But there is another idea which, in St. Paul's mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the 'divine family.' It is that in this household we are sons and not servants--that is intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be 'subject to ordinances,' or to 'the weak and beggarly rudiments,' the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. 'Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years, I am afraid of you[7].' 'Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, taste not, touch not[8].' It is perfectly true to say that what {116} St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. Their attitude towards observances as such is to be different. Not that St. Paul does not insist on that readiness to obey reasonable authority which is a condition of corporate life, or would hesitate to lay stress upon corporate religious acts in the Christian body. The truth is very far from that. 'We have no such custom, neither the churches of God,' is an argument which ought to be sufficient to suppress eccentricity. To 'keep the traditions' is a mark of a good Christian[9]. 'A man that is heretical' (or rather 'factious') after the first and second admonition is to be 'refused'[10]. Government is to be a constant element in the Christian life. But the character of authority and of obedience is to be changed. The authority is to be reasonable authority, and the obedience intelligent obedience. Passive obedience to an authority which does not explain itself, whether in a spiritual director or in the Church as a whole, St. Paul would have thought of meanly as a Christian virtue. And the multiplication of authoritative observances he would have dreaded as a {117} bondage. Our Lord was very unwilling to give His disciples, when He was on earth, much direction. And St. Paul is true to his Master's spirit. Our life should be ordered by principles, rather than directed in detail. For to rely upon direction from outside dwarfs our sense of personal responsibility, and personal relationship to the divine Spirit. A certain amount of confusion, hesitation, difference, due to men feeling their way, due to their different individualities having free scope, St. Paul would apparently have thought preferable to that sort of order which is the product of a very strong and exacting external government, and to an undue exaltation of the virtue of passive obedience.