Further, Paul here teaches us that this debt (debitum, ‘duty’) of love includes all duties.  It is the fulfilling of the law, inasmuch as it will secure the conduct which the law prescribes.  The Mosaic law itself indicates this, since it recapitulates the various commandments of the second table, in the one precept of love to our neighbour (Lev. xix. 18).  Law enjoins but has no power to get its injunctions executed.  Love enables and inclines to do all that law prescribes, and to avoid all that it prohibits.  The multiplicity of duties is melted into unity; and that unity, when it comes into act, unfolds into whatsoever things are lovely and of good report.  Love is the mother tincture which, variously diluted and manipulated, yields all potent and fragrant draughts.  It is the white light which the prism of daily life resolves into its component colours.

But Paul seems to limit the action of love here to negative doing no ill.  That is simply because the commandments are mostly negative, and that they are is a sad token of the lovelessness natural to us all.  But do we love ourselves only negatively, or are we satisfied with doing ourselves no harm?  That stringent pattern of love to others not only prescribes degree, but manner.  It teaches that true love to men is not weak indulgence, but must sometimes chastise, and thwart, and always must seek their good, and not merely their gratification.

Whoever will honestly seek to apply that negative precept of working no ill to others, will find it positive enough.  We harm men when we fail to help them.  If we can do them a kindness, and do it not, we do them ill.  Non-activity for good is activity for evil.  Surely, nothing can be plainer than the bearing of this teaching on the Christian duty as to intoxicants.  If by using these a Christian puts a stumbling-block in the way of a weak will, then he is working ill to his neighbour, and that argues absence of love, and that is dishonest, shirking payment of a plain debt.

II.  The great stimulus to love and to all purity is set forth as being the near approach—­of the day (verses 11-14).  ‘The day,’ in Paul’s writing, has usually the sense of the great day of the Lord’s return, and may have that meaning here; for, as Jesus has told us, ‘it is not for’ even inspired Apostles ’to know the times or the seasons,’ and it is no dishonour to apostolic inspiration to assign to it the limits which the Lord has assigned.

But, whether we take this as the meaning of the phrase, or regard it simply as pointing to the time of death as the dawning of heaven’s day, the weight of the motive is unaffected.  The language is vividly picturesque.  The darkness is thinning, and the blackness turning grey.  Light begins to stir and whisper.  A band of soldiers lies asleep, and, as the twilight begins to dawn, the bugle call summons them to awake, to throw off their night-gear,—­namely, the works congenial to darkness,—­and to brace on their armour of light.  Light may here be regarded as the material of which the glistering armour is made; but, more probably, the expression means weapons appropriate to the light.