September 9

For there is no difference. - Romans 3:22.

NOTHING is more strikingly apparent, when we survey mankind, than the differences which obtain among them, in country, complexion, in language, in feature, and in manners. Indeed, the differences seem to be almost endless. And yet there may be general points of resemblance, and they are, after all, the most important, inasmuch as they make manifest the fact that, amid all the circumstantial variety in the human family there is an essential sameness; so that the Apostle says, “There is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

We have heard much about the doctrine of equality. If this equality intends an equality of substance, it is a very foolish and absurd thing, for, in the first place, it is unattainable; secondly, if it were obtained it could not be continued one year, one month, one week, perhaps not one day; and, thirdly, if it were attained and continued it would be far less desirable and useful than the distinctions designed by Divine Providence, for it would preclude or injure the exercise of those virtues and the performance of those duties which are now called forth by the various relations and ranks in the community.

Yet there is such a thing as equality, and this equality is of three kinds: First, There is a civil equality, an equal right to unequal things; that is, a poor man has as much right to his cottage as the nobleman has to his mansion; a journeyman has as much right to his wages as the master has to his services. The law which secures the privileges of the peer, also secures the rights of the poor. The mower in the field lays his homely garments and food under the hedge, while he works freely on, and the law says, he that toucheth them, toucheth the apple of mine eye.

Secondly, There is also physical equality. This is both original and final: “He has made of one blood all nations of the earth;” the human race derive their existence from the same father, Adam, the same mother, Eve, and the same maker, God. “The rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the maker of them both.” They have the same limited faculties and the same wants, are subject to the same pains and diseases, and they are heirs to the same immortality; they are doomed to the same grave: “the small and the great are there, and the servant is free as his master.”

There is, thirdly, Amoral and Spiritual equality. All men are in the same Spiritual condition as men, and all Christians are in the same state and have the same privileges as Christians. There is no difference, says the Apostle. There is no difference as to men, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. There is no difference as to Christians, all of them “being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”