St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans : a practical exposition

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COlUffi

THE

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

ii.

FIRST EDITION . . March, 1900
Reprinted .... A T (n>ember^ 1901
Reprinted .... February, 1904

Epistle to the Romans^

A Practical Exposition

BY CHARLES GORE, -BrD.

LORD BISHOP OF WORCESTER
CHAPLAIN TO HIS MAJESTY THB KING

VOL. II

(CHAPTERS IX-XVI)

NEW IMPRESSION

LOND ON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1904

93307

ST. MARY'S COLLEGi

A Series of Simple Expositions

of

Portions of the New Testament

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
Crown Svo, green cloth, $s. 6d. each.

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.

THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. In Two Vols.

PREFACE

THERE would be no need for a preface to
this second volume were it not that a very
kindly and careful review of the first volume in
The Guardian of May 24 last, requires a word
of notice. The reviewer warns me off ' the dia-
logue system of exegesis/ Now no doubt this
principle, like every other, may be abused.
1 The Jewish objector ' may, as the reviewer
complains, be allowed to ' run riot/ Still I can-
not doubt that the Jewish objector is a reality
of an illuminative kind in the argument of such
passages as Romans iii. 1-8, or the great passage
(ix-xi), to which the first part of this volume is
devoted. Of the other points of detail noticed
by the reviewer which a volume of this kind is
not the place to discuss many are confessedly
doubtful, and some unimportant. On most of

vi Preface

them I am still disposed to retain my former
opinion, but I would, in accordance with my
critic's wishes, alter 'the actual life' (vol. i.
p. 203) into ' the principle of life/ and (p. 213)
instead of saying that the principle of living
by dying ' belongs only to a fallen world ' say
that 'it belongs, as St. Paul views it } though
probably not in its ultimate law, to a fallen world/
I agree that in its deepest sense the principle
appears to be an ultimate law of all created life
of which the conditions are known to us.

C. G.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY,

Conversion of St. Paul, 1900.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.

PAGE

DIVISION IV The theodicy or justification of God for His

CHAPTER dealings with the Jews i
ix. 1-13 i The present rejection of Israelites no

breach of a divine promise ... 14
14-29 2 God's liberty in showing mercy and judge-
ment always retained and asserted . 31
3o-x. 21 3 Lack of faith the reason of Israel's rejection 44
xi. 1-12 4 God's judgement on Israel neither uni-
versal nor final 59

J 3-s6 5 God's present purpose for the Jews
through the Gentiles : and so for all

humanity 68

DIVISION V Practical exhortation ... 95

xn. 1-2 i Self-surrender in response to God . . 97

3-21 a The community spirit .... 103

xin. 1-7 3 The Christians and the imperial power . 116

8-10 4 The summary debt 127

11-14 5 The approach of the day .... 133

xiv. 1-23 6 Mutual toleration 137

xv. 1-13 7 Unselfish forbearance and inclusiveness . 159

viii Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

DIVISION VI Conclusion . . .170

xv. 14-33 r St. Paul's excuse for writing, and his hope

of coming . . . . 171

xvi. 1-2 a A commendation ..... 189

3-16 3 Personal greetings 191

17-20 4 Final warning 198

21-23 5 Salutations from companions . . . 200

25-27 6 Final doxology 201

APPENDED NOTES :

A. The meanings of the word ' faith ' 205

B. The use of the word ' conscience ' 207

C. Recent reactions from the teaching about hell . . 210

D. Difficulties about the doctrine of the atonement. . 215

E. Evolution and the Christian doctrine of the Fall . 219

F. Baptism by immersion and by affusion . . . 237

G. A prayer of Jeremy Taylor 238

H. The origin of the maxim * In necessariis unitas, &c.' 239
I. St. Augustine's teaching that 'The Church is the

body of Christ offered in the eucharist ' . . 240

THE
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

DIVISION IV. CHAPTERS IX-XI.

The theodicy or justification of God for His
dealings with the Jews.

ST. PAUL has concluded his great exposition
of the meaning of * the gospel ' : that in it is
the disclosure of a divine righteousness into
which all mankind Jews and Gentiles on the
same level of need and sin are to be freely
admitted by simply believing in Jesus. The
believer in Jesus first welcomes the absolute
and unmerited forgiveness of his sins, which his
redeemer has won for him, and thus acquitted
passes into the spiritual strength and joy and
fellowship of the new life, the life of the
redeemed humanity, lived in Jesus Christ, the
second Adam or head of our "race. The contem-

II. B

2 The Epistle to the Romans

plation of the present moral freedom, and the
glorious future prospect, of this catholic body
the elect of God in Jesus Christ has in the
eighth chapter filled the apostle's language with
the glow of an enthusiasm almost unparalleled
in all the compass of his epistles. And he is
intending to pass on to interpret to the repre-
sentatives of this church of Christ at Rome
some of the moral obligations which follow
most clearly from the consideration of what
their faith really means. This ethical division
of the epistle begins with chapter xii. The
interval (ix-xi) is occupied with a discussion
which is an episode, in the sense that the epistle
might be read without it and no feeling of
a broken unity would force itself upon us.
None the less the discussion not only confronts
and silences an obvious objection to St. Paul's
teaching, but also brings out ideas about the
meaning of the divine election, and the responsi-
bility involved in it, which are vital and neces-
sary for the true understanding of the ' free
grace of God/ For these chapters serve really
to safeguard the all-important sense of our
human responsibility under the rich and un-
merited conditions of divine privilege in which
we find ourselves.

St. Paul's 'theodicy'

St. Paul's argument so far has involved an
obvious conclusion. God's elect are no longer
the Jews in particular. On the contrary, the
Jews in bulk have lost their position and become
apostates in rejecting the Christ. This result
in the first place cuts St. Paul to the heart, for
his religious patriotism was peculiarly intense.
But in the second place it furnishes an objec-
tion in the mouth of the Jew against St. Paul's
whole message. For if God had really rejected
His chosen people, He had broken His word in
so doing. God had pledged Himself to Israel :
the Old Testament scriptures were full of
passages which might be quoted to this effect.
Thus

* My mercy will I not utterly take from David

' Nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.
' My covenant will I not break,

' Nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.
' Once have I sworn by my holiness ;

' I will not lie unto David ;
' His seed shall endure for ever,

1 And his throne as the sun before me.
' It shall be established for ever as the moon,

* And as the faithful witness in the sky 1 .'

But according to St. Paul's teaching, had not
God 'broken His covenant'? What had be-

1 Ps. Ixxxix. 33-7.
B 2

4 The Epistle to the Romans

come of the 'faithful witness'? To this
objection, then, St. Paul sets himself to reply.
The chapters we are now to consider may be
best represented as an animated defence of his
teaching directed toward a Jew who pleads this
objection. St. Paul, no doubt, had heard too
much of it since he began to preach the gospel,
and had felt it too deeply in his own mind in the
earlier days, when the word of Jesus was as a
goad against which he was kicking, for it to be
possible for him to pass it by. And his defence
his 'theodicy* or justification of God is in
brief this : God never committed Himself or
tied Himself to Israel physically understood.
He always kept hanging over their heads
declarations of His own freedom in choosing
His instruments, and warnings of possible
rejection, such as ought to have prevented their
resting satisfied with merely having 'Abraham to
their father' (ix). And if the question be asked :
Why has Israel been rejected? The answer
is : That so far as actual Israel has fallen out of
the elect body, it is because they refused to
exhibit the correspondence of faith (x) ; but also
Israel, as such, has not been rejected ; for, as of
old, so now there is a faithful remnant. Nor
again is the partial alienation of Israel which

St. Paul's 'theodicy*

has occurred final. God is simply waiting for
their recovery of faith, to restore them to their
ancient and inalienable position of election.
Meanwhile He uses their temporary alienation
as the opportunity of the Gentiles, who in their
turn can only retain their newly won position
by maintaining the correspondence of faith with
the purposes of God, and who also wait for their
fulfilment and the perfecting of their joy upon
the recovery of Israel as a body. Thus through
all stages of election and rejection by both
methods of mercy and of judgement God, in
His inscrutable wisdom, works steadily for the
opportunity of showing His mercy upon all
men.

When we have a brief analysis of the argu-
ment of these chapters under our eyes, we may
well rub them in astonishment, and look again,
and ask why, in the reaction against Calvin-
ism J , we had come (to put it frankly) to dislike
these chapters so much. We know that as
a fact these chapters have been taken as a
stronghold of the Calvinistic position by both its

1 By this phrase is commonly meant the doctrine that God
created some men absolutely and irresistibly predestined to eternal
life and joy, and created the rest of mankind absolutely and hope-
lessly abandoned to eternal misery.

6 The Epistle to the Romans

friends and foes. They have come to constitute
in modern literature a sort of reproach upon
Christianity 1 , just on the ground on which
the best Christian conscience of our time is
most sensitive. Many of us would have to
admit that we have shrunk from these chapters
as we have heard them read, and probably
avoided them in our own reading. We have
shrunk from the sound of the words 'the chil-
dren being not yet born, neither having done
anything good or bad, that the purpose of God
according to election might stand, not of works
but of him that calleth' ' Jacob have I loved, and
Esau have I hated' 'Whom he will he har-
deneth ' ' Hath not the potter power over the
clay. 1 Yet these texts, with their arbitrary, unfair
and narrow sound, appear as steps in an argument
which has for its conclusion the most universal
conception possible of the purpose of the divine
love. ' God shut up all unto disobedience, that
he might have mercy upon all.' The conclusion
of the argument is so unmistakable, and so plain
against any Calvinistic attribution to God of

1 Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism (Smith, Elder,
1870), p. 99, admits that St. Paul ' falls into Calvinism,' but
patronizingly excuses him on the ground that this Calvinism is
with him secondary, or even less than secondary.

S/. Paul's 'theodicy'

a narrow and arbitrary favouritism, that there
must have been some great mistake in our
understanding of its main point and drift. It is
worth while then to indicate at starting where
the error has lain.

1. It has been in part owing to our mistaken
habit of taking isolated ' texts ' out of their con-
nexion, as if they were detached aphorisms. Now
St. John, in his meditative method, does very
generally round off a fundamental Christian
truth into an aphorism which really admits of
being detached and quoted apart from its context.
And no doubt there are in St. Paul detachable
texts. But on the whole St. Paul, least of
all men, admits of being judged by detached
fragments. His thought is always in process.
It looks before and after. He is seriously
wronged by the mere fact of his epistles being
divided into separate verses, and sometimes
arbitrary chapters, as in the Authorized Version.
Thus in the case of these three chapters, the
common mistake as to the meaning of particular
phrases could hardly have arisen if the argument
had been kept in mind as a whole, and especially
its conclusion as to the universal purpose of
divine love 'to have mercy upon all/

2. For, among other things, the true meaning

8 The Epistle to the Romans

of ' election ' in these chapters would then have
been apparent. St. Paul has been popularly mis-
understood to be referring to God's ' election ' of
some individual men to salvation in heaven, and
His abandonment of the rest to hell. Whereas
the argument as a whole and its conclusion make
it quite certain that what he is speaking of is the
election of men in nations or churches (only sub-
ordinately of individuals) T to a position of special
spiritual privilege and responsibility in this
world, such as the Jews had formerly occupied,
and the Christians were occupying now an
election to be the people of God, and bear His
name in the face of the world the sort of
election which carries with it a great joy and
a special opportunity, but not by any means
a certainty of final personal acceptableness to

1 Of course the election of the nation or the church is felt,
especially in the New Testament, or whenever in the Old Testa-
ment individuality is fully realized, to involve the election of each
of the persons composing the cation or the church. But still
their election is a challenge to their faith, and no guarantee of
ultimate salvation. St. Paul is left praying and suffering ' for the
elect's sake that they also may obtain the salvation . . . with eternal
glory' (2 Tim. ii. 10). The elect have to ' make their calling and
election sure ' (2 Peter i. 10). It should, however, be noticed
that election may be, and in the Gospels is, used to describe the
final selection of those who are proved worthy of the ' marriage
supper of the Lamb.' (Matt. xxii. 14.)

5/. Paul's 'theodicy'

God, apart from moral faithfulness. Apart from
such faithfulness the ' children of the kingdom
shall be cast into the outer darkness/ and the
highest shall be put lowest, while the lowest
are raised highest.

3. Another cause of misunderstanding has
been forgetfulness of the point of view of the
opponent with whom St. Paul is arguing. In
modern times assertions of divine absoluteness,
like St. Paul's, have been made by teachers who
were refusing to recognize any such freedom of
the will in the individual human being any such
power to control his own personal destiny as
seems to our common sense to be involved in
moral responsibility in any real sense. St. Paul
has therefore been supposed, like these more
recent teachers, to be asserting divine absolute-
ness, or the unrestricted freedom of divine
choice, as against human freedom, or in such
a way as to destroy the idea of moral responsi-
bility. But in fact St. Paul is vindicating moral
responsibility. His opponent is the Jew, who
holds that God had so tied His hands and lost
His liberty in choosing Israel once for all for
His elect people, that every child of Abraham
can at all times claim the privileges of his
election for no other reason than because of his

io The Epistle to the Romans

genealogy. Such a doctrine of election does
indeed destroy all real moral responsibility in the
subject of it, and all freedom of moral choice in
God. St. Paul, on the other hand, asserts that
God remains free and absolute to elect and to
reject, irrespective of all questions of race, where
He will and as He will. The absolute reason
of God's selections, the reason why certain races
and individuals are chosen for special privileges
and as special instruments of the divine purpose,
lies in a region into which we cannot penetrate.
But because God has shown us His moral
character and requirement, we can know how,
and how only, we may hope to retain any
position which God has given us ; it is by
exhibiting moral correspondence with His pur-
pose that is faith or malleability under His
hand.

This is a doctrine then which lays upon ' the
elect/ at any particular moment, the moral re-
sponsibility of correspondence with a divine
purpose. In a word, St. Paul asserts divine
sovereignty in such a sense as vindicates instead
of destroying moral responsibility, while his
opponent is claiming for Israel a sort of freedom
from being interfered with, which would really
destroy their moral responsibility altogether.

St. Paul's 'theodicy' n

Thus, as has already been pointed out 1 , nothing
can well be more important than to keep clearly
in mind, here as elsewhere, with whom St. Paul
is arguing.

4. It is worth while remarking, before we
apply ourselves to St. Paul's argument in detail,
that it is essentially ' apologetic ' : it is a justi-
fication of God in view of certain felt difficulties :
and it is an argument ad hominem, that is an
argument with certain people on their own as-
sumptions, the sort of argument which takes the
form of saying, 'you at least have no right on
your own principles to urge such and such diffi-
culties.' Now we are bound to recognize how
very important at all periods this ad hominem
appeal is : how very important it is to get men
to see what their own principles really involve.
A great part of the evil of the world comes
through people not thinking out what they
really mean and believe. But on the other hand,
this sort of argument, which proceeds upon
a certain set of assumptions, has often a merely
temporary force, and carries with it an accom-
panying danger. When the state of mind contem-
plated becomes a matter of history, the argument
based on its assumption has lost its power. In

1 Vol. i. pp. 114 f.

12 The Epistle to the Romans

view of a quite different set of assumptions it
may become even misleading. For example.
Bishop Butler argued for the truths of natural
and revealed religion, on the analogy of the
facts of nature and on the assumption of a divine
author of nature, thus If, as you admit, God
made nature, and yet nature is shown to contain
such and such facts or processes, how can you
argue against the divine authorship of natural
religion and revelation on the ground that it
attributes to God similar facts and processes?
This was a very effective argument so long as
men did treat the doctrine of God having created
the world as a matter of course. But when
'agnosticism* arose when men ceased to dis-
cover in nature any decisive argument for God
or against God, and professed only an inability
to draw any conclusion at all, Butler's argu-
ment had lost its force, and the difficulties in
nature and religion to which he called attention
could even be used against ascribing a divine
authorship to either. Apologetic arguments are
always liable to this peril. Thus St. Paul's
arguments, based on an unhesitating belief that
the Old Testament contained really the words
of God, that what they asserted about God was
certainly true, and that God was certainly just

S/. Paul's 'theodicy' 13

and the standard of justice, may have an effect
very contrary to his intention when they are
applied to people who feel no such certainties.
St. Paul may seem to be making the difficulties
of believing in the Bible only more obvious, by
calling attention to its ' harsh and unedifying '
elements.

But this unfortunate result of most 'apologies'
is, at least in the case of St. Paul and Bishop
Butler, only superficial. If the apologetic argu-
ment is really deep, it retains, if not exactly its
original value, yet a value not the less real.
Butler's indications of the profound analogy
which holds between the doctrines of religion
and the facts of nature, can never be out of
place or lose force. Still less can men ever
cease to learn the deepest lessons from his
temper of mind and method. And that it is so
with St. Paul's apology that it contains the
profoundest and most abiding lessons about the
responsibility and danger of all elect bodies and
individuals will appear plainly enough in what
follows, now that we are in a position to approach
his argument in detail.

14 The Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION IV. i. CHAPTER IX. 1-13.

The present rejection of Israelites no breach of
a divine promise.

ST. PAUL has finished his glowing description
of the position and prospects of the elect people
of God. And then, by contrast, the misery
of the outcast people once called electhis
own people wrings his heart with pain. The
very idea that in his new enthusiasm for the
catholic church he can be supposed to be for-
getting those who are of his own flesh and
blood, stirs him to a profound protest. He
solemnly asseverates that the pain which Israel's
rejection causes him is acute and continuous.
He has caught himself at the point of praying
to be himself an outcast from Christ, if so be he
could bring the people of his own kindred and
blood into the Church. For who indeed could
seem to have so good a title to be there? They
are the Israelites that is God's own people:
the eye of God was so specially upon this race

No divine promise broken 15

that He redeemed it and made it His own son 1 :
to them was vouchsafed the shining of His con-
tinual presence in the tabernacle 2 : to them, in
the persons of the patriarchs and of Moses, God
gave special covenants, that is to say, pledged
His word to them in an unmistakable manner
and repeatedly that He should be their God and
they should be His people : thus in pursuance
of a divine purpose they were brought under
the education of the divinely given law and
ritual worship : and all this with direct and re-
peated promises of a more glorious position in
the future to be brought about by the divine
king, the Christ who was to be. To them
finally belongs all the sanctity which can attach to
a people from having numbered among its mem-
bers the holy ones of God : for of this race were
the patriarchs, the friends of God ; and of this
race, so far as human birth is concerned, came in
fact the Christ who, born a Jew, is sovereign of
the universe and ever blessed God. Surely then,
St. Paul implies, that this race, now that the
Christ they were expecting is at last come, now
that the goal of all God's dealings with them is
at last reached, should have fallen outside the
circle of His people and be no longer sharers in

1 Exod. iv. 22 ; Hos. xi. i. a Exod. xvi. 10.

i6 The Epistle to the Romans

the sonship or the election, would seem a result
too monstrous to contemplate. The contrast
between what they were and were intended for,
and what in present appearance they are, is
indeed appalling.

Yet the natural conclusion for the Jew to draw,
which at this point flashes into St. Paul's mind,
the conclusion that God has proved unfaithful,
is not the true one. No: God's word, God's
promise, has not broken down. For, if the facts
are looked at, it appears quite plainly that the
Israel of God was never simply the Israel of
physical descent, nor the children of Abraham
simply his physical seed. Plainly not. For Isaac
and Ishmael were equally Abraham's seed, phy-
sically considered, but for the purpose of God
the promise is given only to the family of the
younger son, Isaac (Gen. xxi. 12), who moreover
was born, not in the mere natural order, but
under circumstances of special divine promise
and intervention (Gen. xviii. id). And if in this
case it be said that the younger son Isaac
was the only son of Sarah, the wife and free
woman, and therefore had a natural prerogative
over Ishmael, yet the same inscrutable principle
of selection is apparent in the next generation,
in a case where there is no possible inequality

No divine promise broken

of natural claimin the case of the two sons
born simultaneously to Isaac of the same mother.
Prior to their birth, and prior therefore to any
possible merit or demerit on their own part
so that God's absolute freedom of choice
should appear quite conspicuously the younger
Jacob was deliberately preferred over the elder
Esau (Gen. xxv. 23). And in fact this race of
Esau, this Edom though they were Israelites
after the flesh appear in history as something
much worse than merely secondary to the true
Israel; for God speaks by Malachi and de^
clares that, whereas Israel is His beloved son,
Esau, that is Edom, He has 'hated' (Mai. i. 3).
No Israelite therefore who reads his scriptures
(St. Paul would conclude) ought to have failed to
perceive an inscrutable element in God's choice
of his chosen people. He ought not to have
felt in his own case, any more than in that of the
first children of Abraham or Isaac, that he could
be sure of membership in the people of God
merely because of his physical descent.

I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing
witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great
sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could
wish 1 that I myself were anathema from Christ for my

1 Or < pray ' (marg.) literally < I was praying.'
II. C

i8 The Epistle to the Romans

brethren's sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh : who
are Israelites ; whose is the adoption, and the glory, and
the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service
of God, and the promises ; whose are the fathers, and of
whom is Christ as concerning the flesh, who is over all,
God blessed for ever. Amen. But it is not as though the
word of God hath come to nought. For they are not all
Israel, which are of Israel : neither, because they are
Abraham's seed, are they all children : but, In Isaac shall
thy seed be called. That is, it is not the children of the
flesh that are children of God ; but the children of the
promise are reckoned for a seed. For this is a word of
promise, According to this season will I come, and Sarah
shall have a son. And not only so ; but Rebecca also
having conceived by one, even by our father Isaac for the
children being not yet born, neither having done anything
good or bad, that the purpose of God according to election
might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth, it was
said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. Even
as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.

i. St. Paul's earnest asseveration is very notice-
able in form. It shows so much of his instinctive
inward life. He lives ' in Christ/ who is light
as well as life 1 , and to speak the truth is the
very atmosphere of this new life 2 . As it comes
natural to many people to say ' upon my word
as a gentleman/ it comes natural to St. Paul to
say, 'speaking as in Christ, who is the light/
And his natural conscience that is the faculty
of passing judgement on one's own actions,

1 Cf. Eph. v. 8-14. 2 Cf. Col. iii. 9.

No divine promise broken 19

which in St. Paul's case bears witness to the
truth of what he says by passing no censure on
him that too does not act of itself merely, but
in the Spirit of the new life, the Holy Spirit of
Christ, which inspires and ratifies the moral
judgement, otherwise so liable to be degraded
or perverted or silenced: his conscience bears
witness with his word in the Holy Ghost. Here,
then, is the whole secret of Christian truthful-
ness. The Christian is truthful because he lives
and speaks in God, in Christ, in the Spirit.

As to St. Paul's half-expressed prayer (' I was
praying,' he says, i. e. ' I caught myself praying '),
it resembles that of Moses for his rebellious
people 1 . 'And now, O Lord, if thou wilt for-
give their sin ; and if not, blot me, I pray
thee, out of thy book which thou hast writ-
ten.' But St. Paul's instinctive desire is not
apparently like that of Moses, to perish with his
people rather than be saved without them ; but
to offer himself for rejection with a view to their
salvation. The prayer is, as St. Paul implies,
an impossible prayer, but it expresses, as hardly
anything else could, the intensity of his feeling.
And such intensity of feeling was natural to the
deep religious patriotism of a Jew.

1 Exod. xxxii. 32.
C 2

20 The Epistle to the Romans

We may illustrate St. Paul's feeling by com-
paring a fine expression of a more commonplace
sorrow over the ruin of Israel from a period
after the destruction of Jerusalem 1 . 'Now
therefore I will speak ; touching man in
general, thou knowest best ; but touching thy
people will I speak, for whose sake I am sorry ;
and for thine inheritance, for whose cause
I mourn ; and for Israel, for whom I am heavy ;
and for the seed of Jacob, for whose sake I am
troubled/ 'Thou seest that our sanctuary is
laid waste, our altar broken down, our temple
destroyed; our psaltery is brought low, our
song is put to silence, our rejoicing is at an end;
the light of our candlestick is put out, the ark of
our covenant is spoiled, our holy things are
defiled, and the name that is called upon us is
profaned ; our freemen are despitefully treated,
our priests are burnt, our Levites are gone into
captivity, our virgins are defiled, and our wives
ravished ; our righteous men carried away, our
little ones betrayed, our young men are brought
into bondage, and our strong men are become
weak ; and, what is more than all, the seal of
Sion for she hath now lost the seal of her

1 2 Esdr. viii. 15-16, x. 21-23. The latter passage is not spoken
to God, but by one Jew to another.

No divine promise broken 21

honour, and is delivered into the hands of them
that hate us/

2. As we read St. Paul's enumeration of the
glories of Israel, it is of course obvious for us to
pursue the line of thought taught us elsewhere
by St. Paul, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews;
and to recognize how each element of the
1 glory/ which belonged once to the Jewish
1 ministration of condemnation/ belongs in
deeper and fuller measure to the Christian 'mini-
stration of the Spirit V Ours is the vocation of
the chosen people ; ours is the sonship to God ;
and the perpetual presence ; and the security of
divine covenant ; ours is the divine law, and with
it, what is much better, the Spirit for its accom-
plishment; ours is the corporate worship in
spirit and in truth, the Church's eucharist ; for
us, too, are promises which the realization of
those of the first covenant has made 'more
sure ' ; ours finally is the communion of the
saints from Abraham onward into the body of
Christ. And in proportion therefore to the
greatness of our privileges, even as compared
with those of the older covenant, is the great-
ness of our responsibility ; ' For I would not,
brethren, have you ignorant 2 / St. Paul would

1 2 Cor. iii. 8. a See i Cor. x. 1-13.

22 The Epistle to the Romans

say ; he would not have us fail to profit by the
warnings of old days. And another voice
warns us 'Of now much sorer punishment
shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden
under foot the Son of God, and hath counted
the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was
sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done
despite unto the Spirit of grace 1 /

3. There has been amongst critics, since
Erasmus, much controversy over the clause,
' who is over all, God blessed for ever.' There is
no doubt that it is translated most naturally, and
most agreeably to the balance and movement of
the sentence, if we attribute it to Christ, as
above. But many critics, including some who
were orthodox, have stumbled at the idea of
St. Paul speaking of Christ straight out as ' over
all, God blessed for ever/ Generally no doubt
1 God ' is used by St. Paul as a proper name of
the Father. But Christ is continually recog-
nized as possessing strictly divine attributes,
and exercising strictly divine functions; and
in all St. Paul's epistles, beginning with his
earliest to the Thessalonians, He is God's Son,
His own or proper Son 2 . His blood, as shed
for our ransoming, is God's own blood, or

1 Heb. x. 29. i Thess. i. 10 ; Rom. viii. 3.

No divine promise broken 23

(possibly) the blood of one who is ' His own ' 1 .
He subsisted eternally in the form, or essential
attributes, of God, and in possession of equality
with Him ; and He possesses now, as glorified
in humanity, the divine name of universal
sovereignty, the object of universal worship 2 .
Therefore He is in the strictest sense divine ;
and whatever or, I should say, whoever is
essentially divine and proper to the being of
God, can rightly be called God. For, indeed,
there is nothing in the strict sense divine but
God Himself. It was then merely a question of
time when Christians would become sufficiently
familiar with the new revelation of the threefold
name to apply the word God to the Son and
the Spirit as naturally as to the Father. And
there is nothing really to surprise us in St. Paul
here applying it to Christ 3 : nothing certainly
to warrant us in doing violence to the sentence,
in order to obviate the conclusion that he did
so, by putting a full stop after ' flesh/ and then
supposing an abrupt exclamation ' He who is
over all is God blessed for ever 4 ! '

1 Acts xx. 28. 3 Phil. ii. 6-n.

3 Without the article which makes it a proper name of the
Father.

4 R. V. margin \ It does further violence to the Greek to
translate as R. V. margin l , ' He who is God over all is (be)

24 The Epistle to the Romans

Let it be recognized, then, that St. Paul here
plainly speaks of Christ as ' over all/ i.e. in His
glorified manhood, and also as ' God blessed for
ever' that is, as the one proper and eternal
object of human praise ; and that he speaks of
Him again elsewhere 1 , as 'our great God and
Saviour/ It was only because He was essen-
tially and eternally ' God ' that He could, in our
manhood and as the reward of His human
obedience, be exalted to divine sovereignty and
be ' over all/

4. In the rest of the section St. Paul is
arguing with a Jew, who makes the claim that
because of the divine covenant God is bound to
the Israelites, and to all Israelites for ever.
1 We have Abraham to our father/ and that is
enough 2 . The higher prophetic spirit of the
Old Testament had already realized that God's
election of Israel was a challenge to her to
prove herself worthy of an undeserved privi-
lege 3 , and that, though a faithful remnant would

blessed for ever/ I have nothing to add on the matter to S. and
H. in loc., especially p. 236.

1 Tit. ii. 13. This is probably the right rendering.

3 St. Matt. iii. 9.

3 Great stress was laid by the prophets on the absence of any
original merit or power in Israel, which caused the divine election;
see Ezek. xvi, Deut. xxvi. 5.

No divine promise broken 25

never fail, yet unfaithfulness in the bulk of the
nation would bring destruction upon them and
loss of God's favour 1 . The prophetic spirit had
realized also that God's servant Israel was not
'called' for his own selfish honour's sake, but was
entrusted with a divine ministry to fulfil for all
the nations of the earth 2 . It is to this higher
sense of what Israel's position meant, and the
perils it involved, that John the Baptist and our
Lord Himself had sought to recall the Jews.
They must not l think to say within themselves,
They had Abraham for their Father ; for God
was able of the stones to raise up children unto
Abraham.' For 'many should come from the
east and the west, and sit down with Abraham,
and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God,
and the sons of the kingdom should be cast into

1 See especially Amos ix. 7-10 : * Are ye not as the children of
the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel ? saith the Lord.
Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the
Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir ? Behold, the
eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will
destroy it from off the face of the earth ; saving that I will not
utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord. For, lo, I will
command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all the nations,
like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall
upon the earth. All the sinners of my people shall die by the
sword, which say, The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us.'

