2 Timothy 1:7

Ver. 7. For God gave us not the spirit of cowardice, but of power, and love, and correction. By spirit here may be understood either God's Spirit working in a certain manner in us, or our own spirit as wrought upon and formed by God; practically, it comes much to the same thing, since either way the gift is of God, obtained by direct fellowship with His Spirit. But spoken of as a thing that, hypothetically at least, might take a wrong as well as a right direction, it most naturally presents itself to our view in the subjective, concrete aspect as the inwrought spiritual disposition or temperament which, by the Spirit of God conferred on us as ministers of the word, we were at once called and empowered to exercise. Now, as such it was not, the apostle says, the spirit of cowardice (δειλίας, more than φόβου, fear, which is capable of a good as well as a bad sense) such as would dispose us to shrink from the discharge of duty when it becomes irksome, or to compromise our principles when it is perilous to hold them. Not this is the spirit with which we were endowed by God (as at Romans 8:15 it was denied to be the spirit δουλείας, of bondage), but of power, manfully to bear up against trials and difficulties, to hold our ground when others are ready to yield and give way; and love, which seeks not its own, but the good of others and the glory of God, even at the expense of what is personally dear and amiable to it; and correction. In regard to this last expression, σωφρονισμός, it is impossible, perhaps, to get an English word that exactly corresponds with the original. Our translators have rendered it sound mind, substantially following Beza, sanitatis animi; the Vulg. and Erasmus have sobrietatis, not much different, but giving the import of σωφροσύνη rather than σωφρονισμός : for the latter, as Suicer remarks, Thes. ii. p. 1224, “expresses the authority which admonishes and restrains those who walk in a disorderly manner, and is opposed to cowardice;” so that this spirit shows itself in a capacity to check what, either by corrupt motions from within, or by threats and allurements from without, would lead us into foolish and perverse ways: it is the power of authoritative control and wise restraint, which if we but have in sufficient measure, we shall not weakly bend to adverse circumstances, but make these bend to us. This coincides, in part at least, with one of Chrysostom's explanations; and Theodoret gives the sense of the whole thus: “God has given us the grace of His most Holy Spirit, not that we should dread the perils that beset godliness, but that, being replenished with divine power, we might both ardently love Him and repress the disorder of the affections that agitate us;” as also, it should have been added, might reprove the false compliances and disorderly behaviour prevalent around us. Hence the word, in later times, came to be applied to ecclesiastical censures; see in Suicer.