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I. THE WONDERFUL POSSIBILITY that is opened out here before every Christian that he may add beauty to the gospel. He may paint the lily and gild the refined gold. For men do quite rightly and legitimately judge of systems by their followers. The astronomer does not look directly up into the sky when he wants to watch the heavenly bodies, but down into the mirror, on which their reflection is cast. And so our little low lives down here upon earth should so give back the starry bodies and infinitudes above us that some dim eyes, which peradventure could not gaze into the violet abysses with their lustrous points, may behold them reflected in the beauty of your life. Our lives should be like the old missals, where you find the loving care of the monastic scribe has illuminated and illustrated the holy text, or has rubricated and gilded some of the letters. The best Illustrated Bible is the conduct of the people that profess to take it for their guide and law.

II. THE SOLEMN ALTERNATIVE. If you look at the context you will see that a set of exhortations preceding these to the slaves, which are addressed to the wives, end with urging as the great motive to the conduct enjoined, "that the Word of God be not blasphemed." That is the other side of the same thought as is in my text. The issues of the conduct of professing Christians are the one or other of these two, either to add beauty to the gospel or to cause the Word of God to be blasphemed. If you do not the one you will be doing the other. There are no worse enemies of the gospel than its inconsistent friends. Who is it that thwarts missionary work in India? Englishmen! Who is it that, wherever they go with their ships, put a taunt into the lips of the enemy which the Christian workers find it hard to meet? English sailors! The notorious dissipation and immorality amongst the representatives of English commerce in the various Eastern eentres of trade puts a taunt into the mouth of the abstemious Hindu and of the Chinaman. "These are your Christians, are they?" England, that sends out missionaries in the cabin, and Bibles and men side by side amongst the cargo, has to listen, and her people have to take to themselves the awful words with which the ancient Jewish inconsistencies were rebuked: "Through you the name of God is blasphemed amongst the Gentiles." And in less solemn manner perhaps, but just as truly, here, in a so-called Christian land, the inconsistencies, the selfishness, the worldliness of professing Christian people, the absolute absence of all apparent difference between them and the most godless man that is in the same circumstances, are the things which perhaps more than anything else counteract the evangelistic efforts of the Christian Church.

III. THE SORT OF LIFE THAT WILL COMMEND AND ADORN THE GOSPEL.

1. It must be a life conspicuously and uniformly under the influence of Christian principles. I put emphasis upon these two words "conspicuously" and "uniformly." It will be of very little use if your Christian principle is so buried in your life, embedded beneath a mass of selfishness and worldliness and indifference as that it takes a microscope and a week's looking for to find it. And it will be of very little use, either, if your life is by fits and starts under the influence of Christian principle; a minute guided by that and ten minutes guided by the other thing — if here and there, sprinkled thinly over the rotting mass, there be a handful of the saving salt.

2. Remember, too, as the context teaches us, that the lives which commend and adorn the doctrine must be such as manifest Christian principle in the smallest details. What is it Paul tells these Cretan slaves to do that they may "adorn the doctrine"? Obedience, keeping a civil tongue in their heads in the midst of provocation, not indulging in petty pilfering, being true to the trust that was given to them. "That is no great thing," you may say, but in these little things they were to adorn the great doctrine of God their Saviour. Ay! The smallest duties are in some sense the largest sphere for the operation of great principles. For it is the little duties which by their minuteness tempt men to think that they can do them without calling in the great principles of conduct, that give the colour to every life after all. The little banks of mud in the wheel tracks in the road are shaped upon the same slopes, and moulded by the same law that carves the mountains and lifts the precipices of the Himalayas. And a handful of snow in the hedge in the winter time will fall into the same curves, and be obedient to the same great physical laws which shape the glaciers that lie on the sides of the Alps. You do not want big things in order, largely and nobly, to manifest big principles. The smallest duties, distinctly done for Christ's sake, wilt adorn the doctrine.

3. And then again, I may say that the manner of life which commends the gospel will be one conspicuously above the level of the morality of the class to which you belong. These slaves were warned not to fall into the vices that were proper to their class, in order that by not falling into them, and so being unlike their fellows, they might glorify the gospel. For the things that Paul warns them not to do are the faults which all history and experience tell us are exactly the vices of the slave — petty pilfering, a rank tongue blossoming into insolent speech, a disregard of the master's interests, sulky disobedience or sly evasion of the command. These are the kind of things that the devilish institution of slavery makes almost necessary on the part of the slave, unless some higher motive and loftier principle come in to counteract the effects. And in like manner all of us have, in the class to which we belong, and the sort of life which we have to live, certain evils natural to our position; and unless you are unlike the non-Christian men of your own profession and the people that are under the same worldly influence as you are — unless you are unlike them in that your righteousness exceeds their righteousness, "Ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven."

(A. Maclaren, D. D.)

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KJV: Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again;

WEB: Exhort servants to be in subjection to their own masters, and to be well-pleasing in all things; not contradicting;