3 Gen. xii. 3 ; Isa. Ixvi. 18 ; Zech. viii. 23, &c.

26 The Epistle to the Romans

the outer darkness V But it is evident that this
higher meaning of the doctrine of election had
been forgotten by contemporary Judaism, and
they would not be recalled to it. They refused
to contemplate the spiritual risk of missing their
vocation, or the universal purpose for which it
was given. They chose to think that Israel,
i. e. the actual Israelites in bulk, must remain
God's elect; that the Christ, when He came,
must come to exalt their race and nation : that
they were bound to inherit the blessings of the
world to come : that the divine government of
the world existed for their sakes 2 .

St. Paul, then, is here intending to vindicate
the real meaning of election, in the sense in
which it is bound up with the ethical character
of God and carries with it a deepened feeling of
responsibility in those who are the subjects of it.

1 Matt. viii. n, la.

3 In Weber's Jiidische Theologie (Leipzig, 1897, formerly called
System der Altsynagog. Paldstin. Theol. or Die Lehre des Talmud),
pp. 51 ff, there are striking illustrations from the Talmud of this
fixed tendency of thought among the Jews. Thus ' there exists
no clearer proof of the Talmudic conviction of the absolutely holy
character of Israel than that in all the places of Scripture in which
Israel is reproved and has evil attributed to it, the expression,
" the haters of Israel," is substituted for Israel.' * We read : Isaiah
was punished, because he called Israel a people of unclean lips,'
&c. Cf. S. and H., p. 249, and my Ephesians, p. 261.

No divine promise broken 27

But his argument is directed, first of all, to one
point only to bringing the eyes of the Jews
straight up to their own scriptures, and forcing
them to see that they do not justify the idea
of election purely by race. It is riot all of a
certain seed, but only part of it, that is chosen.
There is nothing to hinder a great part of the
race again becoming as Ishmael or as Edom by
the side of Israel. Ultimately, no doubt, there
are two points to be proved. First, that God's
method of choosing an elect body to be His
people in the world is inscrutable, so that we
cannot produce or determine His election by
any calculation, or by any real or supposed
merits, of ours ; secondly, that though we can-
not create our vocation, we can retain it by
moral correspondence or faith, and by that only.
But at present it is only the first point that is
insisted upon the absolute, inscrutable element
in the divine choice. And that, we should
notice, is a fact not merely of scriptural evidence
but of common experience. Men are born to
higher and lower positions of privilege and
opportunity. They are born Jacobs or Esaus,
in respect of moral, intellectual, religious, or
physical endowment with ten talents, or five, or
two, or one ; and God does not often give us so

28 The Epistle to the Romans

much as a glimpse of the reason why. All He
does make clear to us is that the determination
of human vocations, higher or lower, is in wiser
hands than ours.

It is of course evident, as has already been
said, that what St. Paul is speaking about is the
election of men, and specially races or nations of
men, to a position of spiritual privilege in this
world. We know now, better than the Jews of
the Old Covenant could know it, that behind
all the apparent injustices and inequalities of
this world lies the rectifying equity of God.
St. Peter had come to believe that the divine
mercy had rectified in the world beyond death
the apparently rough and heavy handed judge-
ment upon the rejected mass of mankind in the
time of the Flood. That physical catastrophe
at least was an instrument of mercy in dis-
guise 1 . St. Paul believed the same about all
God's rejections, as well as elections, in this
world. They served one universal purpose :
'That he might have mercy upon all 2 / But

1 i Pet iv. 6. ' The gospel was preached to ' these ' dead men
that they might be judged according to men in the flesh,' i. e. by
perishing in the flood, ' but live according to God in the spirit/
i. e. through our Lord's preaching in Hades. There is, I think,
so far, no ambiguity about this passage.

2 Not, however, without regard to man's will to respond to the
divine offer, see later, p. 82 ff.

No divine promise broken 29

all the same here and now in this world God
does work by means of enormous inequalities.
There are Jacobs whom He plainly loves,
upon whom He showers all His richest blessings,
and Esaus whom, to judge from present
evidence, we should say He hates whom He
sets to live in hardest and most cramping
surroundings. And no man can determine
which lot he shall enjoy. That lies in the
inscrutable selectiveness of God.

That there is no question at all about the
eternal welfare of the individual Esau's soul
that the question is simply of the comparative
status of Israel and Edom in this world
appears plainly in the passage of Malachi,
which St. Paul quotes. And we must notice
how unexpected an application St. Paul gives
to this passage in a direction most unfamiliar
to Jewish thought. For Edom was to the Jew
the very type of all that was most hateful. He
anticipated for the Edomites God's worst ven-
geance, as for Israel God's best blessings. But
St. Paul forces him to think Why should he
assume that he will be better off than Edom?
Edom was once physically on Israel's level, or
his superior in claim, when their first fathers
were but just born infants. But God chose one

30 The Epistle to the Romans

and not the other. He may exercise the like
unscrutable selectiveness upon the seed of
Israel to-day. And Edom did not remain in
a merely secondary position. He sank to be
a byword for all that is most hateful to God.
Be warned, St. Paul would say, it may be that
1 with change of name the tale is told of thee V

1 Mai. i. 2, 3. 'Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the Lord :
3'et I loved Jacob ; but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a
desolation, and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness.
Whereas Edom saith, We are beaten down, but we will return,'
&c. This passage (i) plainly refers to Esau as meaning Edom,
the people ; (2) describes not the original lot of Esau, which was
secondary indeed, but highly blessed (Gen. xxvii. 39, 40) ; but the
ultimate lot of Esau when he had misused his original endowment
in violence and cruelty.

God's liberty to choose and reject 31

DIVISION IV. 2. CHAPTER IX. 14-29.

God's liberty in showing mercy and judgement
always retained and asserted.

BUT the obvious reply of the Jewish objector
to St. Paul's assertion of the absolute and
apparently arbitrary freedom of God's election
is that it is unfair. It convicts God of un-
righteousness. To this objection (ver. 14), which
St. Paul deprecates with horror, he replies not
by any large consideration of divine justice, but
still by keeping the Jew to his own scriptures.
The God revealed in scripture must be to the
objector still the just God. He cannot call God
unjust if His method as it now appears is that
to which He called attention long ago. Look
back, then, at the past records. Did God dis-
close Himself as bound to show mercy on Moses
the Israelite, or to harden and judicially con-
demn Pharaoh the Egyptian ? No, He declares
to Moses His unrestricted freedom to exhibit His

32 The Epistle to the Romans

compassion on whom He will (Exod. xxxiii. 19).
Men cannot by any choice or efforts of their
own produce an exhibition of divine favour such
as was shown to Moses the leader of Israel: the
absolute initiative must come from God, and in
taking that initiative He declares Himself abso-
lutely free. In the same way God implicitly
asserts His sovereign freedom when He brings
Pharaoh out upon the stage of history as an
example of the way in which He hardens men's
hearts with a hardening which is the prelude to
overthrow, that men all over the world may see
and tremble at the divine power. It is not
because Pharaoh is an Egyptian that he is
hardened. He is hardened, as Moses has com-
passion shown him, simply because it is the will
of God so to do in his case.

But the objector comes forward again (ver. 19):
' If this is the arbitrary method of God if we
are simply powerless puppets in the hands of an
absolute and arbitrary will, to be saved or be
destroyed at any rate He has no reason to
complain of us. If all the power is His, so is
the responsibility.' Now St. Paul has it in his
hand to show that there remains to man a very
real power to retain his position, and conse-
quently a very real responsibility and room for

God's liberty to choose and reject 33

being blamed or praised : for if we cannot create
our vocation, we can and we are required to
correspond with it in a reverent and docile faith ;
and it was exactly here that the Jews had failed,
in spite of all their prophets had taught them.
But he keeps back this answer awhile, because
he finds the attitude of such an objector toward
God in itself so reprehensible. Such an one has
not given consideration to what the relation of
man to God really is the creature to the creator.
His critical, complaining attitude is nothing better
than foolish.

Thus he takes his antagonist back upon the
old prophetic metaphor of the potter and his
clay, with which Isaiah and Jeremiah had re-
buked the arrogance and impatience of men
long ago : ' Shall the thing framed say of him
that framed it, He hath no understanding; and
shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What
makest thou 1 ?' He follows, however, most
closely upon the later writer of the Book of
Wisdom : f For a potter, kneading soft earth,
laboriously mouldeth each several vessel for
our service: nay, out of the same clay doth
he fashion both the vessels that minister to
clean uses, and those of a contrary sort. All in

1 Isa. xxix. 16, xlv. 9, Ixiv. 8 ; Jer. xviii. 6 ; Ecclus. xxxiii. 13.
II. D

34 The Epistle to the Romans

like manner ; but what shall be the use of each
vessel of either sort, the craftsman himself is
the judge V The % thought was often in St. Paul's
mind of the inequality of lots in the world and
the Church. There are more and less honourable
limbs in the body politic : there are vessels for
honourable and vessels for dishonourable pur-
poses in the great social economy 2 . So it is
with the races of men. They are all of one
blood of the one lump. But some have high
and others low vocations, and the right to
determine of what sort the lot shall be in each
case lies absolutely with the Divine Potter. It
is childish to dispute His title. And not only
so : when the potter, whom Jeremiah was ordered
to observe, found a vessel he was making marred
under his hand, 'he made it again another vessel,
as seemed good to the potter to make it 3 .'
Accordingly, when the chosen material (i. e. the
Jews) would not mould to the high purpose for
which the Potter was fashioning it, who shall
complain if He diverted it to lower uses or
threw it away to destruction, and produced out

1 xv. 7.

3 i Cor. xii. 22-5 ; 2 Tim. ii. 20.

3 Jer. xviii. 4. The passage continues with a strong assertion
of God's freedom to govern the destinies of nations on moral
principles.

God's liberty to choose and reject 35

of His stores other vessels which He had already
prepared and destined for glorious functions (that
is to say, the Gentile Christians)? But the case
is even stronger than this. Who indeed shall
complain if, when the vessels originally destined
for the higher uses prove fit for nothing but
destruction, the Divine Potter though willing,
now as in the case of Pharaoh, to let His wrath
fall and to manifest His power yet shows almost
unlimited forbearance with them (as in fact God
did with the Jews) ; and when at last He does
let His wrath fall, only does so in order to
manifest anew the resourcefulness of His mercy 1
upon a new and larger Israel, gathered not from
among the Jews only, but from among all nations,
to be the object of His compassionate regard?

Indeed, the prophet Hosea (ii. 23, i. 10) fore-
saw this choice of a yet unrecognized people
to be God's people. Isaiah again (x. 22) antici-
pated no more than a remnant surviving of all
the multitudes of Israel, because of the sharpness
and conclusiveness of the divine judgement upon
them. And (i. 9) it is only to the compassion of
God that he attributes their exemption by means

1 When Moses asked to see God's glory (Exod. xxxiii. 18),
what was revealed to him was His goodness and free mercy, and
what St. Paul here means by God's glory is His mercy especially.

D 2

36 The Epistle to the Romans

of the faithful remnant from entire annihilation,
like that of the Cities of the Plain.

What shall we say then ? Is there unrighteousness
with God ? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will
have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have com-
passion on whom I have compassion. So then it is not
of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God
that hath mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh,
For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might
shew in thee my power, and that my name might be
published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy
on whom he will, ,and whom he will he hardeneth.

Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he still find fault ?
For who withstandeth his will ? Nay but, O man, who art
thou that repliest against God ? Shall the thing formed
say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus ?
Or hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the
same lump to make one part a vessel unto honour, and
another unto dishonour ? What if God, willing to shew
his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with
much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruc-
tion : and that he might make known the riches of his
glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared
unto glory, even us, whom he also called, not from the
Jews only, but also from the Gentiles ? As he saith also
in Hosea,

I will call that my people, which was not my people ;

And her beloved, which was not beloved.

And it shall be, that in the place where it was said
unto them, Ye are not my people,

There shall they be called sons of the living God.
And Isaiah crieth concerning Israel, If the number of
the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, it is the

God's liberty to choose and reject 37

remnant that shall be saved : for the Lord will execute
his word upon the earth, finishing it and cutting it short.
And, as Isaiah hath said before,

Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed,
We had become as Sodom, and had been made like
unto Gomorrah.

What has been already said will have been
enough to guard against the main sources of
mistake in reading this section. St. Paul might
have much to say about God's righteousness in
general, and large ways of vindicating it. But
here he holds fast to the single aspect of right-
eousness according to which it means that God
has been true to the original principles of His
covenant. The God who chose Abraham and
Moses is the God who is now, and rightly on
His own declared principles of government, re-
jecting the greater part of the people of Abraham
and Moses. This faithfulness to His own
declared principles is what St. Paul here means
by His righteousness. And as it was God's
declared principle to retain His own liberty to
show mercy on men according to His free will,
inside or outside the chosen people, so on the
other hand He retained His liberty to exhibit His
judgement of hardening according to His will,
inside or outside the chosen people. He who
brought Pharaoh the Egyptian upon the stage

38 The Epistle to the Romans

of history 1 , as an example of hardening judge-
ment, is within His right in doing the same now
with (the mass of) the people of His choice.
The liberty asserted for God is wholly consistent
with His being found, in fact, to have ( hardened '
those only who have deserved hardening by
their own wilfulness. It was for such a moral
cause that God hardened the hearts of the Jews,
that 'seeing they might not see, and hearing
they might not hear 2 / . We can feel no doubt
that some similar moral cause underlay the
hardening of Pharaoh. But this is not St. Paul's
present point. All his argument is directed to
asserting God's liberty to show mercy or harden,
irrespectively of considerations of race, when
and where He in His sovereign moral will
chooses.

We should notice that St. Paul's method is
here, as elsewhere, what is called ideal or
abstract, in the sense that he makes abstraction

1 In the original the words run, ' For this cause have I made
thee to stand/ i. e. probably, ' I have preserved thy life under the
plague of boils, and other plagues, in order to make thee an ex-
ample of a more conspicuous judgement.' But St. Paul, departing
from the Greek Bible, uses a word ' raised thee up,' which in
Pharaoh's case, or in that of Cyrus, means to bring upon the
stage of history. Isa. xli. 2 ; cf. Jer. 1. [xxvii in the Greek] 41 ;
Hab. i. 6.

a See Matt. xiii. 14, 15 ; Mark iv. 12 ; John xii. 40.

God's liberty to choose and reject 39

of a particular point of view ; and, apparently
indifferent to being misunderstood, substantiates
his argument upon the particular aspect which
he has taken apart from the whole matter in
hand, till it is done with, and then other points
can be taken in their turn. And he does not, as
a modern writer would do, painfully correlate
the various aspects of the subject 1 .

By means of the famous simile of the potter
St. Paul asserts two principles about God :
(i) that God is free, and condescends to give
no account to His creatures, in absolutely deter-
mining the high or low vocations of men. To
one man or nation He gives five talents, to
another two, to another one. He makes vessels
to honourable and vessels to (comparatively)
dishonourable uses. He makes men Jews or
Assyrians, Englishmen or Hottentots, at His
absolute discretion. (2) That God is absolutely
free, when the human material which He is
moulding for His purposes proves intractable,
to repudiate and reject what has, by its refusal
to mould, become a * vessel of wrath J fit ' to be
taken and destroyed.' And it is only by a
voluntary limitation of this freedom that He
exhibits long toleration with the intractable and

1 Cf. vol. i. p. 75.

40 The Epistle to the Romans

obstinate, and is longsuffering with them even
when His wrath is ready and waiting to show
itself. These are the two distinct points in the
simile of the potter. We must distinguish care-
fully between the 'vessels destined for dishonour*
the ' less honourable limbs ' of humanity and
the ' vessels of wrath/ or ' vessels fitted for
destruction/ i. e. those which have proved them-
selves unfit for the vocation to which they were
destined and have to be rejected. We note that
St. Paul does not say that God fitted vessels for
destruction, but that He bore long with those
which had so become fitted. St. Paul never gives
us any real justification if we look at his lan-
guage carefully for the idea of any predestina-
tion to rejection, as distinct from predestination
to higher or lower purposes. And the New
Testament is full of assurances that a pre-
destination to a low vocation in this world may
be a predestination to high glory in eternity, if
the humble calling is faithfully followed.

It ought not to be denied, however, that in all
this passage St. Paul's feet, as he moves along
his argument, are dogged by the metaphysical
difficulty of finding room for human free-will
inside the universal scope of the divine action
and the prescience of the divine wisdom. This

God's liberty to choose and reject 41

is a perennial difficulty. But St. Paul does not
touch it. He does not even touch the question
of whether God does actually (in our sense)
foreknow the final destiny of every individual,
and how he will act on each occasion * ; he does
not touch the question how or how far human
\vilfulness can be allowed to disturb the divine
order. In the Pharisaic schools' he would cer-
tainly have been brought up, as Josephus tells
us, both to ' attribute everything to fate and
God/ and also to recognize that it 'lay with
men for the most part to do right or wrong ' :
to believe that 'everything was foreseen/ and
also that 'free-will was given'; or, as Josephus
elsewhere puts it (as if it made no difference), to
believe 'that some things, but not all, are the
work of fate, and other things are in men's own
power and need not happen 2 / That is to say,
he would have been educated to believe both
in predestination and in freedom, without any

1 On the meaning of divine foreknowledge in St. Paul see
vol. i. p. 317.

8 See Joseph. Antiq. xiii. 5, 9 ; xviii. i, 3 ; Bell Jud. ii. 8, 14.
Cf. Schurer, Jewish People (English trans.), Div. ii. vol. ii. pp. 14 ff. ;
James and Ryle, Ps. of Solomon, p. 96. The Essenes, Josephus
says, believed in fate, and not in free-will ; the Sadducees in free-
will and not in fate ; but the Pharisees in both. No doubt
Josephus is importing Greek philosophical views into his account
of Jewish parties, but substantially his account is probably true.

42 The Epistle to the Romans

special attempt to reconcile the two. We can
tell for certain that this inherited belief was
further moralized in St. Paul's case by his
enlarged view of the divine purpose as working
through high and low estates alike, for the final
good of all men ; and by his deepened percep-
tion of the correspondence with God's purpose,
which, in the exercise of our freedom, is required
of us. But, so far as we know, St. Paul left the
strictly metaphysical question exactly where he
found it as an imperfectly reconciled antithesis.
And there perhaps we men shall always have to
leave it, or at least till we come to know even as
we are known.

In the quotations from the Old Testament,
with which the section concludes, we notice
that St. Paul varies the original application of
the passages from Hosea. In the prophet they
refer to the recovery of dejected and dishonoured
Israel, while the apostle applies them to the
exaltation of the Gentiles from their low estate.
As is often the case, while other passages in the
prophets were there to prove exactly what he
wanted *, St. Paul takes the words which come

1 e. g. Isa. xix. 24 ; Ezek. xvi. 55. (The exaltation into the
fellowship of the chosen people of Egypt, Assyria, Sodom, and
Samaria.)

God's liberty to choose and reject 43

into his mind with a considerable latitude of
application, and without any critical argument.
Thus, if he makes somewhat free with the
particular texts, it is in order to vindicate the
real teaching of the Old Testament. He has,
if not exact criticism, what is much better,
profound spiritual insight.

The passages quoted from Isaiah are charac-
teristic and central. This great prophet first
clearly perceived that most striking law of
human history that progress comes, not mostly
through the majority of a nation, but through
the faithful remnant. It is the few best through
whom alone God can freely work. It is the
best who in the long run determine the moral
level of the nation, and either keep the mass of
men around them from corruption, or, if that is
impossible, provide a fresh point of departure
and hope in a society now inevitably, as a whole,
hastening to decay and judgement. 'As a
terebinth, and as an oak, whose stock remaineth,
when they are felled ; so the' holy seed is the
stock thereof 1 .'

1 Isa. vi. 13.

44 The Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION IV. 3. CHAPTER IX. 3 o-X. 21.

Lack of faith the reason of Israel's rejection.

WHAT is to be our conclusion then ? That
Gentiles, men beyond the pale of God's
covenant, who made no pretension of pursu-
ing righteousness, all at once laid hold on
righteousness and made it their own, simply
by accepting in faith the divine offer which
came their way; while Israel, the chosen
people, devoted to pursuing a law of righteous-
ness, never caught up with that of which it was
in pursuit. The result seems strange enough.
But the reason of it is apparent. Israel 1 had
been put under a divine election, which required
of them the open ear, the responsive will, of
faith. But instead of cultivating this temper
of faith, they fastened upon the specified obser-

1 I have endeavoured sometimes in this analysis to expand
what St. Paul means by ( pursuing righteousness,' by ' works' and
by ' faith/ in accordance with the meaning already assigned to
these words ; see vol. i. pp. 7-24.

Israel rejected for lack of faith 45

vances of the Mosaic law, and blindly adhered
to them, as if God had nothing deeper or greater
to teach them, and they had nothing deeper or
greater to receive. Thus, when the Christ
came, with His completer light and claims, they
would not have Him. They wanted nothing
further, nothing more than they were accus-
tomed to. And thus Isaiah's prophecy was
fulfilled, that the Christ, the tried foundation
stone, the destined security of all who should
believe in Him, would turn out to be a stone at
which the chosen people should stumble, and
a rock on which it should meet disaster 1 (ix.

30-33).

And here is the pathos of the situation. Here
is what puts passion into St. Paul's desire and
his prayer for Israel's entrance into the great
deliverance. It is that they have such a real
zeal for God, though without any spiritual
insight to guide it. A real zeal for God! of
that St. Paul's own experience qualified him to
testify. But in what sense without insight ? In
the sense that with Jesus of Nazareth there
appeared a divine righteousness, which God
was communicating to men 2 ; but the Jews, pre-

1 Isa. viii. 14; xxviii. 16. Cf. Matt. xi. 6.
3 See above, vol. i. p. 17.

46 The Epistle to the Romans

occupied with maintaining a standard of right-
eousness which they had taken for their own
which had become identified, that is to say, with
their own self-satisfaction and pride of privilege
and independence of interference failed to per-
ceive the divine purpose, and, in fact, refused
to submit themselves to it. For that principle
of law which the Jews had come to regard as
God's final word, He really intended only as
a temporary discipline to be brought to an end
by the coming of the Christ, and by the dis-
closure of the real righteousness which, in
Christ, God should offer and man should simply
accept in faith. Law and faith are in sharp
and intelligible contrast. Under the law of
works a man, as Moses says 1 , stands to pre-
serve his life (or save his soul) according as he
performs the specified requirements (as if man
were an independent being who could thus
stand over against God on his merits). But faith,
attributing nothing to itself, simply accepts
the offer of God, the divine message of com-
passion brought near to it. Moses of old told
the Israelites 2 that the commandment was not

1 Levit. xviii. 5.

2 Deut. xxx. 11-14. I have italicized the words substantially
reproduced by St. Paul, but I have quoted the whole passage
because its whole meaning is in his mind.

Israel rejected for lack of faith 47

too hard for them, neither was it far off. // was
not in heaven, that they should say, who shall go
up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and
make us to hear it, that we may do it ? Neither
was it beyond the sea, that they should say, who
shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us,
and make us to hear it that we may do it? But
the word was very nigh unto them, in their mouth
and in their heart, that they might do it. These
words really describe the character of the
Christian message of faith, of which the apostles
are the heralds. Truly there is no need for the
believer in Jesus to seek some one to scale
heaven to reach a remote God, for Christ is
come down. Or to descend into the abyss to
seek a Christ dead and lost, for Christ is
risen. The great deliverance is offered to us
on very easy terms. A man has only openly to
confess that the human Jesus is really the
divine Lord, and heartily to believe that God
raised Him from the dead. Let him heartily
accept that message, and the fellowship in the
divine righteousness is his. Let him publicly
confess that creed, and the great salvation is
open to him. It is the old teaching of Isaiah l
if a man but believe (in the Christ) there is no

1 Isa. xxviii. 16.

48 The Epistle to the Romans

fear of his being put to shame. And here Jews
and Greeks are all on the same level of need
and opportunity. -There is over all the same
Lord Christ, with the same inexhaustible good
will towards all who simply call on Him.
Again the old scripture testifies that it is every
one who calls on the name of the Lord who
shall be saved 1 . The conditions then are very
simple. To call on the Lord, we may say, men
must believe in Him. To have the opportunity
of believing on Him, they must have heard
about Him. To hear about Him, they need one
to speak in His name. And how can men
speak in the name of God except as His
apostles, as men commissioned and sent from
Him ? And these terms we know well enough
have all been fulfilled. The commissioned
heralds of the good tidings of God have gone
forth, so that all men may hear and believe and
call out to God. Truly Isaiah's vision of the
welcome preacher of good tidings 2 is realized
to-day (x. 1-15).

Now we have clear before us the simplicity of
the gospel, the message to faith. And we have
before us the plain fact that the Israelitish
people, preoccupied with their own temporary

1 Joel ii. 32. a Isa. Hi. 7.

Israel rejected for lack of faith 49

and misunderstood standard of the law, have
not generally accepted it. But this is no more
than Isaiah led us to expect. ' Lord/ he cries,
' who gave credence to our message * ? ' (Faith,
you see, according to the prophet, requires just
a listening to a divine message ; and this
message has come to men by the preaching
about Christ.) And can it be pleaded that the
Jews have not had the opportunity of hearing
the message ? No, truly, as the Psalmist says,
the voice of God's messengers has gone over
all the earth, and their words to the end of the
inhabited world 2 . Or can it be said that Israel
did not know that a preaching to the Gentiles
was to be looked for? No, a succession of
warnings had reached them. Thus Moses
foretold that it should be a nation which (reli-
giously speaking) was no nation, a people
without understanding, that God would use to
provoke His people to jealousy, and stimulate
their emulation 3 . Again, Isaiah uses startling
words, and declares that God has been dis-
covered by those who never sought Him, and
revealed to those who never asked for Him 4
that is the Gentiles. But the words of Isaiah

1 Isa. liii. i. a Ps. xix. 4.

' Deut. xxxii. ai. * Isa. Ixv. i, 2.

II. F

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

50 The Epistle to the Romans

that follow describe truly the relation of God and
Israel. God has tenderly and persistently been
offering His love. to them, but they have proved
themselves only rebellious and full of contradic-
tion (x. 16-21).

This, then, is the plain summary. Israel is
rejected because, after every offer, and with
every opportunity, they have refused God's
leading, refused to be docile, refused to believe,
refused to obey.

What shall we say then ? That the Gentiles, which
followed not after righteousness, attained to righteous-
ness, even the righteousness which is of faith : but Israel,
following after a law of righteousness, did not arrive at
that law. Wherefore ? Because they sought it not by
faith, but as it were by works. They stumbled at the
stone of stumbling ; even as it is written,

Behold, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock

of offence :

And he that believeth on him shall not be put to
shame.

Brethren, my heart's desire and my supplication to
God is for them, that they may be saved. For I bear
them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not
according to knowledge. For being ignorant of God's
righteousness, and seeking to establish their own. they
did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.
For Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to
every one that believeth. For Moses writeth that the
man that doeth the righteousness which is of the law
shall live thereby. But the righteousness which is of

Israel rejected for lack of faith 51

faith saith thus, Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend
into heaven ? (that is, to bring Christ down :) or, Who
shall descend into the abyss ? (that is, to bring Christ up
from the dead.) But what saith it ? The word is nigh
thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart : that is, the word of
faith, which we preach : because if thou shalt confess
with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thy
heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be
saved : for with the heart man believeth unto righteous-
ness ; and with the mouth confession is made unto salva-
tion. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on
him shall not be put to shame. For there is no distinction
between Jew and Greek : for the same Lord is Lord of
all, and is rich unto all that call upon him : for, Whoso-
ever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
How then shall they call on him in whom they have not
believed ? and how shall they believe in him whom they
have not heard ? and how shall they hear without a
preacher? and how shall they preach, except they be
sent ? even as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of
them that bring glad tidings of good things !

But they did not all hearken to the glad tidings. For
Isaiah saith, Lord, who hath believed our report ? So
belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the word of
Christ. But I say, Did they not hear ? Yea, verily,

Their sound went out into all the earth,

And their words unto the ends of the world.
But I say, Did Israel not know ? First Moses saith,

I will provoke you to jealousy with that which is no
nation,

With a nation void of understanding will I anger you.
And Isaiah is very bold, and saith,

I was found of them that sought me not ;

I became manifest unto them that asked not of me.

E 2

52 The Epistle to the Romans

But as to Israel he saith, All the day long did I spread
out my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people.

In this passage St. Paul gives us the other
side of the question of the rejection of the
Israelites. God had retained an absolute free-
dom, not to be questioned by men, to reject
whom He willed. That was the first point.
But can we see whom our God wills to reject,
or why in particular He rejected (though not
finally, as will appear) the chosen people ? It
is because they failed in faith. And faith is
precisely that which is necessary to maintain
correspondence with God it is the faculty of
fellowship with Him. They failed because the
false principle of justification by works had
obscured in their minds the need and meaning
of faith. The false principle meant, as we
have already seen, the maintaining an accepted
standard of conduct and divine service,
especially in outward matters, and for the rest
claiming to be left alone. The accepted stan-
dard was that which distinguished Israel from
the rest of the world, and what they had be-
come accustomed to. It was a righteousness of
'their own/ They prided themselves on it.
Their public opinion required its observance.
It had come to usurp the place of any direct

Israel rejected for lack of faith 53

relationship to the voice of God. They had no
idea that God could have anything more or
deeper to require of them. They had lost
personal touch with Him. Therefore seeking
to establish this, their own righteousness, they
failed to submit themselves to the (now newly
revealed) righteousness of God in Christ. This
unprogressiveness of the Jewish ideal, this sub-
stitution of the accepted standard under the
law for the word of God, on the part of the
Pharisees, the religious representatives of Israel,
is precisely what the pages of the Gospel
record. Therefore the * corner stone of sure
foundation' for the divine building became to
them the stone on which they stumbled and fell.
And yet that the law was a temporary expedient,
and not the whole counsel of God, was the
deepest witness of the Old Testament; and
in being false to the further revelation of the
will of God in Christ, they were false to their
own deepest principles. All this ground we
have gone over already, and need not traverse
again *.

