It is a grievous thing to a minister of Christ to see those who for the time ought to be teachers, fit for the Church's strong meat and the harder tasks of her service, remaining still infantile in their condition, needing to be nursed and humoured, narrow in their views of truth, petty and personal in their aims, wanting in all generous feeling and exalted thought. Some men, like St Paul himself, advance from the beginning to a settled faith, to a large intelligence and a full and manly consecration to God. Others remain "babes in Christ" to the end. Their souls live, but never thrive. They suffer from every change in the moral atmosphere, from every new wind of doctrine. These invalids are objects full of interest to the moral pathologist; they are marked not unfrequently by fine and delicate qualities. But they are a constant anxiety to the Church. Till they grow into something more robust they must remain to crowd the Church's nursery, instead of taking part in her battle like brave and strenuous men.
The appearance of false doctrine in the Asian Churches made their undeveloped condition a matter for peculiar apprehension to the apostle. The Colossian heresy, for example, with which he is dealing at this present moment, would have no attraction for ripe and settled Christians. But such a "scheme of error" was exactly suited to catch men with a certain tincture of philosophy and in general sympathy with current thought, who had embraced Christianity under some vague sense of its satisfaction for their spiritual needs, but without an intelligent grasp of its principles or a thorough experience of its power.
St Paul speaks of "every wind of _the_ doctrine," having in his mind a more or less definite form of erroneous teaching, a certain "plan of error." Reading this verse in the light of the companion letter to Colossae and the letters addressed to Timothy when at Ephesus a few years later, we can understand its significance. We can watch the storm that was rising in the Graeco-Asiatic Churches. The characteristics of early Gnosticism are well defined in the miniature picture of verse 14. We note, in the first place, its protean and capricious form, half Judaistic, half philosophical--ascetic in one direction, libertine in another: "tossed by the waves, and carried about with every wind." In the next place, its intellectual spirit,--that of a loose and reckless speculation: "in the hazarding of men,"--not in the abiding truth of God. Morally, it was vitiated by "craftiness." And in its issue and result, this new teaching was leading "to the scheme of error" which the apostle four years ago had sorrowfully predicted, in bidding farewell to the Ephesian elders at Miletus (Acts xx.). This scheme was no other than the gigantic Gnostic system, which devastated the Eastern Churches and inflicted deep and lasting wounds upon them.