. vol. ii. p. 232).
[65] See note (p. [104]) on authorship and date of 2nd Epistle of Clement of Rome.
[66] See Archbishop Benson, Cyprian, vi. 1.
[67] The Emperor Julian’s well-known Letter to Arsacius is a good example. It is clear that charity did not restrict itself to the “Household of Faith.” Cyprian and his congregation’s action in the Great Plague of Carthage is a good example of this. See below, p. [127].
[68] The last clause is a very important one. It tells us that to the collections made in the assembly for the poor and needy, even the poorest artisan and slave contributed, and positively fasted for two or three days that they might save the necessary few coins to help those poorer and more sorrowful than themselves.
On this beautiful act of Christian charity, see, too, such passages as Hermas Shepherd, Simil. iii.
[69] Archbishop Benson happily paraphrases Cyprian’s words thus: Noblesse oblige. S. Cyprian, vi. 1, 2.