So also we have already become familiar
with the simplicity of the message of God in
Christ, and the simplicity of the faith which,

1 See vol. i. pp. 7 ff., 165 f., 250 ff.

54 The Epistle to the Romans

rooted in the consciousness of sin and need,
and equally possible for all men who can
share this consciousness, is required to wel-
come God's offer, and so be brought by
Christ into living union with Him. All this
St. Paul has already elaborated, and is here only
resuming and recapitulating by the way. But
one or two points in the recapitulation require
notice.

i. St. Paul takes the basis of his statement
of the principle of grace and faith out of the
heart of the books of Moses the idea of the
1 word very nigh thee/ of the simple message
claiming only to be simply accepted, and of the
' very present help ' of a gracious God needing
only to be welcomed. The fact is that St. Paul
usually idealizes when he treats of ' the law of
Moses'; as, for example, when he here says
that ' Moses writeth that the man that doeth the
righteousness . . . shall live thereby/ as if that
was all that Moses said. The principle of law, as
Saul the Pharisee had learned to understand it, is
the dominant principle in the five Books of the
Law, but not the only one. ' Grace, already exist-
ing in the Jewish theocracy, was the fruitful germ
deposited under the surface, which was one day
to burst forth and become the peculiar character

Israel rejected for lack of faith 55

of the new covenant V The God of the new
covenant is the God also of the old, and was
there already intimating His truer and deeper
character. To this St. Paul bears witness by
resting his statement of the principle of the new
covenant upon the words of the old.

2. In this passage we have the germ of what
we call the creed. The lordship of Jesus, in
the sense which implies His proper divinity, and
His resurrection and triumph over death was
already matter of public confession in the
Christian church : to make profession that
'Jesus is Lord' qualified for 'the salvation' 2 :
and in this lay hid all that is essential to the
Christian creed. Already then in the earliest
church subjective faith involved a certain objec-
tive and public creed 3 which came very soon to
be called ' the faith/ In this passage also, as in
xiv. 9 and in St. Peter's epistle, we recognize, as
an element in the common tradition, the belief
in the Descent into Hades (the abyss).

3. St. Paul incidentally shows us his instinc-

1 Godet in he.

a Cf. i Cor. xii. 3. The lordship of Jesus, we see in this passage,
means that He can have applied to Him the sayings of the Old
Testament about the Lord Jehovah ; and can be ' called upon' as
such in prayer (Joel ii. 32).

3 Cf. i Cor. xv. 1-3.

56 The Epistle to the Romans

tive feeling that to be a trustworthy ambassador
for God one needs ' apostolate.' ' How shall
they preach except they be sent!' And this
apostolate, as he uses it, means not only an
inward sense of mission, but an external sending
by Christ Himself; and in pursuance of the
same principle, when once the Church has been
established, it would mean a sending by those
authorized to send in His name. This is the
root principle of the Christian 'stewardship/
As the subapostolic Clement expresses it, ' Christ
(was sent) from God, and the apostles from
Christ. Each came in due order from the will
of God. Therefore, having received the words
of command, and having been fully convinced
by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and been assured in the message of God with
conviction of the Holy Ghost, they came forth,
preaching the gospel that the kingdom of God
was to come. Therefore as they preached in
country and towns they established their first-
fruits, when they had put them to the proof, to
be bishops (i. e. presbyters), and deacons of those
who were to come to the faith/ And afterwards,
in view of disputes over the presbyteral office,
which divine inspiration enabled them to antici-
pate, they made provision for a due succession

Israel rejected for lack of faith 57

in the ' episcopate ' on the death of those first
appointed 1 .

4. St. Paul's singularly free, but deeply in-
spired, manner of applying texts from the Old
Testament is especially illustrated in this
passage.

Thus the passages quoted from Isaiah about
the Stone, which St. Paul applies to Christ,
refer originally to Jehovah simply in one case
(Isa. viii. 14), and probably to His will and cove-
nant as the foundation of Israel's polity in the
other (Isa. xxviii. 16). Jewish tradition had
possibly already referred them to the Christ 2 ;
and certainly our Lord's use of Ps. cxviii. 22
'The stone which the builders rejected' as
applying to His own rejection, made the refer-
ence more obvious. It is indeed in deepest
accordance with the spirit of Isaiah : and
St. Peter (i Peter ii. 6), we notice, follows
St. Paul in the use of them. Another passage
(lii. 7) about ' the feet of those who preach good
tidings ' is transferred, with added meaning, from
the heralds of the redemption from Babylon,
to the heralds of the greater redemption. And
the opening of chapter Ixv, which originally
refers altogether to apostate Israel, is divided,

1 Clem, ad Cor. 42, 44. 2 See 5. and H. in foe.

58 The Epistle to the Romans

and applied in part to the Gentiles, in part to
the Jews. (Other passages in the prophets,
we should observe, would justify the former
application.) Again, a passage from Ps. xix is
transferred very beautifully from the witness of
the heavens to the witness of the Gospel ; as if
St. Paul would say grace is become as univer-
sal as nature. The language of a passage from
Deuteronomy, as we have seen, is taken from
the law to express the spirit of the gospel.
The calling upon Jehovah in Joel becomes in
St. Paul's quotation the calling upon Christ.
All this free citation, uncritical according to our
ideas and methods, yet rests upon a profoundly
right apprehension of the meaning of the Old
Testament as a whole. The appeal to the Old
Testament, even if not to the particular passage,
is justified by the strictest criticism.

But not all rejected, nor finally 59

DIVISION IV. 4. CHAPTER XL 1-12.

God's judgement on Israel neither universal
nor final.

BUT if Israel has thus by her own fault fallen
from her high estate, are we then to suppose
that God has simply rejected His own chosen
people ? Such a thought cannot be entertained.
How could it have been in the mind of such
an Israelite as St. Paul, one who came of
Abraham's genuine seed, and of the tribe which
held so fast by Judah ? No : the people on whom
from eternity God's eye rested, to mark them
out for Himself and for His purposes, assuredly
cannot, as a people, have been cast away \ What
has happened now is only what is recorded long
ago in the history of Elijah. Then, as now, a
general unfaithfulness in the bulk of the nation
concealed the existence of a faithful remnant.
Yet God had, as He assured the prophet,

1 Three times i Sam. xii. 22, Ps. xciv. 14, xcv. 3 (in the Greek)
the promise occurs ' The Lord will not cast away His people.'

60 The Epistle to the Romans

reserved for Himself such a remnant, and of
very considerable numbers. And now also such
a remnant of true Israelites exists in accordance
with the selective action of grace that is to say,
God's gratuitous and unmerited good will. Yes :
let there be no mistake about it ; their position
is due to nothing else than the original and
continuous action of God's grace; and grace
means God's absolutely gratuitous and unmerited
good will (which may therefore come upon Gen-
tiles equally with Jews). It excludes the idea of
these remnants owing their position to previous
merits, or of its being in any way God's response
to an antecedent claim l .

This then is what we have to recognize.
What Israel in bulk sought for (by way of its
supposed merit), that it did not get, but a select
remnant got it ; and upon the rest there fell that
judicial hardening that reversal of their true
relation to God which Moses and Isaiah already
discerned in the chosen people 2 : an abiding

1 The vocation and election which made Israel the chosen
people were absolutely of God. What distinguished the faithful
remnant from the bulk of the nation was simply that they had not
altogether failed in faith, so that the unchanging election was not
in their cases practically suspended, but God ' reserved them for
Himself.'

3 St. Paul refers chiefly to Isa. xxix. 10 the description of a
besotted people whose prophets are eyes that cannot see, and

But not all rejected, nor finally 61

stupor, and deafness, and blindness, with regard
to God's purpose and will for them. David too,
as God's righteous servant, demands, as a divine
requital upon his bitter and cruel enemies, that
their very abundance should betray them into
captivity and prove their stumblingblock ; that
their spiritual vision should be lost and their
backs bent downward to the ground. Which is
just what has happened to Israel through their
rejection of the Son of David.

The bulk of the people then has stumbled.
But we must not exaggerate what has happened.
As it is not all of them who have stumbled, so
also it is not for ever. Their stumbling is not
equivalent to a final fall. Already we can per-
ceive how it may be reversed. The refusal of
the Jews to recognize the Christ has been the
occasion for a turning to the Gentiles. Thus
the salvation of the Christ has come to them.
And this has happened in the divine providence
in order that, as Moses anticipated, they may
in their turn provoke the Jews to jealousy to
a jealous determination not to lose their old

their seers ears that cannot hear ; so that the word of God has
become as a sealed book ; cf. also Isa. vi. 9. But there is a similar
passage in Deut. xxix. 4, which partly moulds his language, and
supplies the words * unto this day.'

62 The Epistle to the Romans

privileges. Thus if even the transgression of
Israel has proved the occasion for enriching
the world as a whole, if even the deficiency of
Israel (leaving vacant space, as it were, in the
Church) has proved the occasion for enriching
the Gentiles, how much more enrichment is to be
expected when the chosen people are recovered
in their full number ?

I say then, Did God cast off his people ? God forbid.
For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the
tribe of Benjamin. God did not cast off his people which
he foreknew. Or wot ye not what the scripture saith of
Elijah * ? how he pleadeth with God against Israel, Lord,
they have killed thy prophets, they have digged down
thine altars : and I am left alone, and they seek my life.
But what saith the answer of God unto him ? I have left
for myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the
knee to Baal. Even so then at this present time also
there is a remnant according to the election of grace.
But if it is by grace, it is no more of works : otherwise
grace is no more grace. What then ? That which Israel
seeketh for, that he obtained not; but the election ob-
tained it, and the rest were hardened : according as it is
written, God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that they
should not see, and ears that they should not hear, unto
this very day. And David saith,

Let their table be made a snare, and a trap,

And a stumblingblock, and a recompense unto them:

1 Rather, as margin, in Elijah, i.e. the passage of Scripture
about Elijah.

But not all rejected, nor finally 63

Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see,

And bow thou down their back alway.
I say then, Did they stumble that they might fall ? God
forbid : but by their fall salvation is come unto the Gen-
tiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. Now if their fall
is the riches of the world, and their loss the riches of the
Gentiles ; how much more their fulness ?

i. We learn a little more exactly about
St. Paul's doctrine of election in this chapter.
God's final purpose for good is, as we shall
see at the end of the chapter and in what
sense we shall have to consider upon all men
whatsoever. But this universal purpose is
worked out through special ' elect ' instruments.
Thus God recognized 1 Israel beforehand, i. e. in
His eternal counsels, as the people to bear
His name in the world. This was the selection
of Israel, and was an act of which the initiative
was wholly on God's side. It was a pure act
of the divine favour. This ' selection of grace '
was upon Israel as a whole, but at later stages
of the history, frequently enough, owing to the
disobedience and apostasy of the majority, it is
found to rest in an effective sense only upon
a 'remnant' whom God has reserved for Him-
self, because they have not utterly refused to

1 This to recognize or mark out beforehand is the meaning
of divine 'foreknowing' in St. Paul. See vol. i. pp. 317 f.

64 The Epistle to the Romans

correspond to the original and continuous call
of the divine grace. For the rest their privileges
become the occasion of their fall : their light
becomes their darkness. For judgement always
and inevitably waits upon any form of misused
privilege. Thus, when the Christ came, only an
elect remnant of the nation welcomed Him. The
rest fell under judgement. But God overrules
even this apostasy. He takes the opportunity
of the absence of those who should have been
at the marriage supper of the king's son, to
fill the great vacancy from the Gentile world.
They are brought within the scope of the
selecting call. But God's original vocation is
still irrevocably upon apostate Israel. The
new Gentile converts are to stimulate them to
recover their lost privileges. Their wilfulness
and obstinacy is to give place to humility and
faith; and Jew and Gentile all together are
to constitute the elect catholic church.

This is very simple and cheerful teaching.
It leaves for us to consider later the question
whether God's original and special vocation
resting upon the Jews is finally to constrain
them all to conversion, and whether in the same
way His ultimate purpose of salvation for all
men is to take place infallibly in all cases. This

But not all rejected, nor finally 65

question is still to be considered. But at any
rate the doctrine of election has lost all that
gave it a colouring of arbitrariness and injustice
and narrow sympathies.

We ought to notice in the above passage how
St. Paul, in recalling the continual obstinacy and
hardening of the majority of the chosen people,
is following on the lines of St. Stephen's speech
(Acts vii. 51).

2. The imprecatory psalms are, especially in
our Anglican public services, a great stumbling-
block to many especially the 6gth (here cited
by St. Paul) and the logth. These psalms do
not represent barely the cry of an individual
sufferer invoking God's curse upon his private
enemies. The sufferer, who is the psalmist,
or with whom at least the psalmist identi-
fies himself, represents afflicted righteousness.
It is God's people, His 'servant* and 'son*
according to the language of the Old Testa-
ment, that is under persecution from the
enemies of God. And he calls upon God to
vindicate Himself by punishing the adversary;
to let it be seen that His word and promise- is
truth. ' How long, O God, holy and true, dost
thou not judge and avenge?' Even from this
point of view, however, when with the assistance

II. F

66 The Epistle to the Romans

of the modern critics we have in the main purged
away the element of private vindictiveness, these
psalms no doubfc remain with the stamp of
narrowness and bitterness upon them. They
have none of the larger New Testament sense
that the worst enemies of the Church may be
converted and live : that our attitude towards all
men is to wish them good, purely good and
not evil, even though it be under the form of
judgement: ' Rejoice when men revile you and
persecute you'; 'Bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you, pray for them
which despitefully use you ' ; ' That by your
good works which they shall behold, they may
glorify God in the day of visitation/

But granted the limitation and bitterness still
remaining in these psalms, their citation in
the New Testament shows us what is for us
the right use of them. They are by implica-
tion taken up where we should least expect
them into the mouth of the Son of Man 1 .
That is to say, it is His enemies on whom the
judgements are imprecated. There is a wrath
of the Lamb. There is a divine sword of judge-
ment which proceeds out of His mouth. He,
the administrator of the righteousness of God,

1 Both in this passage and in Acts i. 20.

But not all rejected, nor finally 67

expects from His Father judgement on His
enemies. It is not necessarily, as St. Paul
here indicates, final judgement : the judgement
upon the Jews was not yet that; but judge-
ment of some sort temporal or final upon
His wilful adversaries, the Son expects of the
Father. And we men, as we repeat these
psalms, are, like the first Christians in face
of the suicide of Judas, to identify ourselves
with the divine righteousness and accept the
law of just retribution. This is the deepest and
truest sense in which we can still say the impre-
catory psalms ; and in these days of a philan-
thropy that often lacks the stem savour of
righteousness, it is very necessary that we
should make this sense our own.

F 2

68 The Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION IV. s 1 . CHAPTER XL 13-36.

God's present purpose for the Jews through the
Gentiles : and so for all humanity.

ST. PAUL would not have it supposed that,
in his zeal for the recovery of Israel, he was
proving faithless to his vocation as the apostle
of the Gentiles. On the contrary, he explains
(assuming the Roman Christians to be Gentiles
in the mass) that he is, by this very zeal, fulfilling
that vocation. The conversion of the Gentiles
was meant to react as a stimulus on the Jews.
When St, Paul magnifies his Gentile ministry,
he does so always with the motive of stinging
the jealousy of his own people, and so bringing
some of them to salvation. How can such a
consummation be too eagerly desired? For if
even so pitiable an event as their rejection has
yet, in God's providence, been overruled for

1 I follow, by preference, the paragraphs of the R.V., unless
there is very strong reason to the contrary.

A purpose of love for all mankind 69

a good end the bringing back of the outside
world into the fellowship of God 1 : can we
doubt that so happy an event as their recovery
would be indeed (what Ezekiel saw in vision
in the valley of the dry bones) a veritable
resurrection? For the consecration of God is
still upon them. The holy (i.e. consecrated)
people they still remain. As the 'heave offer-
ing ' of the ' first of the dough ' 2 consecrates the
whole lump, so the first of the nation offered to
God Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have conse-
crated the whole nation. The holiness of the
root of God's olive tree 3 has passed to the latest
branches. It is quite true that some of these
branches of the Jewish olive tree were broken
off, and that the Gentiles were introduced in
their place ; like a wild olive grafted upon the
root of a cultivated plant, and so sharing its rich
sap. But that to let the metaphor continue
gives the wild olive no ground for an insolent
contempt of the branches which naturally be-
longed to the tree. What advantage it now
has it wholly derives from that which it is

1 Cf 2 Cor. v. 19, * God was in Christ reconciling the world
unto Himself.'

2 Num. xv. 20, 21.

3 ' The Lord called thy name A green olive tree.' Jer. xi. 16 ;
Hos. xiv. 6.

yo The Epistle to the Romans

affecting to despise. It is the root that supports
it, not it the root. And are the Gentiles dis-
posed to argue * that these rejected Jewish
branches were broken off in order that they
might take their place ; and that they, the
Gentiles, are thus plainly preferred by God
to the Jews? The answer is plain. Why were
they broken off? Because they would not main-
tain the correspondence of faith with the purpose
of God; and it is simply by maintaining this
attitude that the newly introduced Gentiles can
hope to retain their place. They had better
exhibit, not a groundless pride, but a reasonable
fear. Is God likely to be more sparing towards
them than towards His first chosen? God has
displayed before their eyes both His attributes
of severity and goodness, and they must take
note of both. At the present moment it is
severity towards Jews, goodness towards Gen-
tiles. Yes, goodness towards Gentiles ; but so
long only as they abide faithfully in His good-
ness, no longer. When they fail of faithfulness,
they too, like their Jewish predecessors, shall
be cut off. And, on the other hand, when those
Jews change their attitude, and their hardness
melts and faith returns, they shall be recovered
and reingrafted into the old olive tree. If God

A purpose of love for all mankind 71

could graft into it branches cut out of an alien
and inferior stock, how much more easily can
He reingraft into it what is really part of its
very self?

Here then we have a real disclosure of a
divine secret 1 , to which the Gentiles would do
well to keep their eyes open, lest (like the Jews
before them) they mistake for wisdom their own
self-conceit. The hardening of the Jews has
been used by God as an opportunity for the
gathering in of the full number of the nations of
the earth ; and that with the further purpose
that, when the nations are gathered in, Israel in
all its completeness should be recovered too.
And so shall be fulfilled Isaiah's prophecy of
a redeemer from Zion, who should restore
Israel, and of a new covenant with them, based
on a fresh forgiveness of their sins 2 . Thus if
we think of the actual relation of the Jews to the
present preaching of the Gospel, we must think
of them as God's enemies, and as having by
their very enmity secured the Gentiles their
opportunity ; but if we think of them in relation

1 On ' mystery,' see Ephesians, p. 73. It means a divine secret
disclosed to the elect.

a Isa. lix. 20, according to the Greek, and xxvii. 9. Cf. Ezek.
xxxvi. 25, 26.

72 The Epistle to the Romans

to God's eternal choice, they still must appear
as sharing the divine love which rests on the
people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God's
gifts and vocation do not admit of being re-
pented of and recalled. Thus we know what to
expect. As the Gentiles passed out from dis-
obedience under the divine compassion through
the opportunity afforded by the disobedience of
the Jews ; so now the divine compassion which
rests on the Gentiles is intended (by stimulating
the Jews to recover their lost privileges) to
prove the means of recovering them too out of
their disobedience into the shelter of the divine
compassion which is the common heritage of all.
We see, in fact, all men in turn shut up in dis-
obedience to God, as in a prison house : it is
God who has so shut them up ; but it is done in
view of the largest and most compassionate
purpose which can be even conceived. It is done
that (when men have become wearied of their
own wilfulness, and have experienced their own
need) the divine mercy may welcome and
embrace all alike at last.

And if this is the purpose of God disclosed to
us, how can we fail to adore the fathomless
resourcefulness of His wisdom in determining
how to act, and His skill in executing what He

- A purpose of love for all mankind 73

has determined ? How can we fail to recognize
our utter incompetence to explore His judge-
ment, or track out His ways ? Like inspired
men of old * we must recognize that the absolute
initiative is His, and our only reasonable attitude
the humblest correspondence. Truly in counsel
and operation we have contributed to God
nothing of our own : we have no claim with
which to approach Him. He is the unique
source of whatever is, and the sole executor of
whatever takes place, and the only end to which
all things tend : and to Him, therefore, alone all
praise is due, and shall be given.

But I speak to you that are Gentiles. Inasmuch then
as I am an apostle of Gentiles, I glorify my ministry :
if by any means I may provoke to jealousy them that are
my flesh, and may save some of them. For if the casting
away of them 15 the reconciling of the world, what shall
the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? And
if the firstfruit is holy, so is the lump : and if the root
is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches
were broken off, and thou, being a wild olive, wast grafted
in among them, and didst become partaker with them of
the root of the fatness of the olive tree ; glory not over
the branches : but if thou gloriest, it is not thou that bear-
est the root, but the root thee. Thou wilt say then,
Branches were broken off, that I might be grafted in.
Well ; by their unbelief they were broken off, and thou
standest by thy faith. Be not highminded, but fear : for

1 Isa. xl. 13. Cf. Job xxxviii. 4; xli. n ; Wisd. ix. 13.

74 The Epistle to the Romans

if God spared not the natural branches, neither will he
spare thee. Behold then the goodness and severity of
God: toward them, that fell, severity; but toward thee,
God's goodness, if thou continue in his goodness : other-
wise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they
continue not in their unbelief, shall be grafted in : for
God is able to graft them in again. For if thou wast cut
out of that which is by nature a wild olive tree, and wast
grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree : how
much more shall these, which are the natural branches,
be grafted into their own olive tree ?

For I would not, brethren, have you ignorant of this
mystery, lest ye be wise in your own conceits, that
a hardening in part hath befallen Israel, until the fulness
of the Gentiles be come in; and so all Israel shall be
saved, even as it is written,

There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer ;

He shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob :

And this is my covenant unto them,

When I shall take away their sins.

As touching the gospel, they are enemies for your sake :
but as touching the election, they are beloved for the
fathers' sake. For the gifts and the calling of God are
without repentance. For as ye in time past were dis-
obedient to God, but now have obtained mercy by their
disobedience, even so have these also now been disobe-
dient, that by the mercy shewn to you they also may now r
obtain mercy. For God hath shut up all unto disobedience,
that he might have mercy upon all.

O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the
knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements,
and his ways past tracing out ! For who hath known the
mind of the Lord ? or who hath been his counsellor ? or
who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed

A purpose of love for all mankind 75

unto him again ? For of him, and through him, and unto
him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.

i. There is a true patriotism which must at
times be content to wear the guise of disloyalty ;
and not even Jeremiah 'weakening the hands
of the men of war 1 ' in the conflict with the power
of Babylon, while all the time his very heart
was bleeding for Jerusalem, presents a more
pathetic and moving picture of such patriotism
than does St. Paul as he here shows himself to
us. While he was shaking off the dust of his
feet, as he left the synagogues to turn to the
Gentiles, while he was throwing all his tre-
mendous energy into the apostolate of the
nations, and vindicating their cause, even to
fierceness, against the narrowness of his own
nation, all the time the thought which buoyed
him up was that when the catholic church had
become an established fact when it should
have become plain, even to Jewish eyes, that
the elect people of God is now a fraternity of all
nations, and not their own race only then it
could not fail to happen, that the members of
the ancient people, finding themselves in their
turn 'alienated,' 'strangers,' and 'far off/ while

1 Jer. xxxviii. 4.

76 The Epistle to the Romans

they knew so well, and needed so deeply, the
fellowship of the covenant, should be stimulated
to resume their former privileges. Surely
then at last Israel ' should remember her way
and be ashamed/ and 'receive* her Gentile
'sisters,' though they had been to her as ' Sodom
and Samaria/ and though they were now given
to her for 'daughters, but not by her covenant'-
not by any means on her own terms *. All the
time that St. Paul is fighting Judaism and vindi-
cating Catholicism, laying down the lines of the
great church of the nations, this is the vision that
cheers him an Israel, penitent, humbled, wor-
shipping the Christ whom she had crucified, and
therefore welcomed back again with the honour
due to her great memories and her inextinguish-
able vocation. But we notice by the way, as
throwing an unmistakable light on the cir-
cumstances of Roman Christianity, that while
St. Paul thus shows his own Jewish feeling, he
speaks to the Roman Christian as in the mass
Gentile 2 .

2. If so miserable an event, one so revolting
to the divine heart, as the apostasy of Israel,
had yet in the determinate counsel and fore-
knowledge of God been overruled so as to

1 Ezek. xvi. 61. 2 See above, vol. i. 3.

A purpose of love for all mankind 77

become the occasion for the calling of the
Gentiles, it must needs be, St. Paul argues,
that an event so dear to the heart of God as
the recovery of Israel, would have a result
even more blessed, nothing less than ' life from
the dead/ What does this last expression
mean ? Does St. Paul mean that when once
the chosen people was recovered into a really
catholic church, there would be no further
delay the consummation would be reached,
the resurrection of the dead which is to accom-
pany the (second) coming of the Christ would
take place at once? This thought would be
very natural to St. Paul, and thoroughly agree-
able to the old Messianic expectation ; and it
would give, as nothing else gives so well, the
needed climax to the sentence. Moreover it
cannot be said that the idea of the resurrection
was not intimately associated among Christians
with the return of the Christ in glory. But, on
the other hand, nowhere else does St. Paul speak
of ' the resurrection ' so absolutely and without
explanation as the goal of all things ; and, if he
had meant so to speak of it here, he would
surely have said ' the resurrection,' and not used
the vaguer expression ' life from the dead/ As
he has used this we must interpret it in terms

78 The Epistle to the Romans

of Ezekiel's vision 1 : the recovery of Israel
will be nothing less than a case of dead men
coming to life again, of dry bones revivified.
The only drawback to this interpretation is
what need not trouble us much the failure of
rhetorical climax. This revival of dead Israel
is hardly a greater thing than the reconciliation
of an alienated world. And, though it would
improve the rhetorical climax to interpret the
phrase as meaning that the whole catholic
church would have new life put into it by
Israel's recovery, and though we should expect
this idea to prove true, yet I do not think it is
natural to introduce it here.

3. St. Paul's language ' beloved for the
fathers' sake/ ' if the root be holy, so are the
branches' comes very close to the current
Jewish language about ' the merits of the
fathers/ and yet is deeply distinguished from it.
The Jews as represented in the Talmud and
the belief goes back to St. Paul's time 2
believed that no prayer was so effective as that
which was offered in the name of ' the fathers.'
Thus : ' How many prayers did Elijah speak on
Mount Carmel that fire might fall from heaven,
and he was not heard ; but when he mentioned

1 Ezek. xxxvii. 8 See my Ephesians, pp. 258 ff.

A purpose of love for all mankind 79

the name of the dead, and called Jehovah the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then at once
he was heard. So was it in the case of Moses.
When the Israelites had accomplished that bad
work, Moses stood up and spoke for their justi-
fication forty days and forty nights, and was not
heard. But when he mentioned the dead, he
was at once heard. . . . Therefore as the living
vine supports itself on a dead stock (i. e. grows
out of a stock dry and seemingly dead), so
Israel lives and supports itself on the fathers
since they are dead V The individual Israelite,
moreover, could supply his own deficiencies in
righteousness out of the treasury of merits
which belonged to him in virtue of his descent
from the common fathers of the race, or the
holy progenitors of his own family. In other
words the Israelites in various ways and senses
depended for salvation on having ' Abraham to
their father/ And it has already appeared
sufficiently how dangerous this belief was ; and
how utterly St. Paul, like Ezekiel 2 and John

1 Quoted, with much other illustrative matter, by Weber, I.e.
pp. 293 ff. The fancy is based on i Kings xix. 36 ; Exod. xxxii.
13. Cf. on Cant. i. 5, * I am black but comely ' ' The congrega-
tion of Israel speaks : I am black through mine own works, but
lovely through the works of my fathers.'

2 Ezek. xiv. 14.

8o The Epistle to the Romans

the Baptist before him, repudiated this idea of
genealogical and traditional merit as a ground
of confidence before God.

On the other hand, this belief in the transfer-
ence of merit was based on a true idea of the
organic unity of the race. The Jewish race was
bound up into one with its great progenitors ;
and it is these men who are its true representa-
tives. They show what their race can be and is
meant to be, and along what lines it is meant to
move. Their election and walk with God laid
a consecration on all who came after them ; as
St. Paul elsewhere says that the children of a
Christian parent in a mixed marriage are holy,
i. e. have a consecration laid upon them by their
partly Christian parentage 1 . The patriarchs
exhibit Israel as God means it to be. And God,
so to speak, cannot forget that every Israelite is
a child of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and
that in their faith and religion lies his possi-
bility and his glory.

Thus stated, the idea of the 'communion of
saints' in the Jewish race is nothing else than
a ground of hope, and a stimulus to recovery.
And the idea admits at once of being trans-
ferred to the catholic Israel, as in fact its Jewish

1 i Cor. vii. 14.

A purpose of love for all mankind 81

parody has, at certain periods, been only too fully
and fatally transferred. I say, the true idea
admits of being transferred. We belong to
the same body as the apostles and martyrs,
the virgins and saints, the Jewish patriarchs and
prophets also. Their possibilities are ours. Their
God is our God for ever and ever. And God
looks on us as in one body with them. We
too are beloved for these our fathers' sakes.
And they too, we cannot doubt, are conscious
of our fellowship with them, and if we are trying
to live in the same spirit with them, we must
believe, all the limitations of our knowledge
notwithstanding, that they are supporting and
helping us, as in Christ our sympathetic advo-
cates and allies.

4. The metaphor of the olive and the grafting
is intelligible enough without explanation. We
know how often the olive and the vine are taken
in the Old Testament and in other Jewish
writings as in the passage just quoted from
the Talmud for a symbol of Israel; we must
frankly recognize that St. Paul, apparently in
forgetfulness and not by design, accommodates
the physical process of grafting to its spiritual
counterpart ; for in physical fact, of course, the
ingrafted shoot (which represents the Gentiles),

II, G

82 The Epistle to the Romans

and not the stock upon which it is grafted (which
represents the Jews), would determine the cha-
racter and produce, of the tree : but when this is
once recognized it may be forgotten, and the
metaphor is as intelligible to us as if the physical
process of grafting were really as St. Paul
represents it.

