CHAPTER III
CHRISTIAN MODERATION
Phil. iv. 5. – Let your moderation be known unto all m en. The Lord is at hand.
The word moderation, in this verse, is not quite self-explanatory. With “moderation” we now associate ideas, some of them excellent, some inferior, which are not the idea of the original Greek word here. Moderation means sometimes the virtue of self-government; the moderate man is the well-controlled man, whose habits and feelings in common life are his servants, not his masters. On the other hand, moderation often means what is scarcely a virtue – an abstinence, constitutional or acquired, from all extremes in opinion or practice; a “not too much,” a point de zele, carried into everything. The man thus moderate shuns and discountenances strong emotions, profound convictions, unsparing efforts; tends to look on evil with only a cool dislike, and on good with only a mitigated and philosophic love; is prepared to deal with great articles of faith, perhaps, as always open questions; certainly is unprepared to live and die in their defence. He dreads exceptions, and anomalies, and what is out of the main fashion of action and opinion. He prefers in everything what is called, rightly or not, “the golden mean.”
Neither the virtue moderation, nor its counterfeit, is in view in this verse; most surely not the latter. Not that the Gospel here, or elsewhere, means therefore to inculcate a hot, untempered, inconsiderate enthusiasm. Indeed, enthusiasm is not a New Testament word; and no wonder, when we remember that its old connexion was with the frenzied excitements of the Greek worship of Bacchus. Enthusiasm is not indeed a word to be discarded. But yet it is a word which too often suggests hasty and ill-conceived resolutions, a flow of animal excitement very likely to ebb, a heat that outruns light. And all these things are things of nature, not of grace; of fallen not of regenerate humanity. The zeal and love of the Gospel spring from deeper and purer wells, have a serener flow, and are altogether nobler things than what commonly passes under the name of enthusiasm.
But the Apostle here is looking in quite another direction. The word here rendered moderation in our Bible is connected by derivation and usage with ideas not of control, but of yielding. It is rendered Lindigkeit, yieldingness, giving way, in Luther’s German Bible; and I fully believe the interpretation to be right. “Forbearance,” “gentleness,” are the alternative renderings of our Revised Version, and both suggest the thought of giving way. “Let your yieldingness be known unto all men; the Lord is near.”
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