Sannyasa Dharma

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 17

1. According to St. Paul, not the hearers of the law, but the practisers (doers) of the law, will be justified (Romans ii. 13). In the Epistle of James (chap. i. 22), the warning is plainly given against self-deception in this respect :
"Be ye vloers of the world, and not hearers vuly, deceiving your
own selves."
Still more clear rings the voice of the preceptor when he says :
* What doth it profit, my brethren, thongh a man say lie hath faith,
and have not works? Can faith save bini ? " If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and
one of you say unto him, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled : notwithstanding ye give him not those things which are needful
to the body, what doib it profit? ** Iven so faith, if it laid not works, is deal, being alone" (Jamex ii.
14-17). St. Paul laments man's inability to do what he should do, and to refrain from what he should not.do, in forcible language (Romans, vii. 19-23):
" For the wood that I would I do not : butile evil that I would not.
that I do. ** Now if I do what I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin
that cwelleth in me. “For I delight in i he laws of tiod after the inward man: " But I see anoiher law in my members, warring against ihe law of
mind, and bringing uc into captivity to the law of sin which · is in my members,'*
*Cf, Drummond, who discoursing on Philo's teaching about the
internal conflict, says:"Like the apostle Paul he was familiar with the internal war, which
he pronounces to be the most difficult and oppressive of all wars! This conflict is occasione by the intagonism between soul
lid body. The body is by nature evil, and plots against the soul, It is dead, so that each of 18 carries a corpse ; and the philosophie cards for that which is alive in him, the soul, and neglects that which is dead, the body, aiming only at this, that that which is best, the soul. may not le maltreated by the evil and dead thing with which it is bound up. This view logically carried olt is the parent of asceticism. It had already collected the Essenes in Palestine, and perhaps the Therapeutae in Egypt, and it was destined at a later period 1.0 people the Egyptian desort with monks." (Druc monil's Philo Judocus, Vol. I, pp. 23-24),