5. As we read the words, 'And so all Israel
shall be saved/ we cannot help asking ourselves
Does St. Paul mean us to believe this of all
Israelites without exception, or even of Israel
in general with an absolute necessity ? I think
the answer should be a negative in both cases 1 .
Just above St. Paul says, looking at the matter
from the side of Israel, 'They also, if they continue
not in unbelief, shall be grafted in.' Here he is
looking at the matter from the side of God. It
lies in the divine purpose that the establishment
of the catholic church, and the experience of
alienation on the part of the Jews, should stimu-
late them to regain their ancient privileges on a
new basis ; ' and so/ looking at the matter from
the point of view of the divine intention, 'all
Israel shall be saved/ Just below, from the same
point of view, it is stated to be God's purpose

1 'All Israel,' in i Kings xii. i, 2 Chron. xii. i, Dan. ix. n,
means ' Israel in general.'

A purpose of love for all mankind 83

'to have mercy upon all men/ But, in inter-
preting this latter passage, we are doing violence
to what St. Paul says elsewhere with emphatic
distinctness, if we imagine that he asserts that
all individual men without exception shall ulti-
mately attain the end of their being and the
fellowship of God. In these passages, as else-
where, St. Paul looks at things from two points
of view, without attempting to present us with
a harmony of them. From one point of view
we have spread out before us the ' mystery/
or revealed secret of God, and discern the
purpose of His love working on, and finding its
opportunities even in the gravest moral disasters.
From the other point of view we detect human
wilfulness, able in a measure, but never com-
pletely or on the whole, to baffle and thwart the
divine purpose. St. Paul, I say, is content to
recognize both points of view, and not to hold
them in complete combination. He uses the
perception of the divine purpose in this case, the
recovery of the Jews as a motive for hope and
thankfulness and renewed energy ; but he does
not, apparently, ask himself the metaphysical
questions whether God foreknows how particular
individuals or groups of men will act, or, if we
must say that God does so foreknow how each

G 2

84 The Epistle to the Romans

man will act, how this is reconcilable with his
moral freedom. He is content to adore the
divine purpose, and rest upon it ; and recognize,
on the other hand, the thwarting power of human
wilfulness.

From the point of view of God's patiently
loving purpose, then, a great and fresh oppor-
tunity is being prepared for the recovery of the
whole of Israel, when * the times of the Gentiles '
are fulfilled and the Church stands really catholic
before their eyes. Just in the same way, in the
larger field of all mankind, the purpose of God
is at work through all rejections, and all judge-
ments of hardening, to convince all men of their
need of God, and so prepare their hearts 'that
he might have mercy upon all/ But from the
other point of view God respects human freedom.
Thus over against the divine purpose stands the
ambiguous human 'if 'if they continue not in
their unbelief/

This ambiguous human element is a prominent
feature in Old Testament prophecy, though there
too the thwarting power of man's perverseness
is limited. If not in one way then in another,
if not through one set of agents then through
others on the whole the purpose of God finds
its sure way to accomplishment.

Retrospect over the argument 85

And now that we have given all the pains we
can to entering into the spirit of these chapters,
may we not say that they have become no longer
repellent but deeply attractive? Where could
we find a more liberating outlook over the wide
purpose of God in redeeming the world ? Sin is
a stern fact, and demands stern dealing to over-
come it by moral discipline. Men of all sorts
must be brought to realize their need of God,
utterly to expel the false dream of independence,
and humbly to welcome the unmerited bounty
of the divine ' mercy,' the free gift of pardon and
new life. This then is the way in which the
fundamental purpose of God for man shows
itself in a world of sin ; it is by a discipline
preparing men to welcome a divine mercy of
which they have learnt to know their need.
' That he may have mercy upon all ' this is the
generous end upon which all the divine dealings
with men converge. The Jews by one kind of
discipline while they still were standing together
as the elect people of God, and by another when,
having rejected the Christ and fallen out of their
religious leadership, they were to be stirred to

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

86 The Epistle to the Romans

jealousy by the spectacle of a divine fellowship
from which they were excluded: the Gentiles
by a different sort of discipline, and each separate
race by its own ; nay more, every individual,
Jew and Greek, Englishman or Hindoo, by a
distinctive personal chastening, in as many ways
as man is various and God is resourceful : all
men are so to be dealt with as that all men
shall be brought to confess themselves to be
as they are in God's sight, and surrender them-
selves to Him to be refashioned after the divine
image. Through all national and personal voca-
tions realized, by which human character is
educated: through all national and personal
humiliations, which are divine judgements by
which human character is corrected and made
docile : God's untiring patience and forbearance,
in sternness and in love, works on to the one
universal end that He might have mercy upon
all. The uttermost and most pitiable collapse,
even the imminence of death itself, may be, nay
certainly in God's intention is, His remedy for
human wilfulness : a means by which

1 God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain, which must not be 1 .'

1 These words (which in their full sense seem to go beyond
what we have a right to say) occur in Browning's Ring and the

Retrospect over the argument 87

must not be, that is, so far as the resourceful-
ness of divine love, going all lengths short of
destroying the fundamental moral choice of the
soul, can avail to prevent it. This teaching of
St. Paul suggests a wonderful way of reading
human history, and inspires us with the right
sort of patience and hopefulness in our attitude
towards the wider problems of missionary work
and our own dealings with individuals. The
races to whose conversion we would fain minister
seem so immovable and so indifferent. The
men and women whom we would fain help seem
so hardened or so weak. But 'the gifts and
callings of God' within them and about them,
'are without repentance/ God's remedies for
them are not yet exhausted. We therefore have
a right to hope and labour on, ' never despairing 1 /
And where is a nobler presentation to be
found than here of the idea of divine election ?
That in the great household of the world there
are magnificent and (comparatively, at least) igno-
minious vocations among races and individuals ;

Book. It is the Pope's final reflection, when he condemns Guido
to death, that his execution may be the one chance for his spiritual
recovery

' In the main criminal I see no chance
Except in such a suddenness of fate.'
1 Luke vi. 35, or ' despairing of no man,' marg. R.V.

88 The Epistle to the Romans

that some men are born for the top, and other
men for the bottom of society; that there are
'honourable 1 and 'dishonourable ' limbs in the
body of humanity, the latter fulfilling their
necessary function no less than the former, is
an indisputable fact. It is no use challenging
it, any more than any other fundamental law of
the universe. And, if we can see why certain
races and certain individuals are fitted for certain
tasks, yet on the whole we can advance but
a very little way in seeing the reason of human
inequalities as in fact they exist. All that lies in
the inscrutable and free counsels of God, and
the responsibility is in spite of the modifying
effects of human sin ultimately His 1 . But in
St. Paul's treatment of it, the recognition of the
fact that God works universal ends through
selected races and individuals, is robbed of all
that ministers to pride and narrowness in the
elect, or to hopelessness and a sense of injustice
in the rest.

The New Testament writers in general would
teach us that with God is no respect of persons ;

1 We hold, therefore, with regard to the lots of men in this
world, exactly the opposite of what Plato suggested under the
impulse of the doctrine of transmigration, ' It is the man's own
choice, God is blameless.'

Retrospect over the argument 89

so that the lowest vocation may result in the
highest glory, where it is faithfully fulfilled, and
the highest vocation, misused, in the deepest
degradation ; but St. Paul in particular makes us
feel the humbling responsibility which attaches
necessarily to any state of election. The Jews
failed because they lacked the faith and docility
which would have enabled them to correspond
to God's larger leading. The time came when
God who had, ' through the Jews, prepared the
Christ for the world,' had also, 'through the
Gentiles, prepared the world for Christ'; but
the Jews were ready neither to welcome the
Christ, nor to 'receive' the world. Thus the
richest ministry ever vouchsafed to a race was
waiting for the Jews, and they proved false to it,
because they had turned their privileges into an
occasion for pride and selfishness, and would
not learn the new truth or rise to the new
opportunity.

'Here is a serious warning to the 'elect' of
every age. How often has the church at large,
or a national church, refused the call to expan-
sion, and lost some rich part of its heritage
because it was self-satisfied, and therefore blind?
How often does a 'good catholic' fail to recog-
nize that he is utterly misusing the gifts of grace,

90 The Epistle to the Romans

if his Catholicism does not mean a generous and
self-sacrificing desire to win the lost and save
the world? How* often has the profession of
being 'saved* put an end to spiritual growth
and the struggle with sin ? How many religious
orders and societies have lived on the reputation
of the past, and appeared to fancy that the
achievements of their founders' the merits of
the fathers ' would justify the apathy and care-
lessness of those who had inherited an honour-
able name ? Indeed, to whatever we are elect
whether national, or ecclesiastical, or personal
privileges the temptation dogs us to rest on
our inherited merits and have no open ear to
the guiding voice of God, as it calls us to fresh
ventures and renewed sacrifices, like those which
laid the basis of the position of which we now
make our empty or insolent boast. But thus to
evade the uncomfortable requirements of the
present by an appeal to the achievements of
the past whether it be the past of catholic
tradition or ' the Reformation settlement ' is to
expose ourselves inevitably to divine condem-
nation.

Those who keep the open ear are the 'remnant'
in every age and church and nation. They are
the men who refuse to ' make the word of God

Retrospect over the argument 91

of none effect/ because of the blinding, deadening
force of social tradition. They are alive and
awake to ' buy up the opportunity/ as it presents
itself. And for such St. Paul's teaching, inherited
from the prophets, of the function of the remnant
is full of encouragement. The Bible is a book
contemptuous of majorities. The mass of men,
conventional, easily satisfied, self-centred, accom-
plish nothing, redeem and regenerate nothing.
But those who have ears to hear have every
motive, though they be few in number, to live
at the highest level possible, and believe to the
full that the purpose of God can be realized.
God's purpose can work, and has in history
worked, through small minorities, through single
individuals. They are the true representatives
of their church, their nation, their class. And
when the inner history of any epoch comes
to be known, while the inert mass of people,
' important ' or ' unimportant/ is lost in the dim
background, they will be seen distinctive in the
foreground: the real movement of God in history,
the real witness of the truth, the real spiritual
succession of the kingdom of God, will be seen
to have been carried on through them for the
enriching of the whole world.
I would add two reflections on subordinate,

92 The Epistle to the Romans

but still important points. It is the function of
the catholic church to let its light so shine
before men that if shall ' provoke to jealousy/
by the manifest presence of God in the midst
of it, the ancient and now alienated people, the
Jews. At the moment, with the anti-semite cry
strong throughout Europe, and on the morrow
of the ' affaire Dreyfus/ these words ring with
a bitter irony. And in our own East London
how utterly unlikely it is that the spectacle of
our Christianity should make the Jews feel that
Christian society cannot but be divine ! Indeed,
the unfulfilled debt Christendom owes to the
Jews is appalling. That ancient and indomitable
race retains, with all its faults, its close-knitting
sense of brotherhood, its faith, its frugality, its
industry, its patience, its heroism. We are meant
to show it the greater glories of the New
Covenant, the splendour of the purity, the un-
worldliness, the expansiveness, the love of the
brotherhood of Christ. And we do show it
what? Is there that in our common Christi-
anity, as they see it, which should obviously
make Judaism ashamed of itself? Could St.
Paul, looking at our Christendom, have expected
' all Israel to be saved ' by the spectacle of
a catholic church? These are considerations

Retrospect over the argument 93

which indeed should drive us to bitter penitence
and earnest prayer.

Finally, before we leave these chapters, we
shall do well to look steadily at St. Paul's habit
of mind in dealing with antithetic or comple-
mentary truths. No one could believe with
a more glorious conviction than St. Paul in the
dominance of the purpose of God in the world :
in the certainty of the accomplishment of what
God has predestined. If the very rejection of
the Christ by the Jews was turned into an
opportunity for the conversion of the Gentiles,
what crime can be too great for the divine
wisdom to overrule it for good ? No one, on
the other hand, could realize more deeply the
responsibility which lies upon men : their strange
power to correspond with God, or partly thwart
His purpose for them and through them. My
point is only this : he is true to both sides of an
antithesis, even though the exact relationship
and interworking of the twin truths is necessarily
and finally obscure. He refuses to be one-sided
at the requirement of an incomplete human
logic. It has been often pointed out, and in
many directions, how prone we all are to take
up with one side of truth with predestination
or free-will, with the divinity or the manhood

94 The Epistle to the Romans

of Christ, with the unity or the trinity of the
Godhead, with sacraments or conversion, with
authority or personal judgement ; and if we are
intellectually disposed, we call our one-sided-
ness 'being logical/ But we had better let
St. Paul teach us once for all that impartiality
is a greater thing than this cheap logic ; even as
Church history teaches us that a sharp-witted
but one-sided zeal for truth is one main cause of
bitterness, narrowness, and schism.

Practical exhortation 95

DIVISION V. CHAPTERS XII-XV. 13.

Practical Exhortation.

WE must almost all of us, in climbing some
high hill, have experienced the necessity for
two distinct efforts, the second more or less un-
anticipated. We started to climb to the apparent
summit, only to find, when we got there, that it
was no real summit at all, but a prominent
spur, and that a second climb was required of
us before we were really at the top. An intel-
lectual experience not unlike this is the lot of
the student of the Epistle to the Romans. The
apparent climax of the epistle is the end of
chapter viii, and the student at starting expects
his brain to be chiefly taxed in following the
closely knit argument which is to lead him
thither. But he reaches it only to find another
like effort of mind required of him in grasp-
ing the meaning of the section (chapters ix-xi)
in which St. Paul is occupied in justifying God's
dealings with the chosen people. But now,
intellectually speaking, his work is almost over.

96 The Epistle to the Romans

As the climber, seated on the summit of the
hill when at last it is gained, lets his eye range
over a rich and wide prospect, and takes in its
vastness and variety, or traces below him the
delightful descent: so it is with the reader of
this epistle who has entered sincerely into the
spirit of St. Paul. His intellectual scruples as
to the divine dealings have been just laid to
rest ; before that his mind had been convinced,
and his heart and will attracted and won, by the
unfolding of the divine righteousness, that is to
say of the free grace and love of God. And
now, proportionate to the greatness of the effort
by which this satisfaction of intellect and heart
and will has been won, is the joy of expansion
which remains the joy of the surrendered mind
in appreciating all that is practically possible for
it in the light of the love of God. ' I will run
the way of thy commandments, because thou
dost enlarge my heart/ that is, expand it with
a sense of liberty and joy 1 . 'All things are
ours/ if but once in completeness of self-surren-
dering faith ' we are Christ's ' as assuredly
* Christ is God's 2 / * I can do all things in
Christ that strengtheneth me 3 /

1 Ps. cxix. 33. See Driver's Parallel Psalter, Oxford (1898).

2 i Cor. iii. 21-3. * Phil. iv. 13.

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98 The Epistle to the Romans

on the pattern of Christ, is the only reasonable
sort of divine service for man to offer. The
transitory world, jto which such an ideal is quite
alien, is indeed all around them, but they are
not to suffer themselves to be assimilated to its
fleeting fashion. Their whole point of view is
changed and become new ; and this must result
in so thorough a transformation of their old
worldly ways of thinking that a new inward
light will shine in their hearts, and they will be
able to discriminate and see what God's will is,
and so to follow the way of perfection.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of
God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept-
able to God, which is your reasonable service. And be
not fashioned according to this world : but be ye trans-
formed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove
what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

This short paragraph is full of meaning, and
is profoundly characteristic of St. Paul in thought
and language.

The ' therefore ' is one of the great transitional
1 therefores T ' by which St. Paul shows his con-
stant sense of the inter-connexion of doctrine
and life: the doctrine passing by a clear logic
into the practical life, and the life drawing all its

1 See further, Ephes. pp. 172 ff.

Self-surrender 99

practical motives from the realities disclosed in
the doctrine. It is truly nothing whatever but
shallowness and 'shortness of thought' which
can suffer us to imagine that the Christian char-
acter I do not say all morality, but the Christian
character could long survive the Christian
creed.

And the character of this summary exhortation
shows us that any idea of a faith which stops
short of moral identification with its object is
utterly alien to St. Paul's mind. Faith is no true
Christian faith, if it is content to receive from
the Father, or from Christ, a gift which leaves it
still outside the life of God. The faith which
Christ inspires asks for and receives nothing
less than real fellowship in His divine and human
life, and that life is, in its joys as well as its
sorrows, a life of self-surrender, of sacrifice.
Thus the Christian only welcomes the gift of
pardon through Christ's sacrifice in order to be
admitted into the freedom of the dedicated life in
Christ, which is the life of sacrifice. It is the
sort of sacrifice (as St. Paul's language indicates)
which is as different as possible from any such
asceticism as is prompted by contempt of the
flesh or the body, or refusal of joy, or love of
death. It is sacrifice which seeks to cultivate
H 2

ioo The Epistle to the Romans

into full vitality every faculty of body as well as
of mind (and that in an active society or brother-
hood), in order to. consecrate all we are or can be
to the service of God, and so realize in conscious
correspondence with the divine will the rational
worship for humanity.

St. Paul's words here about a 'living' as
opposed to a bloody, and a 'rational' as opposed
to an animal sacrifice, may be the basis on which
the eucharist, the Christian worship 'in spirit
and in truth/ was often called in early times the
'reasonable' and 'bloodless sacrifice 1 / And
whether this be the case or no, at any rate we
must relearn the lesson that St. Augustine is
for ever insisting upon, that the eucharistic
sacrifice essentially involves and implies the
offering of the Church as the body of Christ,

1 It is more likely, however, that the phrases l rational worship'
and ' bloodless sacrifice ' had an earlier Jewish origin. They
occur in The Testament of the XII Patriarchs, which is apparently
a Jewish document christianized. There the angels are said
(Levi. 3) to ' offer to the Lord a rational odour of sweet savour and a
bloodless offering.' Philo also, as Mr. Conybeare points out to me,
in several passages describes the true sacrifices as * bloodless ' : and
by bloodless sacrifices he means either the meal offerings as opposed
to the animal sacrifices (De Anim. Sacrif. ed. Mangey ii. 250),
or truly spiritual acts as opposed to merely outward (De Ebrcitate,
i. p. 370, cf. ii. 254). These two ideas run easily into one another,
and the earliest uses of the expression 'bloodless sacrifice* for the
eucharist have a similar ambiguity.

Self-surrender 101

that is, the offering of ourselves as members of
the body ; and we may feel profoundly thankful
that, in our service of Holy Communion, this
truth has been restored to its proper prominence,
after having been, in the pre-Reformation service,
almost ignored. 'And here we offer and present
unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and
bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively
sacrifice unto thee/ In this prayer is really the
climax of our sacrificial worship J .

The true service of God is intelligent corre-
spondence with the divine will this is perfection ;
and to correspond with the divine will we must
be able to know it : and this is what we can do
if we are true to the principle of our new birth,
and suffer it radically and permanently to trans-
form us and our point of view (for nothing less
than this is carried by St. Paul's expression
rendered 'transform*). Negatively, this means
that we must maintain our separateness from
the worldly world, to which we died at our
baptism the world of human society as it
devotes itself to its business and its pleasures,

1 See further, p. 179. I may be allowed to express the earnest
desire that we might have liberty in our Church to read both of the
Post-Communion Prayers, which seem supplementary rather than
alternative to one another.

102 The Epistle to the Romans

leaving God out of account 1 . For if the worldly
world is suffered to fashion us in accordance
with its shallow find transitory show (this is the
idea conveyed by the word rendered ' fashion '),
we shall be blinded to what our regeneration
ought to have made plain to us.

1 See Ephes. p. 92.

The community spirit 103

DIVISION V. 2. CHAPTER XII. 3-21.

The community spirit.

AND when St. Paul, justifying himself here, as
before and later on, by the special divine favour
which has made him the apostle of the Gentiles 1 ,
proceeds to develop his exhortation, it appears
that with him, as with St. James 2 , the form in
which 'divine sen-ice' shows itself must be love
of the brethren. To be called into the body of
Christ the society which is bound into one by
His life and spirit -is to be called to social
service, that is, to live a community life, and
to cultivate the virtues which make true com-
munity life possible and healthy. Of these
the first is humility, which in this connexion
means the viewing oneself in all things as one
truly is, as a part of a whole. Of the faith by
which the whole body lives, a share, but only

1 See i. 5, 11-15 \ xv - 15-17- * Jas. i. 17.

104 The Epistle to the Romans

a share, belongs to each member a certain
measure of faith and he must not strain beyond
it. But he is diligently to make the best of his
faculty, and do the work for which his special
gift qualifies him, in due subordination to the
welfare of the whole, whether it be inspired
preaching, or ordinary teaching, or the distribu-
tion of alms, or presidency, or some other form
of helping others which is his special function.
Besides humility there are other virtues which
make the life of a community healthy and happy,
and St. Paul enumerates them, as they occur to
his mind, in no defined order or completeness.
There must be sincerity in love, that is in
considering and seeking the real interest of
others; there must be the righteous severity
which keeps the moral atmosphere free from
taint ; there must be tenderness of feeling, which
makes the community a real family of brothers ;
and an absence of all self-assertion, or desire for
personal prominence; and thorough industry;
and spiritual zeal; and devotion to God's ser-
vice ; and the cheerfulness which Christian hope
inspires ; and the ready endurance of affliction ;
and close application to prayer ; and a love for
giving whenever fellow Christians need; and
an eagerness to entertain them when they are

The community spirit 105

travelling for 'the community* embraces, not
one church only, but 'all the churches/

Nay in a wider sense the community extends
itself to all mankind, even those who persecute l
them. According to his Lord's precepts, the
Christian is only to bless his persecutors.
Generally he is to be, in the deep, original
sense, sympathetic with his fellow men every-
where in their joys and sorrows, and (to return
to the Christian community) he is to seek to let
it be pervaded by an impartial kindness ; and,
not thinking himself a superior person suited
only for superior affairs, he is to let the current
of ordinary human needs bear him along. He
is not to set undue store on his own opinions 2 ;
he is utterly to banish the spirit of retaliation ;
he is deliberately to plan so to live as that his
life shall prove, not a stumblingblock, but a
moral attraction to men in general 3 ; he is never
to quarrel with any one if he can possibly help
it ; he is completely to suppress his resentment

1 The word is the same as St. Paul has just used to describe the
eager 'pursuit' of opportunities of hospitality by the Christian.
He ' pursues ' opportunities of doing good, while he is himself
' pursued ' by enemies to do him eviL

2 Cf. xi. 25, and Prov. iii. 7.

3 Prov. iii. 4 LXX. ' Provide things honourable in the sight of
the Lord and of man.'

106 The Epistle to the Romans

when he is wronged, and simply to leave the
matter to the wrath of God, as indeed the law
would have him do * ; so that, by his very meek-
ness and returning good for evil, he may,
according to the wise man's saying, heap burning
shame upon his enemy, like coals of fire 2 . Evil
is all around the Christian, and it is a strong man
armed; but the Christian has with him the
forces of good which are yet stronger, and by
no passive withdrawal, but by the active exercise
of good, he is to win the victory over evil.

For I say, through the grace that was given me, to
every man that is among you, not to think of himself
more highly than he ought to think ; but so to think as to
think soberly, according as God hath dealt to each man
a measure of faith. For even as we have many members
in one body, and all the members have not the same office :
so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and severally
members one of another. And having gifts differing
according to the grace that was given to us, whether
prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of
our faith ; or ministry, let us give ourselves to our ministry ;
or he that teacheth, to his teaching; or he that exhorteth,
to his exhorting: he that giveth, let him do //with liberality;
he that ruleth, with diligence ; he that sheweth mercy,
with cheerfulness. Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor
that which is evil ; cleave to that which is good. In love
of the brethren be tenderly affectioned one to another ; in
honour preferring one another ; in diligence not slothful ;

1 Deut. xxxii. 35. 2 Prov. xxv. 21.

The community spirit 107

fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope;
patient in tribulation ; continuing stedfastly in prayer ;
communicating to the necessities of the saints ; given to
hospitality. Bless them that persecute you ; bless, and
curse not. Rejoice with them that rejoice ; weep with
them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward
another. Set not your mind on high things, but con-
descend to things that are lowly. Be not wise in your
own conceits. Render to no man evil for evil. Take
thought for things honourable in the sight of all men.
If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with
all men. Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place
unto wrath : for it is written, Vengeance belongeth unto
me ; I will recompense, saith the Lord. But if thine
enemy hunger, feed him ; if he thirst, give him to drink :
for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.
Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

(i) It is the idea of corporate life which domi-
nates all this exhortation. No writing in the
New Testament has done more than the Epistle
to the Romans to strengthen the sense of
spiritual individuality, and to rouse the individual
spirit to protest, as it protested in Luther, against
spiritual tyranny. But it is a complete mistake
to suppose that the epistle is individualistic in
tendency. The life into which the individual's
laith in Jesus admits him is the life of a com-
munity, and its virtues are the virtues of
community life. The strengthened individuality
is to go to enrich an organized society.

io8 The Epistle to the Romans

This is expressed in the familiar metaphor of
the body which had been employed in non-
Christian thought before St. Paul identified it
with himself and Christianity by the vigorous
and profound use which he made of it 1 . The
Christian community is a body bound together
in a common life by a common inspiring presence
and spirit. The divine grace and good favour
of Christ shows itself in special 'gifts' (in the
Greek this word 'charisma* expresses a particular
embodiment of the general grace, 'charis/ of
God) ; and no individual member is without his
special endowment. It is not a few officers of
the community who are gifted, but all ; and all
are to co-operate in the common life and work.
Of gifts there are various sorts which we hear of
in the New Testament. There are the official
gifts, the result of what we call ordination, as the
gift which was 'in* Timothy 'by the laying on
of hands.' And those among the Christians at
Rome, who ' presided ' and ' ministered/ would
have been, we should suppose, official presbyters
or 'bishops/ and deacons. But the Roman
Christians hardly constituted yet an organized
church, and we cannot tell whence such officers of

1 The truth, however, which underlies the metaphor of the body
is, we may say, equally present in all the New Testament writers.

The community spirit 109

the community received theirappointment. There
is no ground for a positive assertion of any kind x .
Again we hear of special gifts, such as powers of
healing, speaking with tongues and prophesy-
ing, which sometimes accompanied the bestowal
of the Spirit, through the laying on of hands
which was given to all. And the gift of
prophesying among the Roman Christians may
have been a gift of this kind. But St. Paul is
perhaps writing with the circumstances of the
Corinthian church, rather than those of the
Roman Christians, in his mind ; and we can
gather but little about the exact condition of
things at the capital. Once more, St. Paul uses
the word 'gifts* for more personal and moral
endowments, as for the bent of mind which leads
men, under divine guidance, towards celibacy or
marriage 2 . But in this place he is not distin-
guishing. He is hardly speaking in view of any
special circumstances at Rome. He is but
emphasizing the fact which is the basis of all the
life of Christians everywhere the fact that each
individual member of the body has a special gift,
and a special function for the good of the whole
body, by which the gift is to express itself.
What every individual Christian has to do,

1 See, however, p. 196. J i Cor. vii. 7.

no The Epistle to the Romans

then, is to realize his own gift and correspond
to it. The gift involves a certain 'measure of
faith/ The faith t>f each individual Christian is
the same in its basis. It holds him in spiritual
allegiance to the same Lord, and in confession
of the same elemental creed. But, besides this,
it involves a special insight, which is the peculiar
endowment of the individual. There is some-
thing which each man can realize and impart, as
no one else is qualified to do. The Church is
the poorer if he holds back or fails to stir up
this gift of his own, and on the other hand he
incurs the peril of presumption if he ventures
beyond it. Even the inspired man, the prophet,
must prophesy within the limits of what his own
special proportion of faith enables him to perceive
and grasp 1 , even though another prophet with
a larger faith might rightly say what he may
not venture upon. 'Let each man be fully

1 Dr. Liddon, with many others, interprets ' according to the
proportion of the faith/ i. e. according to ' the majestic proportion
of the (objective) faith.' This is the characteristically Latin, as
against the Greek, interpretation, and the Greek is certainly to be
preferred, because 'according to the proportion of our faith'
follows naturally upon 'according as ... the measure of faith' just
above ; indeed ' faith ' in this context can hardly have assigned
to it without violence the objective meaning which, however, in
the context of the Pastoral Epistles it no doubt frequently bears.
Cf. app. note A, p. 205.

The community spirit IIT

persuaded in his own mind.' For any assertion
which goes beyond what the faith of the indi-
vidual enables him to be convinced of, is for
him 'sin.' We greatly need this exhortation
to-day. The convictions of many are vague and
uncertain, and their teaching without heart or
force, because, like parrots, they catch up and
repeat what others may have insight enough to
warrant their asserting, but they have not. To
correspond with one's own personal gift of faith
is to realize one's vocation ; and, by the develop-
ment of the individual points of view, inside the
common ' tradition,' the fullness and richness of
the corporate faith is secured.

The cohesion of the body lies in each one's
realizing his own gift, and also reverencing that
of others. Here is humility. Humility is not
self-contempt, or cringing to others. To realize
one's own gift, one's own relation to God, gives
to each man a dignity, a power to stand upright
and face the world. The sovereign Master and
Giver has given me my own life and my own
gifts. He is responsible for the existence which
He gave me, and I am not to shame Him by
shrinking from making the best of it. But also
humility is, in all relations, truth about ourselves.
It is truth about ourselves as regards God, who

ii2 The Epistle to the Romans

is simply the giver of whatever we have and are ;
and it is truth about ourselves as regards our
fellow men our own gifts being justly appraised
'only when they are regarded as means of serving
the body as a whole, without any self-aggrandize-
ment, with a due respect to the gifts of others,
and even a positive will to let them have higher
place than ourselves.

Indeed we shall do well to meditate deeply on
this. What good work is there which is not in
more or less continual danger of suffering, or
even being abandoned, because fellow Christians,
zealous fellow Christians, will plainly, and it
must be wilfully, yield to the ambition to be
first : will not be content to be second or third :
will not do the unobtrusive work : will think
' How can I shine/ rather than ' How can I
serve ' ? In fact, how very unwilling we are to
recognize, in our ideals of education, and in our
theory of grown life, that ambition, in the strict
sense of the word the desire to obtain distinc-
tion for ourselves, as distinct from the desire to
serve is not a motive which Christianity can
sanction, or from which it can hope for a blessing.

