If Jesus Christ abides, He is our anchorage, and the exhortation first given near the beginning of the Epistle once more suggests itself to the Apostle. “Permit not yourselves to drift and be carried past[396] the moorings by divers strange doctrines.” The word “doctrines” is itself emphatic, “Be not borne aside from the personal, abiding Jesus Christ by propositions, whether in reference to practice or to belief.” What these “doctrines” were in this particular case we learn from the next verse. They were the doubtful disputations about meats. The epithets “divers and strange” restrict the allusion still more nearly. He speaks not of the general and familiar injunctions of Jewish teachers respecting meats, the subject rather contemptuously dismissed by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: “One man hath faith to eat all things; but he that is weak eateth herbs.”[397] Our author could not have regarded these doctrines as “strange,” and he could scarcely have spoken of “strengthening the heart with meats” if he had meant abstinence from meats. A recent English expositor[398] has pointed out the direction in which we must seek the interpretation of this difficult passage. The Apostle brushes aside the novel teaching of the Essenes, who, without becoming Christians, “had broken away from the sacrificial system” of the Mosaic law and “substituted for it new ordinances of their own, according to which the daily meal became a sacrifice, and the president of the community took the place of the Levitical priest.” Such teaching was quite as inconsistent with Judaism as with Christianity. But the writer of this Epistle rejects it for precisely the same reason for which he repudiates Judaism. Both are inconsistent with the perfect separateness of Christ’s atonement.