We linger lovingly, wistfully, on the picture
of the corporate life of a Christian community.
Has it vanished from the earth, this real fraternal

The community spirit 113

living, 'high and low, rich and poor, one with
another/ each supplementing the deficiencies of
the other, and receiving of their fullness ? May
we not do something more than we are doing to
realize" it in our congregations or parishes ? Is
nearly enough emphasis laid on the social
relationship of each congregation of fellow
worshippers or each local church?

Dimly through the mist of ages in old church-
wardens' accounts, in the rare instances where
they have been preserved from days before the
Reformation, we discern what a really fraternal,
self-governing and mutually co-operative com-
munity the mediaeval English parish was. Let
me extract a few sentences from the excellent
preface 1 which Bishop Hobhouse prefixed to an
edition of the surviving Churchwardens' Accounts
of a number of Somersetshire parishes.

' The (parish) community was completely or-
ganized with a constitution which recognized the
rights of the whole and of every adult member
to a voice in self-government, but kept the self-
governing community under a system of inspec-
tion and (if need should be) restraint from central
authority.' 'The whole adult population were
accounted parishioners, and had an equal voice

1 Somersetshire Records, vol. iv, 1890.
II. I

ii4 The Epistle to the Romans

when assembled for consultation under the
rector. Seeing that both sexes served the office
of warden, there can be no doubt that both had
a vote/

The strongly existing spirit of good will and
pride in the parish church found all the necessary
funds for the maintaining of the church and
the services, and for the provision of often a
sumptuous and rich treasury of ornaments. The
needs of the Church were met generally by the
local industry of l such as were wise-hearted '
builders, carpenters, workers in gold and silver,
bell-founders, embroiderers, writers, illuminators,
book-binders, and others.

Hard by the church the church-house was the
centre of the popular recreations of the holy day
or holiday.

The parish elected and paid its own officers,
except the rector, and the affairs and ornaments
of the church, even in part the arrangement of
the services, were under the government, not of
the rector, but of the parish meeting, of which he
was president, under the restraining hand of the
rural dean and archdeacon.

The support of the poor or disabled was a
wholly voluntary matter. ' The brotherhood tie
was so strongly realized by the community, that

The community spirit 115

the weaker ones were succoured by the stronger
as out of a family store/

' All the tendency of the feudal system, working
through the machinery of the manorial court,
was to keep the people down. All the tendency of
the parochial system, working through the parish
council, holding its assemblies in the churches,
where the people met on equal terms as children
and servants of the living God, and members of
one body in Christ Jesus, was to lift the people up?
In these assemblies there was no distinction
between lord and vassal, high and low, rich and
poor; in them the people learnt the worth of
being free. Here were the schools in which, in
the slow course of centuries, they were disciplined
to self-help, self-reliance and self-respect J .

No doubt these descriptions of mediaeval
parish life represent an ideal very imperfectly
realized. But is it not an ideal we need to
recover? Is there not a call for Church reform,
both moral and formal, to restore to us the
community life of our parishes, and fill St. Paul's
language again with its primary and natural
meaning?

1 Dr. Jessop, ' Parish Life in England before the Great Pillage,'
Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1898, p. 55 ; cf. also Dom Gasquet on
'The Layman in the Mediaeval Period,' Tablet, Sept. a, 1899.

I 2

n6 The. Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION V. 3. CHAPTER XIII. 1-7.

The Christians and the imperial power.

IT is possible that the thought of the innocent
victim of injustice and wrong waiting upon the
divine wrath, brings to St. Paul's mind the idea
of the State which exists to represent divine
justice in the world, and minister divine wrath
on behalf of the innocent. But, whether this
particular connexion of thought was really in
St. Paul's mind or no, at any rate the previous
section has made it plain that the ' love of the
brethren ' must extend itself to become a right
relation to all men, whether Christians or not *.
In particular, therefore, the relation of the
Christians to the imperial authority could not
fail to be a matter which required attention and
apostolic counsel. The Jews, whose theocratic

1 Cf. 2 Pet. i. 7, ' In your love of the brethren supply love/ i. e.
let the temper bred inside the closer bond of Christian fellowship
extend itself universally.

Christians and imperial officers 117

principles made submission to government by
' the uncircumcised ' at least a real abandonment
of a religious ideal J , had always an instinctive
tendency to rebellion ; and the Christian church
built upon Judaism might easily have inherited
this instinct. The catholic church of the new
covenant, might have claimed to be a theocracy
like that of the old. Especially at Rome, where
the Jews were a vast and formidable body who
had recently given trouble and been expelled 2 ,
the attitude of the Christians, who were identi-
fied with them, might easily be misunderstood.
Or on the other hand the Jews themselves, at
Rome as at Thessalonica 3 , might represent the
Christians as disloyal to Caesar. Moreover,
apart from all unjustified slanders, the spirit, of
the ' fifth monarchy men ' has seldom been
altogether absent from periods of Christian
enthusiasm ; and the restless and undisciplined

1 Deut. xvii. 15, ' Thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee,
which is not thy brother.'

3 Acts xviii. 2. ' Claudius had commanded all the Jews to
depart from Rome,' cf. Suetonius, Claud. 25. ' The Jews who
had been persistently breaking into disturbances at the instigation
of Chrestus (Christ ?) he expelled from Rome.' We cannot cer-
tainly explain these words, but St. Paul knew all about the occur-
rence from Priscilla and Aquila, whom the expulsion had brought
across his path at Corinth.

3 Acts xvii. 7.

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

n8 The Epistle to the Romans

tendencies at Thessalonica *, which the mistaken
expectation of the immediate second coming of
Christ had encouraged, were a sign that Christians
might easily find it difficult to settle down as
good citizens in the great empire of the world.

St. Paul therefore, here and elsewhere, would
make it quite plain that the catholic church, if
it is like the ancient Israel, is like it only as it
was in exile when the children of Israel were
bidden to be good citizens of the Babylonian
empire, and to seek the peace of the city
whither God had caused them to be carried
away captive, and to pray unto the Lord for it,
for in the peace thereof they should have peace 2 .
Thus the Church was not a theocracy, but a
1 settlement of strangers and exiles 3 / waiting
for the visible establishment of the kingdom or
city of God, and meanwhile maintaining a polity
or ordered social life of their own, but on a volun-
tary and catholic (or non-national) basis. There-
fore, so long as God maintains ' the present
world/ they must be good citizens of whatever
earthly state they happen to live under. On this
basis, then, St. Paul reminds each single person

1 i Thess. iv. n ; v. 14 ; 2 Thess. iii. 6.
8 Jer. xxix. 7; cf. i Tim. ii. 2.

8 i Pet. i. ii. The word for such a 'settlement of strangers,'
paroecia, has become, by a suggestive history, our ' parish.'

Christians and imperial officers 119

of the duty of political loyalty. The earthly
state is of God's establishing, as well as the
kingdom of Christ, and fulfils a divine purpose
with divine authority. It exists to suppress
moral outrage and lawlessness 1 , to maintain
justice and right. Its officers are God's minis-
ters (as truly as the officers of the Church, though
in a different order), and must be obeyed ac-
cordingly, under peril not only of civil punish-
ment for disobedience, but under peril of divine
judgement also, and as a matter of conscience.
The good man, and therefore the good Christian,
has nothing to fear from the empire or its
officers. And he will readily, and as a matter of
conscience, pay his tribute as a subject, and his
taxes as a citizen, to the proper authorities, and
give to each imperial officer the respect which
is his due.

Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers :
for there is no power but of God ; and the powers that be
are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the
power, withstandeth the ordinance of God : and they
that withstand shall receive to themselves judgement.
For rulers are not a terror to the good work, but to the
evil. And wouldest thou have no fear of the power ? do

1 Cf. 2 Thess. ii. 6. ' That which restraineth' the outbreak of law-
lessness is (almost certainly) the empire, and ' he that restraineth '
(ver. 7) the emperor.

120 The Epistle to the Romans

that which is good, and thou shalt have praise from the
same : for he is a minister of God to thee for good. But
if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not
the sword in vain : Tor he is a minister of God, an avenger
for wrath to him that doeth evil. Wherefore jy must needs
be in subjection, not only because of the wrath, but also
for conscience sake. For for this cause ye pay tribute
also ; for they are ministers of God's service, attending
continually upon this very thing. Render to all their
dues : tribute to whom tribute is due ; custom to whom
custom ; fear to whom fear ; honour to whom honour.

Our Lord, by His whole bearing towards
Jewish nationalism and by His clear prophecy of
the destruction of Jerusalem, as well as by His
particular injunction to ' render unto Caesar the
things that were Caesar's/ had made it evident
to His disciples that the sceptre had departed
from Judah, and had determined the attitude of
Christians towards the empire. They could not
indeed be as other inhabitants of the empire, for
they were waiting, and praying, and working, for
the visible establishment of a city and kingdom
of God on earth little as either the ' times and
seasons/ or the character and manner, of that city
and kingdom had been revealed to them. Thus
the Roman empire could not but be in their eyes
a kingdom of this world destined for overthrow.
But it was by the methods of meekness, and by
purely spiritual weapons, that the kingdom of

Christians and imperial officers 121

God was to come, and the great overthrow, what-
ever it should prove to be, was to be effected.
This at least was certain ; and meanwhile the
Roman empire represented the divine principle
of authority and order, and must be obeyed.

St. Paul no doubt had, more than any other
apostle, a real feeling for the empire and the city
of which he was a citizen. Moreover, he saw
in the organization of the empire a great frame-
work and vehicle for the establishment and
spread of the catholic church. And hitherto
certainly (at least, since the fatal moment of
Pilate's weakness) the Church had continually
experienced the assistance of the imperial
authorities. It was a misused spiritual authority,
before which the protest had to be made, ' We
must obey God rather than man V It was the
Jewish authorities who persecuted the Church.
It was the Jewish king who put James to death.
At Paphos, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, the
imperial authorities had been more or less
friendly, and even at Philippi they had been
reduced to an attitude of apology by the bare
mention of Roman citizenship. St. Paul's
experiences, therefore, had prepared him to
' appeal unto Caesar/ and to expect justice

1 Acts v. 29.

122 The Epistle to the Romans

and freedom for himself and his cause. Even
the beginnings of the experience of imperial
hostility and persecution did not quash or even
weaken this attitude in St. Peter 1 . St. Peter
and St. Paul idealize the empire almost as if it
could do no wrong, and the righteous had
nothing to fear from it. Of course, when this
expectation had been rudely shattered when
the imperial authority had come chiefly to mean
the persecution of the saints an opposite sort
of idealism takes place, and Rome appears as
the great ' beast ' of violence in the Apocalypse
of John. Both idealizations represent truth
the truth of what the State is meant to be on
the one side, and of what it may become on
the other. But after considerable experience of
persecution, Clement of Rome is still full of
admiration for the divine order of the imperial
rule, and recognizes the duty of obedience to
his ' rulers and governors upon earth/ side by
side with the duty of obedience to ' God's al-
mighty and most excellent name ' ; and as it is
God who has given the rulers their authority,
he prays for grace to submit to them, and offers
rich prayer for their welfare and that of the
empire. And the spirit lived on in the Christian

1 i Pet. ii. 13-17-

Christians and imperial officers 123

church through all the persecutions, and the
apologists for Christianity loved to protest
their loyalty to the empire, and to think of their
church as ' the soul of the world/ maintaining
it by prayer and virtue in the midst of impiety
and corruption.

In England this passage has often been put
to two conspicuously unjustifiable uses. First,
it was the stronghold of the maintainers of ' the
divine right of kings ' and of ' passive obe-
dience/ In reality it asserts the divine right of
civil authority, but not of any particular kind of
civil authority. Indeed the government of the
empire was still nominally a republic in its
fundamental forms, though it was becoming a
despotism in fact. And supposing the senate
and people had as is of course conceivable
reasserted their authority over their ' emperors/
or military officers, the Christian doctrine of
divine right would have afforded no guidance as
to which of the claimants to authority had the
divine will on its side. What is barely asserted
is the divine right of the existing civil authority,
democratic or regal. And while our passage
exalts the normal duty of obedience, it suggests
no answer to the question Is there not a point
where a government so manifestly fails to main-

T24 The Epistle to the Romans

tain the divine order in the world, or to repre-
sent the will of God and the best interests of the
people, that it deserves to be put an end to ? At
such a point Christianity can only serve to rein-
force the natural instincts of justice and right.

And again, the words, * the powers that be are
ordained of God : therefore he that resisteth the
power withstandeth the ordinance of God/ have
often been used in England to justify a claim on
behalf of the State to coerce and govern the
Church and the consciences of men in spiritual
matters. But such an idea is utterly alien to
the mind of the New Testament. In the matters
which concern our spiritual salvation, the
authority which is to discipline and control us
is the binding and loosing, absolving and retain-
ing, authority which is entrusted not to the
State, but to the Church. Attempts are re-
corded in history on the part of the State to
crush out the Church, and on the part of the
Church to usurp the authority of the State and
use its weapons. Such attempts, we trust, be-
long to past history. An attempt, too, specially
identified with England, has been made to
identify a national Church and State as only
different aspects of the same society, so that the
government of the national Church can be more

Christians and imperial officers 125

or less fused in that of the State. But whatever
may be said of such an attempt in the past, in
our modern England the plain facts of the
political and religious situation are flatly repug-
nant to it ; and there can evidently be no
reasonable religious government in the Church
of England till it is conducted again in obe-
dience to the fundamental Christian principle that
our national and local Church is part of a great
catholic society, which Christ endowed with an
independent spiritual authority, and a law and
constitution and ministers of its own. The
State may need an established national church
as much as ever to enable it to fulfil its highest
functions, but any ' Establishment ' in these days
must be consistent with the fullest recognition
of the spiritual and political liberties of those
members of the State who belong to other
religious bodies, and also must be based upon
recognition that the Church and State are
fundamentally distinct, and relatively inde-
pendent societies.

But it behoves us Churchmen, not only to
assert the spiritual liberties of the Church, but
also to realize a great deal more fully than we
do, the divine authority of the civil ministers and
civil laws in their own department. The State

i26 The Epistle to the Romans

exists to embody and represent in the world the
divine justice, which is to be the basis of the
government of men.- Its ministers magistrates,
legislators, officers of justice are 'God's minis-
ters ' : laws which are passed by the State in
fulfilment of its divine mission laws intended
to maintain the health and prosperity of the
people as a whole have a divine sanction ;
and we Churchmen can only be what the
Church should be, 'the soul of the world/ if
we make it a matter of conscience, a great deal
more deliberately than it is at present with
most of us, to aid vigorously in the adminis-
tration of the good laws which already exist,
national and municipal, and to promote intelli-
gently and enthusiastically the purposes of civil
government by helping towards better laws ; so
that our government, as a whole, may become
a continually completer image of the equitable
and impartial righteousness of God.

The summary debt 127

DIVISION V. 4. CHAPTER XIII. 8-10.

The summary debt.

CHRISTIANS are willingly to pay tribute and
tax as a debt, a thing due in God's sight to His
ministers. But this obligation is a specimen of
innumerable obligations which we owe to our
1 neighbours' debts only limited by human need.
And the Christian is to take a wide view of his
obligations, and to let there be no legitimate
claim upon him unfulfilled, no debt unpaid,
except the one which a man ought always to be
paying and still to be owing, for it is infinite the
debt of love. Here, in loving each other man
with the same real regard to his personal
interests as we devote to our own, is the satis-
faction of the moral law. All the particular
' commandments ' those of the Second Table,
and any other there may be are comprehended
in this one. For love can do no harm to any
other, and can therefore break no command-
ment.

128 The Epistle to the Romans

Owe no man anything, save to love one another : for
he that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the law. For
this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not
kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet, and if
there be any other commandment, it is summed up in
this word, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy-
self. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: love there-
fore is the fulfilment of the law.

St. Paul gives here a very noticeable expan-
sion to the idea of not being in debt. In its
literal sense we have all of us a horror of it,
at least in theory.

* No debtor's hands are clean
However white they be.'

We must both let that theoretic horror of debt
dominate our practice in money matters, and
also expand our idea of ' debts/ According to
Christ's teaching, the priest and Levite did not
pay their debt to their Samaritan neighbour,
because they thought him a stranger with no
claim on them. Dives ignored his rich man's
debt to Lazarus. Of those who are to appear
on the left hand of Christ's judgement-seat, each
will be condemned because he never realized his
debt to Christ in the persons of all those who
had needs to which he might have ministered.
St. Paul, as an apostle, acknowledged his debt

The summary debt 129

to all the Gentile world \ and we members of a
church, catholic in idea, but as yet so far from
catholic in fact we Englishmen, members of an
imperial and spreading race, responsible for the
name of Christ all over the world have a por-
tentous and lamentably unfulfilled debt to the
races of Africa and India, and to the whole
world.

We can all think of manifold debts to the
lonely whom we might visit, the misunderstood
whom we might sympathize with, the ignorant
whom we might teach, the weak and oppressed
whom we might support and combine, the sinful
whom we might convert and establish in good
living ; so many debts to family and friends ; so
many debts to Englishmen and fellow Christians,
to Africans and Asiatics. Is it not bewildering
even to attempt to realize our debts ? And yet,
let a man make a beginning, and all will be well.
Let him steadily set himself to behave towards
those whom he employs or those who employ
him, to wards his domestic servants or his masters,
towards railway porters and shop assistants
and others who minister to his convenience, as
being men and women with the same right to
courteous treatment, and to a real opportunity to

1 Rom. i. 14.
II. K

130 The Epistle to the Romans

make the best of themselves, as he has him-
self; let him steadily refuse to 'exploit 1 those
immediately concerned with him, or treat them
as merely means to his ends or instruments of
his convenience ; let him thus realize his debts
to his nearest * neighbours/ and the whole idea
of humanity, of brotherhood, will be deepened
and made real to him. Serving the few, he will
come to serve the many. His prayers will go
before his actions, and enlarge their scope. He
will get a habit of considerateness and thought-
fulness for others, as belonging to Christ, which
will express itself habitually towards all, and
especially the weak. His 'neighbour* will
come to mean, as in our Lord's parable and in
St. Paul's expression in this place, any ' other
man V And in our days when the old personal
relations of masters to workers have been so
largely merged in the relation of companies to
unions or to men and women in masses, we
shall never allow ourselves to forget that combi-
nations are combinations of individuals, and that
neither individual responsibility, nor responsi-
bility for the individual, can be obliterated by
union or by numbers.
St. Paul, w r e notice, is here plainly reproduc-

1 ver. 8, 'his neighbours ' : margin, i the other.'

The summary debt 131

ing our Lord's saying about love and the law 1 ;
and he would seem to have the teaching of the
parable about the Good Samaritan in his mind ;
as in the previous section the saying ' Render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's/ and in
the end of the preceding one (xii. 14, 19) the
prohibition of vengeance and the injunction of
love to enemies in the Sermon on the Mount.
St. Paul's ethical teaching is in fact found to be
throughout based on our Lord's, whether our
Lord's words were with him in a written form
or came to him simply in the oral tradition.

And we do well to remember, as we read this
familiar passage, that here is the centre and
kernel of Christianity. It is the revelation of
a new and universal duty, based on a revealed
relationship of all men to a common Father : the
duty which lies upon all men of loving all men,
because God loves all men with a father's love,
or rather because God is love, and only by the
life of love can we share His fellowship 2 . The

1 Matt. xxii. 40 ; cf. Gal. v. 14, and James ii. 8.

3 It has been commonly said that Christianity almost created a
new word to express the new duty. But this now appears not to
be strictly the case. Agape, love, is a word unknown indeed to
classical writers, but it is found in the popular speech of Alexandria
in the second century B. c. See Deissmann, Bibelstudien (Marburg,
l8 95)j P- 8 . C 1 w as referred to this work by Dr. Bernard, Pastoral
K 2,

132 The Epistle to the Romans

Christian 'enthusiasm for humanity* has thus
its roots in a disclosure of the character of God,
and of His mind towards every man.

Epistles, p. 24.) Hence, i. e. from the popular speech of Greek
Egypt, it passed into the Greek Bible and so into Christianity.

The day approaching 133

DIVISION V. 5. CHAPTER XIII. 11-14.

The approach of the day.

AND the motive for paying our debts, in this
wide sense, is that we must 'agree with our
adversary quickly, while we are with him in the
way/ for the day of account is at hand. This
worldly world lies asleep to the spiritual reali-
ties, but its short night the time of darkness
is nearly over. The great deliverance is nearer
to us than when we first became Christians.
The day of the Lord is almost dawning. Let us
see to it then that all that is only fit for the dark-
ness is stripped off us : that we are suitably
equipped for the day, so that when it suddenly
dawns it shall not put us to shame. Sensual
lusts and loveless passions indulged gross sins,
such as none of the Christian communities had
quite got rid of will appear improper conduct
indeed when the sun rises. And there is
only one garment proper for the day; it is the
garment of Christ's righteousness, or rather
of Christ Himself, with whom we must invest

134 The Epistle to the Romans

ourselves. As for our lower nature, it is to be
our servant merely not a master, whose clam-
orous demands we are to study to satisfy.

'And this, knowing the season, that now it is high
time for you to awake out of sleep : for now is salvation
nearer to us than when we first believed. The night is
far spent, and the day is at hand : let us therefore cast off
the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of
light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day ; not in revel-
ling and drunkenness, not in chambering and wanton-
ness, not in strife and jealousy. But put ye on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to
fulfil the lusts thereof.

St. Paul, no doubt, was still in eager expecta-
tion of the immediate second coming of Christ ;
and that expectation has proved mistaken.
Now our Lord plainly did not mean His dis-
ciples to know when His judgement was to be
made manifest, and St. Paul apparently recog-
nized this J , so that his immediate anticipation of
the end can never have been part of his faith
never more than the reflection of the eager
desire which filled the heart of the Church.
On the other hand, our Lord did mean His
disciples to go on expecting Him. Thus St.

1 i Thess. v. 2 : ' The day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in
the night.' To know this is to have answer enough to questions
about the times and seasons of the coming (v. i).

The day approaching 135

Paul's admonition is as applicable now as ever.
The future of the world and of each nation and
institution is precarious : things which seem
solid and strong may crumble and melt ; how
soon God is to make plain His judgements, in
part or on the whole, we do not know ; when
each one of us is to pass by death to the great
account we do not know. There is no reason-
able attitude towards the unknown coming of
judgement except to be ready, and, though the
darkness of the alienated and godless world is
all around us, to live as children of the light
eagerly expecting the dawning of the day x .

And to meet Christ we must be like Christ.
And to be like Christ we must be in Christ,
clothed with His righteousness, invested with
His new nature, fighting with the weapons of
His victorious manhood. The ' evil ' which is
in ourselves, the unregulated flesh, we can only
' overcome with good ' the good which is Jesus
Himself: for it is no longer we that live in our
bare selves, but Christ that liveth in us. We
are baptized into Him, we possess His spirit,
we eat His flesh and drink His blood. What
remains is practically to clothe ourselves in

1 It is interesting to compare this passage with the closely
similar one of Thess. v. 1-4. Cf. Eph. v. 14 ff. ; vi. n.

136 The Epistle to the Romans

Him *, appropriating and drawing out into our-
selves by acts of our will His very present
help in trouble. So can we become like Him,
and be fitted to see Him as He is 2 .

This passage played a memorable part in
St. Augustine's life ; for when the child's voice
had bidden him ' open and read/ these were the
words upon which he opened, and which sealed
his conversion to the faith he served so nobly
' not in rioting and drunkenness, . . . but put ye
on the Lord Jesus Christ/ ' I had no wish/ he
tells us, ' to read any further, nor was there any
need. For immediately at the end of this sen-
tence, as if a light of certainty had been poured
into my heart, all the shadows of doubt were
scattered 3 /

1 Christ is ' put on ' in baptism by all, Gal. iii. 27 ; but we all
still need to appropriate what we have received, and so ' put
Him on ' for ourselves ; cf. Eph. iv. 24 ; Col. iii. 12.

2 See app. note G, p. 238, for an admirable prayer by Jeremy
Taylor based on this thought.

s Conf. viii. 12.

Toleration in inessentials 137

DIVISION V. 6. CHAPTER XIV. 1-23.

Mutual toleration.

ST. PAUL'S practical exhortations show no
definite scheme, but flow out of one another in
a natural sequence. He began with the funda-
mental moral disposition required by life in the
Christian community (xii). He proceeded to the
relation between the Christian community and
the government of the world outside (xiii. 1-7).
This led him to lay brief and vigorous emphasis
upon the universal range of Christian obligation
(8-10), and the motive which is to make Christians
zealous in rising to its fulfilment (11-14). Now 1
he comes back to the difficulties which arise
among Christians the difficulties in actually
living together as members of the same com-
munitydifficulties on those small points of
religious observance which seem so unimportant

1 Possibly his mind passes by a natural reaction from the
thought of sensual licentiousness (xiii. 13) to that of unenlightened
asceticism.

138 The Epistle to the Romans

in the abstract, and which, in the actual experience
of intercourse, prove to be so terribly important,
and so easily give rise to a * crisis in the Church.'
How were the reasonably-minded majority 1 , who
thought that all kinds of food were morally
indifferent, to behave towards the scrupulous who
would only eat vegetables? How were those
Christians, who recognized no distinction be-
tween one day and another, to behave towards
people who still held the mind of the writer of
Ecclesiasticus, that ' some days God had exalted
and hallowed, and some he had made ordinary
days 2 '?

The problem of ' lawful meats ' had often been
before the early Christians. It could not but
have been so, seeing that those among them,
who had passed under Jewish influences had
been brought under a system in which the
distinction between clean and unclean meats
had been rigorously observed. True, our
Lord had ' made all meats clean 3 / as He had
opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
And the vision which reassured St. Peter on the

1 It is implied (xiv. i ; xv. i and 7) that the strong-minded
brethren were in the ascendant. It is them chiefly to whom
St. Paul addresses himself.

2 Ecclus. xxxiii. 9. * Mark vii. 19.

Toleration in unessentials 139

latter point, and forbade him 'to call any man
common or unclean V was expressed in a form
which implied that the same principle would
apply to food. But this fundamental catholic
principle, in its sharp opposition to Jewish
particularism, was not accepted without a struggle
at every point. How hotly, for a time, the
struggle raged, we dimly perceive in the narrative
of the Acts, and especially in St. Paul's Epistle
to the Galatians 2 . But at the Jerusalem con-
ference the fundamental catholic principle was
unmistakably reaffirmed. Gentiles were to be
admitted to brotherhood without circumcision or
the keeping of the law. Henceforth then the
reactionaries had no ground to stand on. The
law of clean and unclean meats had gone with
the rest of the Jewish laws. But while the
Gentiles won a complete victory on the main
principle, they were required by the apostolic
council to make concessions to Jewish habits in
eating, such as could not affect the main principle.
They were to eat meat killed in the Jewish
manner, with the blood thoroughly drained out.
This in itself would probably exclude them from

1 Acts x. 28.

3 The matter of 'eating with the Gentiles' was prominent, cf.

140 The Epistle to the Romans

the Gentile shambles, where also much of the
meat which was for sale would have been offered
to idols 1 . By the observance of such a con-
cession, then, Jew and Gentile were to live
and eat together in peace.

The actual enactment of the Jerusalem con-
ference had a limited application to the Gentile
Christians of Antioch and Syria and Cilicia 2 .
But the principle was a vital and universal one :
to hold firm the catholic or * indifferentist '
principle, but to make concessions for love's sake
and to facilitate mutual fellowship. And this
same principle St. Paul soon had reason to
apply again at Corinth. There the problem was
not How could Jew and Gentile live and eat
together? but How far could Gentiles, who had
become Christians, associate with Gentiles who
were still adherents of the old religion, and eat
their meats ? St. Paul, in answering this question
for the Corinthians, strongly asserts the indiffer-
entist principle that meat of all kinds is God's
gift and good, and that it can have contracted no
moral pollution through any idolatrous ceremony
to which it has been subjected. No questions,
therefore, are to be asked as to its antecedents.
In this physical sense meats which had been

1 i Cor. x. 25. a Acts xv. 23.

Toleration in unessentials 141

offered to idols might be freely eaten. But
when such eating could do harm, when, for
instance, one man points out to another that a
particular portion of food has been part of a
sacrifice, and it is plain he will be scandalized by
the eating of it, then the other must abstain 1 ,
restricting his own lawful liberty for charity and
Christian brotherhood's sake.

Now St. Paul had heard of a new form of the
old difficulty at Rome 2 . There was a Jewish
asceticism similar to what is found frequently
among orientals, and was practised in Europe
among the Pythagoreans which required men
to abstain from animal food altogether and from
wine. Such was probably the rule of the
Essenes in Palestine 3 , as of the Therapeutae in
Egypt, and such was, according to a very early
authority, the rule of St. James, the Lord's
brother. Such a practice, then, had found favour
among a minority of Christians at Rome. And

1 i Cor. viii, and x. 23-33.

2 The exact point abstaining from all flesh meat is so different
from what had presented itself at Corinth that there must be
a particular reference to Roman circumstances, of which St. Paul
was probably informed by Priscilla and Aquila.

3 This seems to follow from Philo's statement that they did not
make animal sacrifices : and from Josephus' description of their
way of life as Pythagorean.

142 The Epistle to the Romans

St. Paul in the passage we are now to study,
in principle plainly approves of the indifferentist
practice of the iajority. He knows, and is
persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is
unclean of itself. It is, he implies, a weak and
unduly scrupulous conscience which makes men
vegetarians. But, on the other hand, this weaker
brother this man with less clear perception of
Christian principle in the matter must in no
way be alienated. He is to be made welcome.
There is no obligation upon him to eat meat.
God laid no such requirement upon him when
he became a Christian. 'God received him/
The Church must continue the like liberality, and
not even seek to pronounce judgement in the
matter. In life and death each man is Christ's
servant, and is responsible to God for what he
does or does not do. Therefore let each man
simply be faithful to his own conscience before
God in this matter, so that whatever he eats he
can 'say his grace/ or 'give thanks/ with a
good conscience ; and let him be respectfully
tolerant of his brother's practice the strong not
despising the weak, nor the weak judging and
condemning the strong.

So far for liberty. But if, by using our liberty
to eat meat, we are found to run a risk of really

Toleration in unessentials 143

troubling our brother, or even (what is worse)
leading him to act against his conscience and
eat what he feels he ought not 1 , then we must
abstain. This becomes matter of character and
peaceable fellowship and spiritual joy, and these
are the really material things in the kingdom of
God. Sooner than do injury to this really divine
cause, sooner than be a hindrance to his brother,
the Christian had better willingly abstain alto-
gether from flesh and wine too.

In passing St. Paul had noticed another in-
different matter besides the eating of meats. It
was the observance of days. St. Paul undoubt-
edly considered that all distinction of high days
and common days, all distinction of the sabbath
from other days, had been in principle abolished
by Christianity. For Gentile Christians, like
the Galatians, to be ' observing (Jewish) days,
and months, and seasons, and years 2 / is to
show a miserable disposition to fall back upon
a superannuated legal idea of religion to fall
back from the religion of the Spirit to the
religion of the letter ; from the substance to the

1 Cf. i Cor. viii. 10.

2 Gal. iv. 10 ; cf. Col. ii. 16, 17 : ' Let no man therefore judge you
in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon
or a sabbath day : which are a shadow of the things to come ; but
the body is Christ's.'

144 The Epistle to the Romans

shadow. For the Christian, in fundamental
principle, there are no ' sacred days/ for all days
are indifferently sacred. As instructed Christian
men could eat all meats, so they could regard
all days as on the same level in God's sight.
But all Christians had not the full perception
of principle. Among the Galatians, indeed,
the tendency to observe days is viewed more
severely as part of a general reactionary ten-
dency. But at Rome it appears to have
represented simply the practice of a harmless,
if imperfectly enlightened, minority, and St. Paul
merely ranks it among things indifferent, which
are to be frankly tolerated. It is to be purely
left to the individual conscience.

With these preliminary explanations which
in this case will serve our purpose better than
an analysis we can read this section without
experiencing any great difficulty.

But him that is weak in faith receive ye, yet not to
doubtful disputations 1 . One man hath faith to eat all
things : but he that is weak eateth herbs. Let not him
that eateth set at nought him that eateth not ; and let not
him that eateth not judge him that eateth : for God hath

1 Or for decisions of doubts, marg. This, or something like this,
is the right meaning ; cf. Hebr. v. 14 : ' for decision between good
and evil.' I Cor. xii. 10 : ' discernings of spirits/ i.e. decisions as
to their true character.

Toleration in unessentials 145

received him. Who art thou that judgest the servant of
another ? to his own lord he standeth or falleth. Yea, he
shall be made to stand ; for the Lord hath power to make
him stand. One man esteemeth one day above another :
another esteemeth every day alike. Let each man be fully
assured in his own mind. He that regardeth the day,
regardeth it unto the Lord : and he that eateth, eateth
unto the Lord, for he giveth God thanks ; and he that
eateth not, unto the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God
thanks. For none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth
to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord ;
or whether we die, we die unto the Lord : whether we
live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's. For to this end
Christ died, and lived again, that he might be Lord of
both the dead and the living. But thou, why dost thou
judge thy brother ? or thou again, why dost thou set at
nought thy brother ? for we shall all stand before the
judgement-seat of God. For it is written,

As I live, saith the Lord, to me every knee shall bow,
And every tongue shall confess to God *.
So then each one of us shall give account of himself to
God.

Let us not therefore judge one another any more : but
judge ye this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock in
his brother's way, or an occasion of falling. I know, and
am persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean
of itself: save that to him who accounteth anything to be
unclean, to him it is unclean. For if because of meat thy
brother is grieved, thou walkest no longer in love. Destroy
not with thy meat him for whom Christ died. Let not
then your good be evil spoken of: for the kingdom of
God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. For he that herein

1 From Isa. xlv. 23.
II. L

146 The Epistle to the Romans

serveth Christ is well-pleasing to God, and approved
of men. So then let us follow after things which make
for peace, and things whereby we may edify one another.
Overthrow not for meat's sake the work of God. All
things indeed are clean ; howbeit it is evil for that man
who eateth with offence. It is good not to eat flesh, nor
to drink wine, nor to do anything whereby thy brother
stumbleth. The faith which thou hast, have thou to thy-
self before God. Happy is he that judgeth not himself in
that which he approveth. But he that doubteth is con-
demned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith ; and
whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

i. According to St. Paul a catholic church
ought to mean a tolerant church, and a 'good
catholic' a large-hearted Christian. If men of
all races, with all sorts of traditional instincts and
habits, were to live together in close social
cohesion in the Christian community and that
was essential this must involve much mutual
forbearance, much self-restraint, and deliberate
toleration of differences 1 . St. Paul plainly not
merely uses, but loves, the language of toleration.
' One man eateth, another man eateth not/ ' One
man esteemeth one day above another ; another
esteemeth every day alike. Let each man be
fully assured in his own mind/ ' Receive ye him
. . . not with a view to decisions of disputed
questions/ Thoroughly in St. Paul's spirit is

1 Cf. Ephes. pp. 271 f.

Toleration in unessentials 147

the familiar saying ' in necessary things unity :
in those less than necessary liberty : in all things
charity V

In necessary things unity. To St. Paul this
principle meant a clear limit to toleration. There
is a common teaching which lies at the basis of
the Church which must not be interfered with,
which is strictly necessary. * Though we, or an
angel from heaven, should preach unto you any
gospel other than that which we preached unto
you, let him be anathema 2 / ' How say some
among you that there is no resurrection of the
dead? But if there is no resurrection of the
dead, neither hath Christ been raised : and if
Christ hath not been raised, then is our preach-
ing vain, your faith also is vain V Plainly there
is an essential fundamental creed which must not
be trifled with. The same is true about the
moral law. In respect of that also the Chris-
tian body must exercise upon its members the
severity of judgement 4 , that ' he that hath done '
the evil deed ' might be taken away from among
them/ or excommunicated. Once more, we
cannot conceive St. Paul making the necessity
of visible unity a secondary consideration 5 , nor

1 See app. note H, p. 239. 2 Gal. i. 8.

3 i Cor. xv. 12, 13. * i Cor. v. 8 Cf. Ephes. p. 126.

L 2

148 The Epistle to the Romans

the recognition of the authority of the apostolic
ministry which is to be the centre of unity, nor
the sacraments, \vhich again are not only means
of divine grace to the individual but instruments
and bonds of unity. Nor again would St. Paul
undervalue the spirit of obedience to the rules
of the Church. He hates the spirit of heresy or
separatism. ' We have no such custom/ he
would say to the recalcitrant, ' neither the
churches of God 1 / Once again, St. Paul is
prepared to let everything turn on even a small
and unessential point, if that point has become
the symbol of a vital principle for good or evil.
Thus, in itself, ' circumcision was nothing/ but
when among the Galatians the practice of it
came to mean a practical Judaizing a practi-
cal abandonment of the fundamental Christian
principle then ' Behold, I Paul say unto you,
that, if ye receive circumcision, Christ will profit
you nothing 2 /

Here, then, are St. Paul's essentials, as to
which he is intolerant a fundamental tradi-
tion of faith and morals : the maintenance of the
unity of the body by means of the apostolic
stewardship, and through the ' one baptism/ and
the 'one loaf : and the spirit of due subordina-

1 i Cor. xi. 16. 2 Gal. v. a.

Toleration in unessentials 149

tion which is necessary to corporate life. But
in a spirit very unlike what has at times become
prevalent in the Church, he would clearly
minimize the action of authority, and leave large
room for the free movement of conscience in
Christians. ' Let us therefore, as many as be
perfect, be thus minded : and if in anything
ye are otherwise minded, even this shall God
reveal unto you : only, whereunto we have
already attained, by that same rule let us walk V
Surely it is not very difficult to apply this
spirit of St. Paul to our own time, in view of
those subordinate points which excite such deep
animosities. Men are by fundamental disposi-
tion, in great measure, ritualist or puritan, eccle-
siastically or individually minded, disciplinarian
or mystical. And the Church should lay on
all a certain common law of doctrine and
morals and worship, sufficient to keep them all
together in one body. But, consistently with
the coherence of the body, why should there not
be both an ornate and a bare ritual of worship,
both societies of strict observance and individual
freedom, and a wide field of open questions in
which we do not even expect ' decisions of
doubts ' ? Instead of my own reflections on this

1 Phil. iii. 15, 1 6.

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

150 The Epistle to the Romans

subject I will ask my readers' attention to the
following extracts from a suggestive book 1 .

1 At all times there are those to whom what
we may call the minor symbolism of ritual is far
from being as helpful as it is to others. There
is the greatest diversity here. Modes of worship,
which repel one man as bleak and bare, attract
another by their very simplicity. The diversity
is so natural and so obvious that it calls for
neither apology nor explanation ; yet it is easily
strained into a cause of disruption/

1 St. Paul is speaking of strong brethren and
of weak; of those who need earthly guides
and of those who do not ; of those who attach
high value to rules and forms and helps; and
of those for whom ordinances have but little
significance ; of mystics and disciplinarians/

1 Again, do we not still want a scientific
theology? I mean a theology which should
do what any scientific treatise does. It should
lay down clearly and plainly the essential con-
ditions of unity, and as regards the unessential
should content itself with saying, " Here men
differ ; one thinks thus, another thus." . . . Ask
yourself, What is it that will carry me, being

1 Unity in Diversity, by Charles Bigg, D.D. (Longmans, 1899),
pp. 84, 85, 95.

Toleration in unessentials 151

what I am, to heaven? What is it will carry
my brother here, who is so unlike me, to
heaven? What is it that will carry us both
to heaven ? There you will find the essential/

St. Paul, we observe, lays great stress upon
honesty of conscience. He wishes men, even
in small matters, seriously to cultivate a con-
science of what is right, as men should do who
even in small things expect a divine judgement ;
and seriously also to cultivate the faculty of not
interfering with their brother's conscience.
(' Hast thou faith ? Have it to thyself/ Do not
parade your superior enlightenment.) He is
greatly afraid of people leading others, or being
led for mere agreement's sake, to do what their
own conscience does not justify. And to do
even a good thing because another does it
whom we want to be like, without ourselves
feeling sure it is good, or with a doubtful con-
science *, this, St. Paul says, is sin. This
warning we really need to lay to heart in our
age, when fashion is such a very strong force in
religion. This individual follows that individual
and ' supposes it must be all right, as every one
seems to do it ' ; this congregation follows that

1 'Whatever is not of faith is sin that is whatever is against
conscience.' Aquinas, quoted in 5. and H. in he.

152 The Epistle to the Romans

congregation in adopting a popular practice,
without its real basis and justification being con-
sidered. But fashion and the influence of mem-
bers is a great danger in religion. ' Let every
man be fully assured in his own mind.' ' What-
ever is not of faith is sin V

2. Plainly, when St. Paul wrote his epistles,
there was no observance of a Sabbath obligatory
upon Christians 2 . But was there none of Sun-
day ? ' The first day of the week ' was already
'the Lord's day/ so far as that Christians who
could not meet to ' break the bread ' every
day, met on that day specially to commemorate
the death of their risen Lord till He should
come again 3 . It was already sufficiently dis-
tinctive for St. Paul to name it as the appro-
priate day for laying by alms for the poor 4 .
But these special observances of it were not
obligatory. Christians, when they could meet
every day, might make their eucharist every
day. No such observance of Sunday was yet
enjoined as was incompatible with regarding

1 Cf. xii. 6 : * Let us prophesy according to the proportion of
our faith.'

2 Col. ii. 16 : ' Let no man judge you in respect of a sabbath
day.'

3 This is probably implied in Acts xx. 7.

4 i Cor. xvi. a.

Toleration in unessentials 153

all days of the week alike. Nothing less than
this can satisfy St. Paul's words. In principle,
as Bishop Lightfoot said 1 , 'the kingdom of Christ
has no sacred days or seasons, because every
time alike is holy/

Yet the bishop adds, 'appointed days are
indispensable to her efficiency/ This was soon
found to be the case. Probably before the end of
the first century, the Didache mentions not only
the observance of Sunday by the eucharistic
service, but the observance also of the Wednes-
day and Friday fasts. Clement, about the same
date, strongly emphasizes the principle of order
in place and time, as still belonging to Christian
worship. ' They, therefore, that make their offer-
ing at the appointed seasons are acceptable and
blessed/ The Canons of Hippolytus show that
by the end of the second century there must
have been a great development of ecclesiastical
regulations, so far restraining the individual

1 Philippians, on 'the Christian Ministry,' p. 181. The lan-
guage in the immediate context I cannot make my own. But
the statement quoted is surely true. And to this day I suppose,
for those living in religious communities and similar institu-
tions, there is very little practical difference between Sundays
and week-days. This almost complete absence of distinction,
however, must always come about, if it is to be legitimate, by
raising the week-days to the spiritual level of the Sundays, and
not by the opposite process.

154 The Epistle to the Romans

liberty of the earliest days, and that, as far as we
know, without protest or sense of alarm. Nor
need St. Paul have been in opposition to such
church rules. The spirit of regulation is strong
in him *. On the other hand, there is no doubt
that the Church has not generally, one might
say has hardly ever, been conscious, as St. Paul
was, of the danger of religious regulations as
such. It is so much easier to keep certain rules
than to acquire and maintain a certain mind and
spirit and principle of action. In the history of
the Church St. Paul, we feel, would very often
have been saying, ' I am afraid of you : the
rules are good in themselves, but there are
dangers attaching to all rules of which you
seem to be quite unconscious. There is a lower
sort of religion of forms and observances, and
you may fall back into it as easily as the
Galatians.'

But after all, rules for living religiously, pri-
vate or ecclesiastical, are, we all know, invaluable,
and practically necessary. A man or a church
that should attempt to dispense with them
would come to disaster. It is very difficult to
fathom the depth of the mischief that has come

1 Especially in the Pastoral Epistles : but also in the epistles to
the Thessalonians and Corinthians.

Toleration in unessentials 155

about in the corporate social life of the Church
of England, through the neglect of the surely
moderate amount of regulation which was pro-
vided for us by the Prayer Book in the way of
festival and fast days and of daily service. To
keep a few simple, intelligible, religious rules all
together gives almost as much as a common
creed the feeling of social coherence. Even the
extremest Paulinist need have no fear so long
as the ecclesiastical regulations do not reach the
point of becoming a burden so long as no one
could be in danger of priding himself on ' acquir-
ing merit* by their mere observance; and so
long also as the principle is kept clearly in view
that ' the rules were made for man and not man
for the rules/ But I do not think there can be
any reasonable doubt that St. Paul would re-
pudiate the idea that any rules of worship and
observance, other than those which are neces-
sarily involved in the administration of the sacra-
ments, can obtain by prescription a right to
permanence. ' They may be changed according
to the diversities of countries, times, and men's
manners/ They were made for man ; and the
Church or the churches with due regard to
mutual fellowship can modify or abolish
them.

156 The Epistle to the Romans

3. 'Overthrow not for meat's sake the work
of God/ ' It is good not to eat flesh nor to
drink wine, nor to do anything whereby thy
brother stumbleth/ ' Wherefore, if meat maketh
my brother to stumble, I will eat no flesh for
evermore, that I make not my brother to
stumble 1 / Here is the right principle of 'total
abstinence ' which does not deny the legitimate
use of what it yet permanently abandons for
love's sake. St. Paul would have Timothy use
a little wine when it was for his health's sake,
but when health was not in question, he would
have all men ask, not how much liberty in this
or that is lawful for them, but how they can
avoid causing offence how they can do most
good. This principle admits of application in
many directions. For instance, it may be very
hard to determine why certain minor forms of
gambling are wrong, or whether they are posi-
tively wrong. But St. Paul would have the
other question asked Can it be denied that
the best way to avoid leading my brother into
one of the most common dangers of our time,
is to keep altogether free from a habit which
in any case can do no good to body or
mind?

1 r Cor. viii. 13.

Toleration in unessentials 157

4. Here, as in x. 7, St. Paul touches upon the
descent into Hades, and indicates the purpose of
it. ' For this end Christ died, that He might be
Lord of the dead/ It might have been imagined
that the dim realms of the dead were outside the
jurisdiction of Christ that the dead have no
king that the kingdom of redemption does not
include them. To obviate such an idea, to show
the universality of His realm, Christ went down
among the dead.

5. In many places of the New Testament
there is mention of the thanksgiving before
food the Christian's 'saying grace/ Whether
he eat flesh or vegetables he 'giveth God thanks 1 /
And the word used is the word which, in its
substantive form, is 'eucharist/ And indeed
there is meaning in this. The thankful recep-
tion by the Christian of the ordinary bread of
his daily life as coming from God, touched his
common meals with something of the glory of
divine communion ; and the eucharist in its turn

1 Cf. i Cor. x. 30 : < Why am I evil spoken of for that for which
I give thanks.' i Tim. iv. 3, 4 : < Meats, which God created to
be received with thanksgiving. . . . For every creature of God is
good ... if it be received with thanksgiving : for it is sanctified
through the word of God and prayer. Cf. Acts xxvii. 35 : < And
when he had taken bread, he gave thanks to God in the presence
of all : and he brake it, and began to eat.'

158 The Epistle to the Romans

is the common blessing and breaking of the
bread, raised by the Holy Spirit to a higher
power and consecrated to become the vehicle of
the bread of life 1 .

1 Matt. xxvi. 26 ; cf. Luke xxiv. 30.

Unselfish forbearance 159

DIVISION V. 7. CHAPTER XV. 1-13.

Unselfish forbearance and indusiveness.

IT was essential, as has been said, that men
whose prejudices and instincts were different
should live in the same church and eat at the
same love feast. This would require a large-
hearted and unselfish self-control. Formerly, as
in Syria and Palestine, it was the Jews who
occupied the position of vantage in the Christian
communities, and were not disposed to tolerate
the ways of the Gentiles. Now the tables are
turned, and the Gentiles are in the majority.
The danger is now that those whose instincts
are Gentile should bear hardly upon the minority
whose prejudices are more or less Jewish. Such
St. Paul anticipates, or knows from Priscilla
and Aquila, will be the danger among the Roman
Christians. Formerly Judaic narrowness had
been a formidable danger. It had developed
a most perilous heresy, and St. Paul had dealt
with it as a deadly poison. Now what remained

160 The Epistle to the Romans

of Jewish feelingwas a weakness to be generously
borne with. It affords St. Paul an opportunity
of falling back on the general principle, that the
measure of Christian strength and full-grown
manhood is the readiness to bear the weaknesses
of others.

To be told he must not use his normal liberty,
must not eat his usual meal or drink his usual
cup of wine, because it might scandalize some
Christian with the ascetic prejudices of an
Essene, or even induce him to do the same
against his own conscience to be told this
was annoying to a man who held the ' strong '
Christian conviction that all kinds of food were
indifferently allowable. The weak scruple of
his brother Christian had become an annoying
burden of self-denial and self-restraint laid on
himself. But this, St. Paul says, is how
Christian strength whether it be the moral
strength of clear convictions, or any other sort
of faculty 1 must show itself, in readiness to
suffer on account of other people's deficiencies,
in not resenting the restraints they lay on us, in
not expecting to do as we please, but being

1 We are all ' strong ' in some respect, Origen remarks, so that
' ye that are strong bear the infirmities of the weak' comes to be
as broad a precept as < bear ye one another's burdens.'

Unselfish forbearance 161

ready to accommodate ourselves to our neigh-
bour's tastes where it is for his good. That
is what our great example did. Plainly His
whole human life was putting Himself under
the restraints which our weaknesses and narrow-
nesses and slownesses laid on Him. The
righteous man in the psalm complains that he
has to bear all the reproaches of God which
impatient and rebellious Israelites might utter;
and that is the picture of Christ bearing our
infirmities. (The reproaches which fell on Him
were for the very largeness of His love ; ( because
He received sinners/ and because He received
them on the Sabbaths as well as on other days.
They were reproaches of God, like Jonah's,
because He was too forbearing, too generous.)

Then St. Paul pauses a moment to justify his
use of the Psalms. These ancient scriptures did
not fulfil their purpose in their own time, or
for the old covenant. God intended them for
Christians. Their teaching is what they need.
The burdens of life are so many, its requirements
upon their patience so constant, that they find it
hard to maintain their hope. Yet what is the
Old Testament so full of? Lessons of endurance
and words of encouragement. The encourage-
ment and endurance then, which they gain from

ii. M

162 The Epistle to the Romans

the Old Testament, are to help them to maintain
Christian hope. They must not lose heart. The
end is a great one : it is the maintenance of
a united spirit in the Church, such as Christ can
approve, such as can express itself in a really
unanimous adoration of Him whom Christ recog-
nized as His God and Father. May the God
who inspires endurance and encouragement,
grant them not to fail in this great end!

Here is the central requirement, then, which
a catholic church lays on them. It is to be
unselfishly inclusive, to welcome into fellowship
people who are not naturally to their taste. Our
Lord did not scrutinize us men, but received us,
of whatever sort we were, that God might be
glorified in human brotherhood." He vindicated
the truth of God by fulfilling the covenant
of circumcision : first, to confirm the promises
given to the fathers of Israel 1 ; and, secondly,
to enlarge the compass of Israel, so that the
Gentiles too might share its blessings, out of
God's pure mercy apart from any promises.
And this alsothe fellowship of Jew and Gen-
tilewas matter of ancient prediction by psalmist

1 Cf. Gal. iv. 4, 5 : ' Christ, born of a woman, born under the law,
that he might redeem them which were under the law, that we
(Jews and Gentiles) might receive the adoption of sons.'

Unselfish forbearance 163

and prophet. The Roman Christians must not
therefore let themselves be discouraged because
they have a difficult task to fulfil. And the
apostle prays that God, the inspirer of hope, may
fill them with such a rich sense of the blessings
of believing in Him, that His Spirit, dwelling
in them, may make hope to abound in their
hearts.

Now we that are strong ought to bear the infirmities
of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each one
of us please his neighbour for that which is good, unto
edifying. For Christ also pleased not himself; but, as it
is written, The reproaches of them that reproached thee
fell upon me. For whatsoever things were written afore-
time were written for our learning, that through patience
and through comfort of the scriptures we might have hope.
Now the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be
of the same mind one with another according to Christ
Jesus : that with one accord ye may with one mouth glorify
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Wherefore
receive ye one another, even as Christ also received you,
to the glory of God. For I say that Christ hath been made
a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, that
he might confirm the promises given unto the fathers, and
that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy ; as it is
written,

Therefore will I give praise unto thee among the
Gentiles,

And sing unto thy name.
And again he saith,

Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with his people.
M 2

164 The Epistle to the Romans

And again,

Praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles;

And let all the-peoples praise him.
And again, Isaiah saith,

There shall be the root of Jesse,

And he that ariseth to rule over the Gentiles ;

On him shall the Gentiles hope.

Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that ye may abound in hope, in the power ot
the Holy Ghost.

i. The connexion of thought in this passage
is undoubtedly somewhat obscure. But we
know to-day, as well as ever, how difficult it
is to bear with what is disagreeable to us in
others, with what seem to us their deficiencies,
without breaking real Christian brotherhood and
co-operation. And we know also that where we
are possessed by an enthusiasm for brother-
hood such as inspired the early Christians, the
divisions which small differences tend to produce
are peculiarly discouraging, because they suggest
that real brotherhood is impossible where men
are so differently constituted. We ought not,
therefore, to be at a loss to see why St. Paul
should pass so easily from speaking of divisions
among Christians to speak of the grounds of
patience and encouragement and hope. The
Christian hope is in substantial part the hope

Unselfish forbearance 165

of a really catholic church a real brotherhood
among people of different races, classes, tastes,
and habits ; and it is this great hope which, even
in St. Paul's day, was continually suffering dis-
couragement and continually needed reinforcing.
And the reinforcement must be 'supernatural/
It is the divine love of the Spirit possessing us
which alone can give it vigour. When we are
full of the divine consolation, then it is that we
are least inclined to be critical, and most disposed
'to receive one another, as Christ also received
us, to the glory of God/ For this is the thought
we are to have constantly in view, when we find
people 'aggravating' Christ received us, and
made the best of those whom ' God gave him/ in
spite of the infinite annoyances which we men,
even the apostles, caused Him; He dealt with
us with infinite patience ; He made us welcome ;
He 'received us/

In fact, the reason why the connexion of
thought in this passage seems obscure to us,
is probably in part that we have ceased to think
of the real fellowship of the naturally unlike
fellowship in all that makes up human life as
a necessary part of the Christian religion. But
to St. Paul there was no Christianity without the
reality of catholic brotherhood.

LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE

166 The Epistle to the Romans

2. St. Paul here, as in writing to the Corin-
thians 1 , shows himself specially anxious that
Gentile Christians should not think they could
make light of the Old Testament, or imagine
that 'Christ was the end of the law* in any
such sense as would make the books of the old
covenant superfluous under the new. Their
value, he insists, remains permanent. When
he is writing to the Corinthians, he finds it in
the moral warnings the warnings of divine
judgement upon the chosen people of which
the history is full. In this epistle he is thinking
chiefly of the lessons of ' endurance ' and divine
' encouragements/ which histories and prophets
provide. In his epistle to Timothy 2 he thinks
of the books as instruments by the use of which
the minister or representative of God may
become fully educated and equipped for all the
purposes of moral supervision and discipline.
They can thus educate and equip him, St. Paul

1 i Cor. x. ir : 'These things happened unto them (the Jews
in the Wilderness) byway of example , and they were written for
our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come.'

2 2 Tim. iii. 15-17. 'Sacred writings which are able to make
thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
Every scripture inspired by God is also profitable for teaching,
for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteous-
ness : that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely
unto every good work.'

Unselfish forbearance 167

teaches, because they were originally written
under the influence of a divine inspiration ; but
it is only when faith has finally attained its true
object in Jesus Christ that their real meaning
becomes apparent. And this last principle is
implied in almost all his use of the Old Testa-
ment.

It is a comfort to perceive that none of the
elements of permanent value, which St. Paul
discerns in the Old Testament, are the least
likely to be affected by reasonable criticism of
its documents. Its history, critically read, does
not become less truly pregnant with moral
warnings or lessons of endurance. The en-
couragements of the prophets are in no respect
reduced in force when they are brought into
right relation to their own times. The whole
library of books is, at least, as capable of edu-
cating and equipping the minister of Christ as
ever. Their inspiration is still obvious, when
it is interpreted candidly in view of all the facts.
And still they can only be rightly regarded when
they are looked upon as various elements in a
progress which has Christ for its goal.

In his use of particular passages in the
Old Testament St. Paul here shows himself as
free as ever, but with the same fundamental

i68 The Epistle to the Romans

adherence to the true tendency of the Old
Testament as a whole. In quoting Ps. Ixix. 9
(ver. 3) he is seeing in the afflicted righteous
man a type of Christ. This psalm is constantly
cited in the New Testament with the same
reference 1 . It has been supposed 2 that St. Paul
here adopts a cry addressed to God by the
righteous sufferer in the psalm, and represents
it as addressed by Christ to his brother man.
' The reproaches aimed at thee, my despised
brother, have fallen upon me/ But, as I have
tried to show in the analysis above, this sup-
position is not needed. Christ is represented
appealing to God for succour, because He
utterly refuses to take the line of self-pleasing ;
but bears all that men's impatience of God
lays upon Him all their 'wild and weak com-
plaining/ And it is suggestive to remember,
with Origen, that it was Christ's 'receiving of
sinners and eating with them/ receiving them
on the Sabbath as well as other days, that
chiefly brought on Him the reproaches of men.
This was probably in St. Paul's mind.

In Ps. xviii. 49 (quoted ver. 9) the victorious

1 Cf above, xi. 9 ; in the Gospels, Matt, xxvii. 34 ; John ii. 17 ;
xix. 28 ; also Acts i. 20.
3 See S. and H. in he.

Unselfish forbearance 169

king declares that he will praise God for his
victory 'among the nations/ St. Paul applies
this to Christ, whose victory among the nations
means their redemption their becoming His
people.

In Deut. xxxii. 43 (ver. 10) 'the nations are
invited to congratulate Israel on possessing
a God like Jehovah, who will effectually take
up His people's cause. Such an invitation
addressed to the nations (cf. Isa. xlii. 10-12;
Ps. xlvii. 2, Ixvii. 1-7, &c.) involves implicitly
the prophetic truth that God's dealings with
Israel have indirectly an interest and importance
for the world at large 1 / This is still more plainly
implied in Ps. cxvii. i (ver. n).

Isa. xi. 10 (ver. 12) is quoted from the Greek
Bible, which is paraphrastic ; but the Hebrew
also asserts that the messianic king of David's
line is to be a ' signal to the nations/ and that
they are to 'resort to him' as to an oracle or
place of refuge 2 .

1 Driver, in loc. * Cheyne, in loc.

1 70 The Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION VI. CHAPTERS XV. 14 XVI. 27.

Conclusion.

THE long letter is almost ended. St. Paul has
developed the meaning of the revelation of
the divine righteousness. He has vindicated
the ways of God to the Jews. He has drawn
out sufficiently the moral conclusions from God's
mercy to mankind. Now he has only to secure
again his good terms with the Roman Chris-
tianswhich he does with the same tact and
the same anxiety as at the beginning 1 , to
explain his movements, to send his greetings to
individuals, and to bid farewell.

1 Vol. i. p. 53.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 171

DIVISION VI. i. CHAPTER XV. 14-33.

His excuse for writing and his hope of coming.

ST. PAUL is very anxious not to be understood
as if, while giving the Christians at Rome these
exhortations which we have just been reading,
he stood in any doubt himself of their goodness
of heart and full grasp of Christian principles, or
of their fitness to admonish one another. He
has only been bold to put them in mind of what
they already knew, because of the priestly
commission on behalf of his Lord towards all
the Gentiles, which the divine grace has bestowed
upon him as apostle of the Gentiles. The
gospel entrusted to him requires him as a priest
to prepare and offer sacrifice ; and the sacrifice
which he is to prepare, which the consecration
of the indwelling Spirit alone can make accept-
able, is that of the whole Gentile world. The
extent to which this great charge laid upon him
has been fulfilled, gives him good reason for

172 The Epistle to the Romans

boasting as he stands before God not in
himself, but in Christ Jesus. His work has
been a pioneer's work. He has made it his
ambition purely to lay foundations. Taking
words of Isaiah * for his motto, he had resolved
to go nowhere where any other had been before
him to make Christ known. But in that free
and open area of a yet unevangelized world,
Christ had worked through him to bring the
Gentiles to His obedience, and had accompanied
his preaching with evidences of miraculous
power and with the strong manifestations of the
Spirit. So that in the result the work of pro-
claiming the gospel had been accomplished,
starting from Jerusalem, in an extending circuit 2
or irregular progress, as far as Illyria.

This world-wide mission would give St. Paul
his title to visit Rome 3 . But its very greatness
has hitherto hindered him. Now however he
is hoping to satisfy the desire that has so long
possessed him, and to pay them a visit of some
length on his way to Spain. That is to say, he
hopes to come to them when the task is over

1 lii. 15, according to the Greek.

2 ' Round about,' literally ' in a circle,' as opposed to a straight
course ; cf. Mark vi. 6, ' round about the villages.'

3 Cf. i. 13-16.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 173

which is immediately occupying him. The
good will of the churches in Macedonia and
Achaia has shown itself in a collection of money
for the poor Christians at Jerusalem. This is
really the payment of a debt to those to whom
they owe their fellowship in Christ's salvation.
When then St. Paul has handed over this
collection, and secured to its recipients this fruit
of his mission, he hopes to pass to Spain by
way of Rome ; and again, as in his introduction 1 ,
he expresses his confidence that at Rome, as
elsewhere, the fullness of the rich gifts of Christ
will accompany his coming.

Meanwhile he makes his urgent request, by
their allegiance to Christ and their fellowship in
the spirit of love, that they will join with him
in wrestling with God in prayer for the success
of his present undertaking that he may escape
the danger to which he is exposed from the
hostility of the unbelieving Jews, and that the
gift, as ministered by him, may not prove un-
acceptable to the Jerusalem church ; so that he
may get happily to Rome and find repose there
with them. And he prays for the blessing of
the God of peace upon all of them.

174 The Epistle to the Romans

And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren,
that ye yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all
knowledge, able also, to admonish one another. But
I write the more boldly unto you in some measure, as
putting you again in remembrance, because of the grace
that was given me of God, that I should be a minister of
Christ Jesus unto the Gentiles, ministering 1 the gospel
of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be
made acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.
1 have therefore my glorying in Christ Jesus in things
pertaining to God. For I will not dare to speak of any
things save those which Christ wrought through me, for
the obedience of the Gentiles, by word and deed, in the
power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Holy
Ghost ; so that from Jerusalem, and round about even
unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ;
yea, making it my aim so to preach the gospel, not where
Christ was already named, that I might not build upon
another man's foundation : but, as it is written,

They shall see, to whom no tidings of him came,
And they who have not heard shall understand.
Wherefore also I was hindered these many times from
coming to you : but now, having no more any place in
these regions, and having these many years a longing to
come unto you, whensoever I go unto Spain (for I hope
to see you in my journey, and to be brought on my way
thitherward by you, if first in some measure I shall have
been satisfied with your company) but now, / say, I go
unto Jerusalem, ministering unto the saints. For it hath
been the good pleasure of Macedonia and Achaia to make
a certain contribution for the poor among the saints that
are at Jerusalem. Yea, it hath been their good pleasure;
and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been

1 ' Ministering in sacrifice ' marg.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 175

made partakers of their spiritual things, they owe it to
them also to minister unto them in carnal things. When
therefore I have accomplished this, and have sealed to
them this fruit, I will go on by you unto Spain. And
I know that, when I come unto you, I shall come in the
fulness of the blessing of Christ.

Now I beseech you, brethren, by our Lord Jesus Christ,
and by the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with
me in your prayers to God for me ; that I may be deli-
vered from them that are disobedient in Judaea, and that
my ministration which / have for Jerusalem may be
acceptable to the saints ; that I may come unto you in
joy through the will of God, and together with you find
rest. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.

i. St. Paul has a habit of representing those
he writes to in the best light 1 . But the words
' full of goodness/ l filled with all knowledge/
'able to admonish/ are no idle compliments. It
is not too much to suggest that St. Paul, as he
sees the high part which the church of the
capital must play in the world, perceives also, .
in what he hears of the Roman Christians,
evidences of the spirit which will enable them to
fulfil it. And history verifies the apostle's
anticipation. The letter of the Roman church
to the Corinthians, which passes under Clement's
name, and was written some forty years after

1 Cf. the opening of i Cor., a letter which contains on the
whole so much blame.

176 The Epistle to the Romans

this letter of St. Paul's, is the very embodiment
of the spirit of goodness, knowledge, and power
to admonish. The princely generosity of the
Roman church in all directions was proverbial
in the second century 1 . If it did not become
as distinguished as Alexandria in theological
science, it did become a chief centre of theo-
logical orthodoxy and government. And the
repeated evidences we gain that rigorists, from
Hippolytus to Novatian, were so dissatisfied with
the policy of the Roman bishops as to separate
themselves from their communion, give us good
reason to believe that the internal policy of this
church was, within just limits, liberal and tolerant.
2. St. Paul here describes his apostolic com-
mission in priestly language. 'The sacrificial
terminology is far more marked in the original
than it can be in a translation 2 / The word
for 'minister of Christ Jesus' is a technical
word for priest in the Greek Old Testament 3 .
The word translated ' ministering ' means ' offer-
ing sacrifice/ (That which St. Paul describes

1 Euseb. H. E. iv. 23.

2 Sanday, Conception of Priesthood (Longmans), p. 89.

8 Like ' agape ' (see above, p. 131, n. a) so this word ' liturgus '
appears to have been adopted in its priestly sense by the Greek
translators of the Bible from the current Greek of Alexandria, cf.
Deissmann, Bibclstudien, pp. 137

Excuses, hopes, and fears 177

himself as offering in sacrifice is not the gospel,
as our translation might imply : the gospel
assigns the sphere of the sacrifice 1 , but the
sacrifice he has to offer is that of the Gentile
world, in Christ, consecrated to be a fit sacrifice
by the Spirit.) The phrase also, ' in things per-
taining to God ' (cf. Hebr. ii. 17), is appropriate
to the priest as he stands before God. ' But
this is all symbolical language/ it is said. That
depends on what we take as the standard of
reality in the sacrificing priesthood. If Christ
is the standard of priesthood, and His method of
making sacrifice the standard method, then St.
Paul's account of his priestliness is not appre-
ciably metaphorical, except so far as metaphor
belongs to all earthly expressions of heavenly
realities ; it is rather true to say that the Jewish
or heathen priest, with his material victims, was
but the dim shadow of a true priest.

The point is that the true Christian idea of
sacrifice makes the substance of it to be always
persons returning to God the life He gave them.
If we must offer sacrifices of money and fruits
of the earth, that is because we cannot offer
ourselves without our bodies 2 , or our bodies

1 Cf. S. and H. in he. ' Making sacrifice as a priest under the
Gospel.' a Cf> xii x>

II. N

178 The Epistle to the Romans

without the material supplies on which they
depend. 'All things come of God, and of His
own do we give "Him/ And all our labour and
prayer for others must be an offering of them,
or a preparation to offer them 1 , to God; which
again is only our assisting them to offer them-
selves. And all this offering in sacrifice of our-
selves and others is rendered possible by the
one effectual sacrifice, through which alone we
and all men have access to the Father. It takes
place 'in Christ Jesus/ who, 'through eternal
Spirit offered himself without spot to God/
There, at the head of all, is the sacrifice of the
person, and that person the Son of Man, who
can take up into His very life and sacrifice even
all mankind. Throughout it is a sacrifice of
persons, or of things only as appertaining to
persons. This is the fundamental Christian
idea, and this at the bottom necessarily forbids
us to separate the thing offered from the person
offering, the victim from the priest. The priest
is the victim, for what he offers is himself.

It is this idea of sacrifice which is realized
in the eucharist. The eucharist is the central
sacrifice of the Christian body. It is to start

1 Col. i. 28 : Teaching every man . . . that we may present
every man,' i. e. present him in sacrifice.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 179

with a presentation of material things, bread
and wine of the fruits of the earth, with alms and
other offerings it may be: and these oblations
are accompanied with prayers and symbolic rites.
But all is done that both by word and act the
One Sacrifice may be commemorated and
pleaded. The outward rite but finds its mean-
ing and justification in that the sacrifice of the
Person. Again we can only take part in it with
any spiritual reality by becoming ourselves
sharers of His sacrifice ourselves the sacri-
fice we offer. 'And here/ we cry, 'we offer
and present unto Thee ourselves/ We men,
St. Augustine does not scruple to say, are the
body of Christ, which is offered in that sacrifice 1 .
And a quite new light is shed on intercessory
prayer, in the eucharist and in the rest of life,
when we view it as St. Paul would have us
view it, as a presenting in sacrifice before God
those for whom we pray, according to the true
idea of them which the sanctification of the Spirit
would make possible and actual. And a quite
new light is shed upon all work for others,
when we regard it as the preparing of such
a sacrifice for the Holy Spirit to consecrate.
From a different point of view St. Paul's con-

1 For his repeated statements see app. note I. p. 240.
N 2

180 The Epistle to the Romans

ception of his mission as the priest of the Gentile
world, might well suggest reflections to the
Church of England. If a Christian nation in
the providence of God is to overrun the world
and possess the nations not yet Christian, it
goes with a mission entrusted to it by God.
Its mission may be expressed, according to
St. Paul's idea, as that of evangelizing the world,
but also as that of preparing the heathen
nations to be offered to God. It is the return
of all humanity to Himself that God desires,
and we are to be the ministers of this perfected
offering. It strikes us with profound humilia-
tion to realize how ' far fetched ' St. Paul's idea
would appear to-day to the mass of our nation,
which, more than any other, is called by circum-
stances to an apostolate of the world.

3. St. Paul speaks, here and in many places
elsewhere, of his grounds for 'glorying/ or rather
'boasting 1 / in what Christ has wrought through
him, and of his ' being ambitious ' to preach
only where no one had been before him 2 . And
in reading such passages the question some-

1 Cf. i Cor. ix. 15 ; xv. 31 ; a Cor. i. 14 ; vii. 4, 14 ; viii. 24 ;
ix. 3 ; x. 8, 13 ; xi. 10, 16 xii. 9 ; Phil. ii. 16 ; i Thess. ii. 19.
These passages are worth examining in connexion.

3 Cf. 2 Cor. x. 15, 16.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 181

times arises in Christian minds was there, after
all, a strain of egotism unsubdued in St. Paul's
character ? Now no doubt, unlike other apostles
whose writings remain in the New Testament,
St. Paul had that sort of passionately personal
and individual nature which easily passes into
spiritual egotism. This at least is discernible
in his epistles. It is also true that the necessity
which lay so long upon him of vindicating his
own apostolic authority, makes it necessary for
him at times to talk about himself and his experi-
ences and his personal methods in a way that to
some minds suggests egotism ; and there is no
obligation upon us to maintain that St. Paul was
perfect. But we only understand these passages
aright when we remember that there runs
through them all a conscious irony. The basis
of St. Paul's whole theology was the denial of
any possible ground for a man to boast in him
self. l Where is boasting ? it is excluded/ ' He
that boasteth, let him boast in the Lord/ It is
Christ who 'leads St. Paul in' His 'triumph/
What he boasts of is not his own, but Christ's.
Of course, this sort of language very easily
admits of self-deception. St. Paul shows him-
self conscious of its danger 1 . But there can

1 See a Cor. xi. 17 ; xii. i.

182 The Epistle to the Romans

be no question of the vehement sincerity of
St. Paul in repudiating any homage to himself
which seemed to put him in the place of Christ,
or to substitute the teacher for his message 1 .
And where his personal gifts of intellect might
most easily have shone, he had determined to
abjure all 'the wisdom of men' in the method
of his preaching 2 . It is remarkable again that
as soon as ever the real peril from Judaism was
over in the Church, St. Paul drops his anti-
Judaistic polemic, and all that brings the per-
sonal element into prominence. He is abso-
lutely free from the charge of pursuing his
advantage so as to magnify a personal victory.
The more thoroughly we grow to know St. Paul,
the more, I think, we feel that his profession is
true that he will ' boast ' only ' in the cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ ' ; and that truly the world,
with all its personal ambitions, had been for
him nailed to the cross and killed 3 .

But what exactly was it that St. Paul had to
1 boast ' that Christ had wrought through him ?

He had, he says, accomplished the preaching
of the gospel in an irregular circuit from Jeru-
salem to Illyria. After he had made a begin-
ning of Christian preaching at Damascus, he

1 i Cor. i. 13 ff. * i Cor. ii. 1-5. * Gal. vi. 14.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 183

had, in fact, shared the apostolic preaching at
Jerusalem (Acts ix. 29), but his own special work
began at Tarsus, or rather at Antioch. After
that he had 'fulfilled the proclamation of the
gospel/ so far, that is to say, as it belonged
to the apostolic office, by founding churches in
a gradually enlarging circuit, especially in the
chief centres, as the narrative of the Acts shows
us, till travelling by the Egnatian way he would
have come within sight of the Illyrian mountains
at Thessalonica 1 . He may even have entered
Illyria when the Acts vaguely describes him as
going to Macedonia and then ' passing through
those parts 2 ' ; but the expression in this epistle
does not require this. It is sufficient that the
border of Illyria, through which the Egnatian
way led to Rome, had been so far his nearest
point to the capital.

St. Paul certainly implies that Rome was
included in his province of work, and that he
owed them a yet unpaid debt 3 . This must
surely mean, according to St. Paul's principle,
that no other of the greater apostles had yet
evangelized them or founded the church there 4 .

1 See S. and H. in he. a Acts xx. 2. 3 i. 14, 15.

4 Not Peter therefore, though he was doubtless afterwards at
Rome.

184 The Epistle to the Romans

Rome was no other man's foundation. But
none the less, the elements of a church had
collected there. The gospel was being preached
there by 'apostles' from among his own
circle. And St. Paul, for this reason, does not
contemplate any permanent stay with the
Romans, but regards Rome only as a place
where he can rest and refresh himself, as well as
supply deficiencies in the spiritual equipment of
the church there, before he passes further west
to the untouched region of Spain. St. Paul,
we see plainly enough, had no power to foresee
the future. But after the long residence at
Rome during his first captivity, which he did
not the least anticipate, did he, we ask, actually
get to Spain? There is certainly no good
reason to say he did not, for his movements are,
in the main, unknown to us in the last period of
his life ; and on the other hand in Clement's
letter to the Corinthians, written within the first
century, he is said to have passed before his
martyrdom to ' the limits of the west ' the ex-
treme west which is certainly most naturally
interpreted of Spain 1 .

4. St. Paul speaks of having wrought 'signs
and wonders/ The two words are habitually

1 Ad Cor. 5, see Lightfoot in he.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 185

combined in the New Testament. The word
'wonders' describes the miraculous and astonish-
ing character of the events, while 'signs ' indicates
that moral witness and significance which distin-
guishes Christian miracles from vulgar portents.
We read of St. Paul working miracles in the
Acts. What he says here, and elsewhere 1 ,
implies that they were frequently worked, and
especially at Corinth, where no such events are
recorded in the history. What it is important
for us to recognize is, that St. Paul so plainly
and repeatedly appeals, in the face of those who
could bear witness, to the fact that he himself
had power given to him to work miracles, as if it
were indisputable.

5. St. Paul tells us that he had it specially
laid upon him by the apostles of the circum-
cision that he was to 'remember the poor/
i. e. the poor Christians at Jerusalem ; where
poverty was specially rife, because, as we should
gather, the wealthier Jews had held aloof from
Christianity 2 . And this, he adds, was the very
thing he himself was zealous to do :>> . How
much it was in his mind, both the Acts and his
own epistles bear witness. We hear much in

1 2 Cor. xii. 12. 2 Cf. Jas. ii. 5, 6.

8 Gal. ii. 10.

186 The Epistle to the Romans

the epistles to the Corinthians 1 of the collection
made in the churches of Macedonia and Achaia.
Not only was thfs expression of Gentile good
will intended to conciliate the half-alienated and
suspicious Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, but
the acceptance of the gift at St. Paul's hands, as
the fruit of his own labour, was to diminish their
suspicion of himself. St. Paul was at pains to
prevent any suspicion attaching to his adminis-
tration of this bounty, and at every point we
perceive how much trouble he took about the
matter. But, hopeful and zealous as he was
about this work of charity, he did not underrate
its dangers. His urgent request for the Roman
Christians' prayers in this passage, and his readi-
ness to meet his death, if need be, at Jerusalem,
as expressed in the narrative of the Acts, show
us that he knew the danger he was incurring
from the fierce hostility of the Jerusalem Jews.

6. This passage about the collection 2 , coupled
with the allusion to Cenchreae, the port of
Corinth, at the beginning of the next chapter,
and the allusion to the Corinthian Gaius as
St. Paul's host 3 , enable us to fix the occasion of

1 i Cor. xvi. 1-452 Cor. viii, ix. 2 Cf. Acts xxiv. 17.

1 Rom. xvi. 23. Cf. i Cor. i. 14. which shows us a Gaius at
Corinth. Cf. the allusion to Erastus in the same verse, coupled
with 2 Tim. iv. 20.

Excuses, hopes, and fears 187

the writing of this epistle exactly at the moment
recorded in Acts xx. 3 the end of his three
months' residence in Greece. We also gather
from the Acts 1 , as well as from this epistle,
that it was his intention at that period, when
he had paid his visit to Jerusalem, to go to
Rome. Once more we know from the Acts 2
that Sosipater and Timothy were with him at
this point, and they join in the greetings of
the epistle 3 . So that all the indications taken
together fix with wonderful accuracy the exact
point when the epistle was written 4 .

7. We do well to note the word used by
St. Paul in asking the Roman Christians' prayers.
He begs them to 'strive together* with him in
their prayers. This word is a derivative of that
which describes our Lord's ' agony ' in prayer ;
and Origen's comment upon it is this : ' Hardly
any one can pray without some idle and alien
thought coming into his mind, and leading off
and interrupting the intended direction of his
mind to God. . . . And, therefore, prayer is
a great striving (agon, wrestling), so that the
fixed direction of the soul towards God may

1 Acts xix. 21. * Acts xx. 4.

8 Rom. xvi. 21.

* See further, on the purpose of the epistle, vol. i. pp. 4 flf.

i88 The Epistle to the Romans

be maintained, in spite of the enemies which
interfere and seek to scatter the sense of prayer;
so that one who* prays may justly say, with
St. Paul, " I have fought a good fight ; I have
finished my course." 3

A commendation 189

DIVISION VI. 2. CHAPTER XVI. 1-2.
A commendation.

ONE strong link among Christians of different
towns, constraining them to remember that their
brotherhood did not depend on physical near-
ness or personal acquaintance, lay in the ' letters
of commendation' from one local church to
another, which the Christian traveller carried
with him. And here we have an example of
such a letter given by St. Paul to the Corinthian
deaconess, Phoebe, who was probably the bearer
of his letter to the Roman Christians.

I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, who is a ser-
vant l of the church that is at Cenchreae : that ye receive
her in the Lord, worthily of the saints, and that ye assist
her in whatsoever matter she may have need of you :
for she herself also hath been a succourer of many, and
of mine own self.

The necessity of instructing women inquirers
or catechumens, visiting them at their homes,
preparing them for baptism, attending to their

1 Or deaconess, as margin.

190 The Epistle to the Romans

unclothing and reclothing at the font, and looking
after them afterwards, forced upon the Church
the institution of an order of deaconesses, side
by side with the deacons and for similar pur-
poses. Pliny found these female officers among
the Christians in Bithynia in the beginning of
the second century, and there is no reason why
already at this date the female order should
not have existed 1 . 'Here we learn/ says
Origen on this passage, 'that female ministers
are recognized in the Church.'

Phoebe is also called a succourer or 'patroness'
of Christians, including St. Paul, which suggests
a woman of wealth and influence. If so, we have
here an example of wealth, not asserting itself but
devoting itself to service, according to our Lord's
teaching: 'He that is greatest among you shall
be your servant (deacon) ' ; ' I am in the midst
of you as he that serveth (the deacon) 2 .' Such
an one is to be received in a manner 'worthy
of the saints,' the consecrated family of God,
and to be allowed to lack nothing which the
Roman Christians can supply her with.

1 See on this subject Deaconess Cecilia Robinson, The Ministry
of Deaconesses (Methuen, 1898), and Bernard, Pastoral Epistles,
p. 59. With Lightfoot, he interprets i Tim. iii. u of deaconesses
rather than of the wives of the deacons.

a Matt, xxiii. n ; Luke xxii. 27.

Personal greetings 191

DIVISION VI. 3. CHAPTER XVI. 3-16.

Personal greetings.

THEN St. Paul, according to his custom, winds
up his epistle with personal greetings. In this
case they are sent to the individual Christians,
among those who from various parts of the
empire had collected at Rome, whose names
his memory so retentive of personal relation-
shipsenabled him to recall.

Salute Prisca and Aquila my fellow-workers in Christ
Jesus, who for my life laid down their own necks ; unto
whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of
the Gentiles : and salute the church that is in their house.
Salute Epaenetus my beloved, who is the firstfruits of Asia
unto Christ. Salute Mary, who bestowed much labour on
you. Salute Andronicus and Junias \ my kinsmen, and
my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles,
who also have been in Christ before me. Salute Amplia-
tus my beloved in the Lord. Salute Urbanus our fellow-
worker in Christ, and Stachys my beloved. Salute
Apelles the approved in Christ. Salute them which are

1 Or Junta (a woman's name), as margin.

192 The Epistle to the Romans

of the household of Aristobulus. Salute Herodion my
kinsman. Salute them of the household of Narcissus,
which are in the Lord. Salute Tryphaena and Tryphosa,
who labour in the l!ord. Salute Persis the beloved, which
laboured much in the Lord. Salute Rufus the chosen in
the Lord, and his mother and mine. Salute Asyncritus,
Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brethren
that are with them. Salute Philologus and Julia, Nereus
and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints that are
with them. Salute one another with a holy kiss. All the
churches of Christ salute you.

i. Aquila, a Pontic Jew, had resided in Rome,
doubtless in pursuit of his business as a tent-
maker; but the edict of Claudius had compelled
him to quit the capital in common with his
brethren, and he had taken refuge at Corinth
with his wife Prisca (as St. Paul calls her), or
Priscilla (according to St. Luke 1 ); and there,
shortly after their arrival, St. Paul had found
them, made their acquaintance, and combined
with them in a common trade. To this was possi-
bly due their conversion to Christianity. When
St. Paul left Corinth, they accompanied him
to Ephesus, and remained there when he left
for Jerusalem; their influential position in the
Christian community being indicated to us by
their dealings with so important a teacher as

1 See the readings of Rom. xvi. 3 ; i Cor. xvi. 19 ; 2 Tim. iv.
19 (in R. V. which is probably right) ; and of Acts xviii. 2, 18, 26.

Personal greetings 193

Apollos. When St. Paul had returned to
Ephesus, and was writing his First Epistle
to the Corinthians, their house was the centre
for a Christian congregation *. It was possibly
during the Ephesian disturbances that they
risked their lives, or 'laid down their own
necks' for St. Paul. Whether on account of
this peril incurred, or for whatever reason, they
returned, as they were now free to do, to Rome.
The Epistle to the Romans follows the First
Epistle to the Corinthians by not more than
a year, and it finds Prisca and Aquila established
at Rome, with a church meeting at their house.
Probably they had been St. Paul's informants as
to affairs among the Roman Christians. A good
many years afterwards, when St. Paul was
writing his Second Epistle to Timothy 2 , we
hear of them again at Ephesus. So much
travelling as we find in their life was not
unusual in the Roman empire, and perhaps
least of all among the Jews.

The fact that Priscilla is generally mentioned
before her husband, both by St. Paul and St.
Luke 3 , as if she were more important, combined
with (i) a tradition which connects her with the

1 i Cor. xvi. 19. a 2 Tim Jv< J9

3 Twice out of three mentions in each case.
II. o

194 The Epistle to the Romans

titulus (or parish-church) Priscae at Rome, (2)
evidence connecting the Coemeterium Priscillae
with the Acilian gens, has led some scholars
to believe that Priscilla was a noble Roman lady
married to a Jewish husband. But the evidence
is not cogent, and it is more likely that both she
and her husband owed their Roman names to
being freedmen *. It was probably her promin-
ence among the Christians which led to her name
preceding that of her husband. We need only
think of Phoebe and Priscilla to understand how
influential women were in the earliest Christian
churches.

1 The church (which met) at their house ' is
a significant phrase 2 . The wealthier Christians,
or those whose houses were commodious,
turned them into churches, where the neigh-
bouring Christians met for worship, love feast
and eucharist. Several of the oldest churches

1 Perhaps both freedmen of the same member of the Acilian
gens. For Priscus or Prisca (or Priscilla) was a favourite cogno-
men in the gens, and the nomen itself was commonly written
Aquilius. This nomen a male slave, when freed, would have borne
(besides his own name and his master's praenomen); and a female
could have borne the cognomen Prisca or Priscilla. 'AKV\IOS
could be corrupted into 'A/tuAas, the Greek form of a different
name Aquila.

2 Cf. Acts xii. 12 ; Col. iv. 15 ; Philem. a. See 5. and H. in he.

Personal greetings 195

in Rome grew in this manner out of private
houses.

2. St. Paul's brief characterizations of indivi-
duals are full of personal memory and tender-
ness ' my beloved, who is the firstfruits of Asia
unto Christ 1 ,' 'who bestowed much labour on
you/ ' my kinsmen (i. e. Jews) and fellow prisoners
(on some occasion which we cannot fix, but which
St. Paul remembers), who also were in Christ
before me,' ' our fellow worker,' ' the man ap-
proved in Christ,' who has been tried and found
not wanting, ' his mother and mine.' St. Paul,
notwithstanding his wide ecclesiastical plans and
theological labours, as he thought no pains too
much to bestow on the details of his scheme for
collecting Gentile money for the needs of poor
Jews, so also never lets great designs obscure
the memory of persons and their intricate rela-
tions to himself.

3. Andronicus and Junias (orjunianus) are 'of
note among the apostles.' There are other
indications that the term ' apostle ' was not
confined to the twelve. Not St. Paul only, but
Barnabas also, and the Lord's brother, were
included in it. Later, in the Didache, we find it
used in a wide but somewhat dim sense, for the

1 Cf. i Cor. xvi. 15.
O 2

196 The Epistle to the Romans

chief teachers of the Church who were not settled
in particular churches *. Nevertheless, this pas-
sage describing two men of unknown names as
' conspicuous among the apostles ' is surprising.
Probably the real requirement for sharing the
title of apostle was to have received commission
from the Lord (as c other seventy ' did besides
the Twelve), and to have seen Him after His
resurrection. These two 'early disciples' as
St. Paul tells us may have fulfilled these re-
quirements. They were Jews like himself,
who with him had laboured and suffered. They
would be centres of authority among the Chris-
tians at Rome 2 : and possibly to the laying on
of their hands other brethren at Rome who
1 ruled ' or ' taught ' or ' ministered ' owed their
qualifying gift.

Chrysostom takes the second name to be a
woman's Junia ; and expresses his astonishment
at finding a woman thought worthy of the title
of an apostle.

4. ' Them that are of the household of Aristo-
bulus.' This Aristobulus was very probably the

1 The term ' apostle' is also used in 2 Cor. viii. 23, Phil. ii. 25,
apparently in the sense of messenger.

* Others, including Liddon, would translate ' highly esteemed
among, i. e. by, the apostles ' but this is not probable.

Personal greetings 197

grandson of Herod the Great, who lived and
died at Rome in a private station, and whose
1 household ' would naturally include many Jews
and orientals. The following name of a Jew
suggests connexion with the Herods.

5. ' Rufus' may very likely be the son of
Simon of Cyrene, whom St. Mark, writing
probably at Rome, refers to as well known T .

6. ' A holy kiss/ * It was from this and
similar words/ says Origen, 'that it has been
handed down as a custom in the Church that
after the prayer the brethren should welcome
one another with a kiss/ He goes on to urge
that this ritual kiss should be neither unchaste
nor without real feeling.

7. ' All the churches of Christ salute you/
This unique phrase is probably used, as
Dr. Hort suggests, to express how * the church
of Rome was an object of love and respect to
Jewish and Gentile churches alike/

1 Mark xv. ax.

198 The Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION VI. 4. CHAPTER XVI. 17-20.

Final warning.

SOMETHING occurred before the letter to the
Romans was concluded and dispatched to make
St. Paul insert a final warning against false
teachers, who were causing divisions and per-
verting the gospel as all Christians had at first
received it, in the interests of their personal
aggrandizement. St. Paul makes a brief but
vigorous appeal to the Romans to be true to
their first obedience, and maintain their reputa-
tion unsullied.

Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which are
causing the divisions and occasions of stumbling, contrary
to the doctrine which ye learned : and turn away from
them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Christ,
but their own belly ; and by their smooth and fair speech
they beguile the hearts of the innocent. For your obedi-
ence is come abroad unto all men. I rejoice therefore
over you : but I would have you wise unto that which is
good, and simple unto that which is evil. And the God of
peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Final warning 199

This abrupt insertion strongly reminds us of
the Epistle to the Galatians (see i. 7-9, vi. 13),
and of the similar outburst in the Epistle to the
Philippians (iii. 1-3). St. Paul believed that such
Judaizing teaching was inconsistent with the
fundamental Christian ' tradition/ He does not
imply that Rome was already corrupted, but he
scents danger.

200 The Epistle to the Romans

DIVISION VI. 5. CHAPTER XVI. 21-23.

Salutations from St. PauFs companions.

TIMOTHY my fellow-worker saluteth you ; and Lucius
and Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen. I Tertius, who
write the epistle, salute you in the Lord. Gaius my host,
and of the whole church, saluteth you. Erastus the trea-
surer of the city saluteth you, and Quartus the brother.

Most of these persons are very probably
otherwise known to us. Leaving aside the
well-known Timothy, we find a Lucius of
Cyrene among the prophets in Acts xiii. i T ;
a Jason at Thessalonica, as St. Paul's host, in
Acts xvii. 5 if; a Sopater (or Sosipater) of
Beroea, Acts xx. 4. Gaius was one of the few
whom St. Paul had baptized at Corinth (i Cor.
i. 14), and the Christian church, it appears, met
at his house. Erastus, the treasurer of Corinth,
is probably the man mentioned in 2 Tim. iv. 20.

1 And closely associated with St. Paul.

Final doxology 201

DIVISION VI. 6. CHAPTER XVI. 25-27.

Final Doxology.

Now to him that is able to stablish you according to
my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according
to the revelation of the mystery which hath been kept in
silence through times eternal, but now is manifested, and
by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the com-
mandment of the eternal God, is made known unto all the
nations unto obedience of faith ; to the only wise God,
through Jesus Christ, to whom * be the glory for ever.
Amen.

There is no idea in this doxology with which
this epistle has not made us familiar in substance.
We have been led to think of the gospel, now
proclaimed and entrusted to St. Paul, as the
disclosure of a divine purpose long working
secretly: we have been bidden to adore the
unfathomable resourcefulness of the wisdom of
God : we have been constantly referred to the

1 If we retain the words ' to whom ' the grammar of the sentence
breaks down, but the object to whom praise is ascribed is probably
the Father.

202 The Epistle to the Romans

testimony borne by law and prophets to the
gospels : we have been made familiar with the
object of the evangelical preaching, as being
to secure ' the obedience of faith among all the
nations/ And a particular phrase in an epistle
written about the same time 1 'We speak the
wisdom of God in a mystery, even the wisdom
that hath been hidden, which God foreordained
before the worlds unto our glory, which . . . unto
us God revealed by his Spirit/ is strikingly
parallel to the beginning of the doxology. At
the same time the elaborate richness of the style,
as well as many of the ideas, reminds us irresis-
tibly of the Epistle to the Ephesians 2 . This,
coupled with the fact that there is considerable
authority for placing the doxology at the end of
chap, xiv, has led some scholars to adopt the
idea accepted and elaborated by Dr. Lightfoot
that St. Paul first wrote the epistle down to
xvi. 23, as his Epistle to the Romans, and subse-
quently, perhaps during one of his sojourns at
Rome, turned it into a circular letter, omitting
for this purpose the last two chapters, with their
personal matter, and adding the doxology in

1 i Cor. ii. 7, 10.

2 See especially Eph. iii. 1-13. Cf. also 2 Tim. i. 9-11 ; Titus i.
a, 3-

Final doxology 203

the rich manner of the Epistle to the Ephesians.
Subsequently the doxology would have been
added also to the complete epistle. There are
many difficulties in such a theory. Especially
why should the beginning of chap, xv be cut off
from the end of chap, xiv, when there is no break
in thought? But I do not pursue the subject
here x , for it would be out of place, and alien to
our practical purpose. There is no ground for
doubting that the whole of what we receive as
the epistle was written by St. Paul; and no
ground for thinking that any part of the whole,
down to xvi. 23, was not found in the letter as
originally carried by Phoebe; but it cannot be
denied that some mystery, not easily solved,
hangs about the manifold and interrupted con-
clusions of the epistle ; and that the rich style of
the doxology is somewhat unlike both the rest
of the epistle, and the other epistles of this
period. However, whether or no it was written
at a later date, at least it forms a splendid
summing up of what is probably the greatest
and most influential letter ever written.
And there is no teaching which we more

1 It is fully treated in Lightfoot's Biblical Essays (Macmillan,
1894), pp. 287 ff, by Lightfoot himself and Hort from different
points of view, and by 5. and H., pp. Ixxxv. ff.

204 The Epistle to the Romans

urgently need to-day than the teaching of this
epistle. Whether the need be to expand our
personal religion into social service, and also to
reinvigorate our social service with the power
of personal religion ; or so to reassert the divine
authority of the Church as never to forget that
it depends for its vitality upon personally con-
verted hearts ; or to teach men to remember the
inexorable severity of divine judgement, as well
as the depth of the divine compassion ; or to re-
buke the shallowness which attempts to separate
Christian character from Christian doctrine ; or
to harmonize individual freedom with the social
claim ; or to impart to self-sacrifice the spirit of
humility and gladness and indomitable hope ;
or at once to exalt and restrict the function of
the State ; or to emphasize the true grounds
and limits of toleration in a catholic church
whatever, one may almost say, be the need to
which the special deficiencies and perils of our
church and age give rise, or of which at the
moment we are most conscious, the teaching of
St. Paul in this epistle is found to meet it full face.
Truly we may thank God with a continually
growing gratitude for the gift to us of a letter
so inexhaustibly full of spiritual wealth, and so
complete in its provision for the whole of life.

APPENDED NOTES

NOTE A. See vol. i. p. 59.
THE MEANINGS OF THE WORD ' FAITH.'

The history of the original Hebrew and Greek words
for believing or faith, is very interesting. The Hebrew
verb (' aman ') means ' to prop ' or ' support ' l . Now (i)
a form of this verb means ' to be supported,' hence ' to
be firm,' hence ' to be trustworthy ' ; (2) another form of
the verb means 'to support oneself on,' and hence l to
trust? ' to believe* From (i) comes the Hebrew substan-
tive ('emunah') meaning 'faithfulness,' 'trustworthiness,'
which is used, as elsewhere, so also in Habakkuk ii. 4.
In that passage it is revealed to the prophet, that, while
the apparently overwhelming wave of Chaldaean bar-
barism rolls over him and passes away, 'the just man
shall live (or save his life) by his faithfulness.' But this
faithfulness of the righteous Israelite means a faithful
holding on through the dark days to the word of God as
to a secure ground of confidence ; and thus the substantive
used in this place in the Greek Bible ('pistis') tends to
pass into the meaning which it mostly, though not
always 2 , has in the New Testament a meaning derived

1 We are familiar with the derived adverb of confirmation,
' Amen.'

2 In Rom. iii. 3, Matt, xxiii. 23, it is still used for ' faithfulness/

2o6 The Epistle to the Romans

not from form (i) but from form (2) of the Hebrew verb
mentioned above (which however had no corresponding
substantive) trust or faith in the word and promise of
another, especially "God or Christ; or, still more charac-
teristically, trust in the person of Christ and so of God.

Even under this heading of belief or trust the range
of the word's meaning is considerable. In one passage
of St. James' Epistle it is a bare intellectual recognition
of the truth of things, without any moral value ('the
devils also believe ' that God is one, James ii. 19). More
often it is that confidence in the divine word or promise,
by which the good man, in lack of present evidence,
sustains his courage or his prayer and wins his victory
over the world : so especially in Hebr. xi, Luke xviii. 8,
James ii. 23, 2 Cor. v. 7, i John v. 4. But its most
characteristic use, as said above, is what first appears in
the Gospels. The person of Jesus is there represented
as eliciting from men a supreme trust in His power to
heal diseases, and also to satisfy that deeper human need
of which the disease is an outward symbol. And this
power of Jesus to heal men in body and soul is'seen in the
Gospels to depend upon the extent of their faith : ' Thy
faith hath saved thee ; ' ' According to thy faith be it unto
thee.' Thus Jesus Christ appears constantly as inspiring,
requiring, and rewarding faith in Himself, and that as
the manifested Son of God, e.g. John xiv. i. This is
' the faith which is through Him,' i.e. which He produces ;
and which as ' faith in His name ' remains the charac-
teristic Christian quality when He is gone from sight
(Acts iii. 16). ' The faith ' in the Acts (vi. 7, xiii. 8, xiv. 22
c.) means this Christian attitude towards the unseen
but living and energizing Christ.

Thus when St. Paul came to believe in Jesus Christ,
' faith in Jesus,' as meaning not merely acceptance of
His claim or of His word or of His grace, but whole-

Note B 207

hearted devotion to His person, entire self-surrender or
self-committal to Christ or God in Christ became the
dominant note of his new state : * I know him whom I
have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard
that which I have committed unto him against that day '(2
Tim. i. 12 1 ). And this same devotion to Christ becomes, in
St. Paul's theology, in its various stages, the only ground
of man's acceptance with God. And though he uses
1 faith ' in a morally lower sense, as distinct from love
the faith which qualifies for miracles (i Cor. xiii. 2)
yet in his characteristic sense of the term it involves the
deepest love towards its divine object 2 .

Naturally, as faith is thus the characteristic of Chris-
tianity, and this faith in a person involves a belief
about Him His divine sonship, His resurrection, His
mission of the Spirit so 'the faith' comes to mean
(objectively) that which the Christian believes, or his
creed ; and this sense of the word appears almost in the
Acts, in Gal. i. 23, and in Eph. iv. 5, and certainly in
the Pastoral Epistles frequently (see Dr. Bernard in Camb.
Gr. Test, on i Tim. i. 19) and St. Jude's Epistle, verse 2.

NOTE B. See vol. i. p. 103.
THE USE OF THE WORD 'CONSCIENCE.'

There is no word for conscience in the Old Testament.
' The conception,' says Delitzsch (Bibl. Psychology, Clark's

1 In spite of Ellicott, Holtzmann, and Bernard, I believe this to
be the true rendering, and not that of the R.V. margin.

8 On the development of the principle of faith in the soul, see
vol. i. pp. 29, 30 ; and on its naturalness, in the highest sense, for
man, see pp. 21, 22.

208 The Epistle to the Romans

trans., p. 160), ' is not yet impressed upon it.' And he
accounts for this by quoting, ' The positive law took away
its significance from the natural moral consciousness.'
The Jews, that is like other nations at certain stages
of their history lived so constantly under the detailed
guidance of a law believed to be divine, that there
was not much room for reflection as to the right and
wrong of things. For the idea of conscience to develop,
the will of God must be less clearly and decisively
pronounced as to the details of conduct. There was,
however, of course among the Jews, in proportion to
their belief in a clear divine law, the consciousness of
having done wrong ; and on this account a man's ' heart '
is described as * privy to ' an offence, and as ' reproach-
ing' or 'smiting' him : see i Kings ii. 44, Job xxvii. 6 1 ,
i Sam. xxiv. 5, xxv. 31, 2 Sam. xxiv. 10. Here is the
root of the idea of conscience, i.e. of something in
the man behind his surface self, reflecting upon what
he has done, a self behind himself acquitting or con-
demning him, and so anticipating the divine judgement.
For, as stated above 2 , this was in the main the Stoic doc-
trine of conscience, and it was among them that the idea
was first developed. Conscience was conceived of as that
in man which lay behind his working self and reflected
on his actions after they were done, bringing them into
the light of the * law of nature ' or universal divine law
for man. There is thus, as it were, in each man a
double self, or double consciousness (conscientid), so
that one can reflect upon himself, and pass judgement
on his own actions.

It is in this sense of a self-judging faculty in all men
reflecting on what they have done, anticipating a divine

1 In LXX ov yap ffvvotda ipavTy droira irpaas.
8 VoL i. p. 103, n. a.

Note B 209

judgement, that the idea of conscience was acclimatized
among the Jews. Thus, in Wisdom xvii. n, we read,
4 For wickedness, condemned by a witness within, is a
coward thing, and being pressed hard by conscience,
always forecasteth the worst lot.' In St. John viii. 9,
according to one reading, the Jews are ' convicted by
their own conscience.' So St. Paul, in the passage
discussed above (ii. 15), seems to distinguish the sub-
sequent reflective 'conscience ' from the previous inform-
ing reason, 'the effect (equivalent) of the law written
in their hearts.' And in most of the passages of the
New Testament, this meaning of conscience the faculty
by which we sit in judgement on what we have already
done is sufficient. But sometimes, as also among the
Stoics *, the word passes into meaning the positive
directing faculty, as when (i Cor. viii. 10) a man's
'conscience' is said to be 'emboldened' to adopt a new
practice, or (Hebr. ix. 14) to be cleansed for positive
service. Moreover, though it is an individual faculty
(see Rom. ii. 15), and exists primarily to pass judgement
on one's own actions only, yet perforce it must also look
without and condemn or approve the actions of others
(2 Cor. iv. 2, v. n).

St. Paul also brings into notice that our conscience is
a faculty for the condition of which we are responsible.
It is not the voice of God, but a faculty capable of reflect-
ing His voice, if it be well guarded. Thus you may have
a ' weak ' or a ' strong,' i. e. a more or less enlightened,
conscience (i Cor. viii). And a man may 'defile' his
' mind and conscience,' i. e. he may corrupt his moral
reason and powers of moral self-judgement (Tit. i. 15).

1 e. g. when conscience was described by Epictetus as the
grown man's inward tutor [pedagogue], which must obviously
mean that it is to instruct as well as reprove.

n. p

210 The Epistle to the Romans

Then the ' conscience ' may become hardened and
'seared' (i Tim. iv. 2), so that ' the light that is in ' men
becomes itself 'darkness' according to our Lord's
warning (St. Matt! vi. 23). And there is nothing which
is more necessary at the present day than to remind men
that they are not { safe ' because they are not acting
against their conscience, unless they are also constantly
at pains to enlighten their conscience and keep it in the
light, by the help of the best moral thought of their time,
the guidance of the Church and the word of God. Our
conscience, if it is rightly to reassure us by its witness,
must, like St. Paul's conscience, bear its witness * in the
Holy Ghost' (Rom. ix. i).

With us moderns ' conscience ' has generally the wider
meaning of the whole practical moral consciousness. It
enjoins as well as judges, and is occupied with the
present and the future, as well as with the past.

NOTE C. See vol. i. p. 129.
RECENT REACTIONS FROM THE TEACHING ABOUT HELL.

There is no doubt that there has been within the last
forty years a great, and in large measure legitimate,
reaction from the old mediaeval and Calvinist teaching
about hell. But one who reads the early chapters of the
Epistle to the Romans, or the Gospels, or other parts of
the New Testament, in view of this reaction, will probably
feel an uncomfortable sense that it has gone too far. It is
worth while then to try and discriminate.

To put the matter in as brief a summary as befits
a note, I should hold that the reaction has been legitimate
so far as it has involved a repudiation of

Note C 211

(1) the Calvinist doctrine that God has created some
men, no matter whether many or few, inevitably doomed
to everlasting misery. This doctrine is flat contrary to
some particular statements of the New Testament (as to
its general spirit) and is only a misunderstanding of others
(see above, pp. 8, 29).

(2) any such crude idea of the divine judgement as
that God condemns men for merely external reasons,
e.g. because in fact, apart from any question of will, they
were not baptized, or remained pagans or heretics. Such
a conception is quite inadequate, for the divine judgement
penetrates to the heart. God is a father : He is absolutely
equitable : He judges men in the light of their opportuni-
ties. He will reject none whose will is not set to evil.
' This is the judgement that . . . men loved the darkness
rather than the light, for their works were evil ' (John iii.
19).

(3) the tendency to exaggerate what is revealed to us,
and what, therefore, we can say we know about the state
of man after death. Thus (a) there is nothing really
revealed to us as to the relative proportions of saved and
lost, (b] It is certain that we only know of a probation
for man here and now ' Now is the accepted time now
is the day of salvation.' And the absolutely equitable
Father may see the conditions of an adequate probation
equally in every man's earthly lot. It is therefore foolish
to entertain, or encourage any one else to entertain, an
expectation of any other state of probation except that
which we certainly have here in this world. ' It is
appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judge-
ment.' But if St. Peter could speak (as of a familiar
subject) of the * gospel ' as having been ' preached ' by our
Lord's human spirit in Hades ' to the dead,' i.e. to those
who had perished in their wickedness under the divine
judgement of the flood : and preached with the intention

P 2

212 The Epistle to the Romans

that the judgement might be turned into a blessing and
means of spiritual life and he certainly does speak thus
( i Peter iv. 6, cf. iii. 19) : I do not see how we can deny the
possibility at any period, or in the case of any person, of
an unfulfilled probation being accomplished beyond death.
(c) Careful attention to the origin of the doctrine of the
necessary immortality or indestructibility of each human
soul, as stated for instance by Augustine and Aquinas 1 ,
will probably convince us that it was no part of the
original Christian message, or of really catholic doctrine 2 .
It was rather a speculation of Platonism taking possession
of the Church. And this consideration leaves open possi-
bilities of the ultimate extinction of personal conscious-
ness in the lost, which Augustmianism somewhat rudely
closed.

But to have convicted our forefathers of going, in cer-
tain parts of their teaching, beyond what was certainly
revealed, affords no justification for doing the same our-
selves in an opposite extreme ; by asserting for example
positively (a) that almost all men will be ' saved ' ; or (b)
that there is probation to be looked for beyond death ;
or (c) that the souls of 'the lost' will be at the last
extinguished. These positive positions are no more
justified than those of our forefathers which we have
deprecated. We must recognize the limits of positive
knowledge.

And when we have come to the end of what a legitimate
reaction from the teaching of our forefathers restores to
us, in the direction of a ' larger hope,' we are still face to

1 Sutnma, pars, i, qu. 75, art. 6, * Respondeo dicendum, quod
necesse est dicere, animam humanam, quam dicimus intellectivum
principium, esse incorruptibilem.'

2 See Dr. Agar Beet's Last Things (Hodder and Stoughton,
1898 . pp. 194 ff, and Gladstone's Studies Subsidiary to Butler
(Oxford, 1896), part ii. pp. 260 ff.

Note C 213

face with the fact of ' eternal judgement.' Men, as far as
their individual destinies are concerned, are passing
towards one of two ends, not towards one only a divine
judgement of approval or of condemnation ; and both
judgements are represented as final and irreversible ; and
they are the inevitable outcome of the moral law by which
our probation is realized that voluntary acts form habits,
and habits stereotype into a fixed character. It is foolish
to look to the process or moment of death for redemption
from sin ; for death, as far as we know, only transplants
us with the character we have made for ourselves, and
with continuous consciousness, into the unknown world ;
so that if in this life we have unfitted ourselves for God,
we must find it out beyond death, and know there the full
meaning of our awful miscalculation here. And the
awakening of the 'lost' to what they have cast away
to the meaning of irreversible self-exclusion from the
presence of God is imaged as unspeakably awful ; and
their state is pictured in metaphors and phrases descrip-
tive both of torment and finality 'outer darkness,' 'gnaw-
ing worm,' ' unquenchable fire,' ' eternal punishment,'
' eternal sin,' ' sin which shall not be forgiven, neither in
this world, nor in that which is to come,' eternal ' death,'
or exclusion from eternal life, ' eternal ruin,' ' wrath and
indignation, tribulation and anguish.'

In face of all these sayings, it seems to me indisputable
that ' universalism ' the teaching that there are to be
none finally lost is an instance of wilfulness. To speak
of that which lies beyond death, even in the case of the
worst and most impenitent criminal, as a place

* Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain which must not be,'

is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole
tone of the New Testament.

214 The Epistle to the Romans

It is no doubt true that there is in the New Testament
an expectation of a final unity of the whole universe in
God, and that wefind it hard to conceive the relation of
lost souls in hell to this final unity. Certainly all legiti-
mate avenues of dim conjecture that a very limited
revelation allows to be kept open, ought to be kept open.
Certainly we know in part the partialness of our
knowledge can hardly be exaggerated. But we must be
true to both elements in what is disclosed to us ; and
Dr. Martineau has reminded us 1 how deeply 'the belief in
a separate heaven and hell, and a corresponding distribu-
tion of men into only two classes of good and bad, friends
and enemies of God,' though ' at first sight nothing can
appear more unnatural and defiant of all fact,' is yet
bound up with ' the inward look ' of moral evil and the
fundamental reality of moral choice. In fact it seems to
be true to say that a really Christian Theism, and a really
Christian doctrine of human freedom, are inseparable
from the belief in the possibility of wilful sin leading to
final ruin.

' It is appointed unto men once to die, arid after that the
judgement'; and this judgement in the case of those of
us who have wilfully hardened themselves, or remained
loveless and love-rejecters, in face of the real offer of
God to man in Christ Jesus, is a divine condemnation
which takes effect in an eternal punishment, the bitter-
ness as well as the justice of which the soul realizes, and
which if it does not necessarily mean an everlasting
continuance of personal consciousness is yet final and
irreversible, and unspeakably awful 2 .

1 See Types of Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1885), ii. pp. 60 ff.

2 The only passage in the New Testament which strongly
suggests an everlasting persistence of personal consciousness of
pain, is Rev. xx. 10, ' Shall be tormented day and night for ever
and ever.' This is explicit enough. But I am persuaded that all

Note D 215

NOTE D. See vol. i. pp. 143 ff.
DIFFICULTIES ABOUT THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT.

I have endeavoured above to sketch the positive con-
ception of the Atonement, as St. Paul seems to put it
before us. Christ inaugurates the church of the new
covenant, the new life of union with God. He lays its
basis in a great act of reparation to the righteousness of
God, which 'the old Adam' had continually outraged.
This act of reparation lies in a moral sacrifice of obedience,
carried to the extreme point by the shedding of His blood.
This is the great propitiation in virtue of which God is
enabled, without moral misunderstanding, to forgive
freely the sins of any one who comes in faith to unite
himself to Christ, and set him free to begin the new life.

The subject is a divine ' mystery,' and we shall never
adequately probe it. Nay more, one man's thought will
rightly seem inadequate to another, who has gained, or
thinks he has gained, some special avenue of insight into

the numbers and expressions for periods of time in the Apoca-
lypse are strictly symbolical. 'A thousand years,' ' forty and
two months/ ' three days and a half,' ' day and night for ever and
ever,' are expressions which have to be translated into some moral
equivalent before they can be made the basis of literal teaching.
Thus ' day and night for ever and ever ' describes in a picture the
completeness of the final overthrow and the anguish of the enemies
of the Lamb. The symbolical character of the expression is further
indicated by ' the beast ' and ' the false prophet ' themselves sym-
bolical figures being with the devil the subjects of the torment.

Some will say that the deterrent effect of the doctrine of hell
depends upon its being held to be a state of strictly endless con-
scious torment. I do not believe this is the case. The language
of the New Testament is full enough of deterrent horror if we are
faithful to it. And after all, this is all we have a right to be.

2i6 The Epistle to the Romans

the divine depths. But when we pass from special points
of view, which are necessarily more or less individual, and
can never become certainties for men in general when we
pass on to the ground of what should be the common
church belief, the statement of the original revelation, it
is not, it seems to me, liable to any of the familiar moral
objections, or indeed a subject of any special difficulty.
The difficulties experienced by the moral consciousness of
our age have been due to gross and unnecessary mis-
understandings, of which the following are, perhaps, the
most considerable.

(1) The propitiation has become separated from the
new life, for which it merely prepares the way. It has
been elevated, with disastrous moral results, from a means
to an end. Christ's work for us has been treated apart
from His work in us, in which alone it is realized. He
alone can act for all men, because He only can be their
new life within. But on this see vol. i. pp. 141 f, and
Ephes. pp. 54 ff.

(2) The idea of injustice has been introduced into the
' transaction ' of the Atonement, and has been the most
fruitful source of difficulty ; but quite unnecessarily.
There is a story that when Edward VI was a child, and
deserved punishment, another boy was taken and whipped
in his place. This monstrously unjust transaction has
been taken by Christian teachers as an illustration of the
Atonement ; and it is truly an illustration of the Atone-
ment as they misconceived it. But the misconception is
gratuitous : there is no real resemblance in the two cases.
For first, what is represented to us in the New Testament
is not that Jesus Christ, an innocent person, was punished,
without reference to His own will, by a God who thus
showed Himself indifferent as to whom He punished so
long as some one suffered. But He, being Himself very
God, the Son of the Father, the administrator of the

Note D 217

moral law and judge of the world, of His own will
became man, and suffered what the sin of the world
laid upon Him, in order that He might lift the world out
of sin. Voluntary self-sacrifice for others is at least not
to be described as injustice. At least we rejoice to
recognize that God accepts such self-sacrifice. It is to
vicarious self-sacrifice like our Lord's that the human
race owes the greater part of whatever moral progress
it has hitherto made.

Secondly, God is not represented as imposing any
specially devised punishment on His only Son in our
nature. As the matter is stated in the New Testament,
He required of Him obedience, the obedience proper to
man ; and, if we regard sympathy with our fellow men as
a part of our duty to God, we may say obedience only.
Thus, ' Lo, I come to do thy will, O God ' is the one cry
of the Christ. In His simple acceptance of the whole of
human duty lies the moral essence and value of His
sacrifice. All the physical and mental sufferings of Christ
came out of His fulfilment of the human ideal, Godward
and manward, and were involved in it. He died because
obedience to the terms of His mission 'the word of
truth, and meekness, and righteousness' in a world
of sin such as this is, involved dying. 'He was obedient'
without reserve ' unto death, even the death of the
cross 1 .' The value of the bloodshedding lies in this,
so far as Scripture enables us to judge that it repre-
sents utter obedience under conditions which human
sin, the sin of Jews and Gentiles, laid upon Him : and
it was in this sense, which does not leave out of con-
sideration the mental torment caused to His sinless spirit
by contact with sin 2 , that He ' bare our sins in his body

1 Phil. ii. 8 ; Hebr. x. 5-9.

2 The perfect Man perfectly realized the misery and horror of

2i8 The Epistle to the Romans

on the tree,' and that ' the Lord made to light on him the
iniquity of us all.' What is ascribed to the Father is that
He 'spared not' His only Son by miraculously exempting
Him from the consequences of His mission ; and that He
foresaw, overruled, and used for His own wise and loving
purposes the sin of men *.

Thirdly and lastly, the Christ (as represented in the
New Testament) did not suffer in order that we might be
let off the punishment for our own sins, but in order
to bring us to God. ' By his stripes we are ' not excused
punishment, but ' healed.' In fact, there are two dis-
tinguishable punishments for sin. There is the spiritual
punishment, which is involved in being morally alienated
from God, which may become irreversible and eternal,
but which is gone when the moral alienation is gone.
From this Christ delivers us in making us at one again
with the Father, but He Himself did not endure it. God
forbid that we should imagine such a thing! Besides
this there is the temporal penalty which our sins bring
as inevitable consequences upon ourselves and upon the
race. All these consequences of human sin the sinless
Christ bore for us, but not that we might be let off

the sins on behalf of which He suffered. How much is involved
in this in the way of detailed realization of each individual sin of
each individual sinner, is a matter on which we have no clear
grounds for exact statement.

1 I believe that nothing more than this is really suggested by
Scripture. The phrase, ' made sin for us ' (2 Cor. v. 21), means,
I believe, according to the clear use of the word in the LXX,
'made a sin-offenng for us.' The same words in the Hebrew
stand for sin and sin-offering, and the use of the Greek follows :
see especially (in LXX) Lev. iv. 21, It is the sin (= sin-offer-
ing) of the assembly ; ' 24, ' It (the goat) is a sin ; ' 29, ' He
shall lay his hand upon the head of the sin ; ' vi. 25, ' This is the
law of the sin ' ; viii. 14, ' The bullock of the sin.' Cf. Hos.
iv. 8, &c.

Note E 219

bearing them. We must bear them too both the death
of the body and the chastisement of particular sins.
Christ bore the punishment of sins that were not His
own, in order that in our case the punishments of sins
which are our own might, through His bringing us back
to God, be converted into healing chastisements and
gracious penances. The record of God's dealings with
His saints is still, as in Ps. xcix. 8, that they are heard,
forgiven and punished.

How gratuitously then the idea of injustice has been
introduced into the doctrine of Christ's sacrifice for us
becomes evident when once it is brought within the
scriptural limits. Christ suffered voluntarily. He suf-
fered simply what was involved in becoming man in
a world of sin. He suffered, the righteous for the un-
righteous, that He might bring us back to God, that so
we might have grace to bear our own sufferings and share
His.

This alone, it seems to me, is what the New Testament
certainly teaches. And the matter of most importance is
that, ridding our minds of distracting and often needless
difficulties, we should drink in, with heart and intelligence
alike, the full force of what is certainly part of the Gospel
the doctrine of the one, full, perfect, and sufficient
atonement with the Father, won for us by the self-sacrifice
of the Christ.

NOTE E. See vol. i. p. 196.
EVOLUTION AND THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE FALL.

There is a wide-spread and popular notion that a
marked contradiction exists between the biological theory

220 The Epistle to the Romans

of evolution and the Christian doctrine of the Fall, which
may be stated and examined under several heads:

I.' According t the theory of evolution man began
his career at the bottom, emerging from purely animal
life, and slowly struggled upwards to his present level of
attainment. According to the Christian doctrine, on the
contrary, he was created perfect, and then subsequently
fell into sin and accompanying misery. Thus, according
to one theory, man began at the bottom ; according to the
other, he began at the top.'

Now there is no doubt that when so stated the
evidence is all in favour of the scientific point of view, and
against the Christian. But such a contrast requires the
greatest modification on both sides before it can be taken
as truly representing the facts. Thus, it is not the case
that the Bible suggests that man was created perfect, i. e.
perfectly developed, and that his later course has been
simply the effect of the Fall, i. e. a downward course.
Leaving first out of account Gen. i-iii, we notice that the
Bible is conspicuously, and in marked contrast to the
religious books of other nations, the book of development.
It looks continuously and systematically forward, not
backward, for the perfecting of man. It traces the be-
ginning of civilization in Abel, the keeper of sheep, Cain,
the tiller of the ground, in Jabal, ' the father of such as
dwell in tents and have cattle,' in Jubal, the father of
music, 'of all such as handle the harp and pipe,' in Tubal
Cain, the first forger of brass and iron work ; it indicates
the origin of religious worship (in some sense) at the time
of Enoch, and the origin of building with the tower of
Babel. The names of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel,
David, &c., represent stages of advance along the line of
a chosen people ; and later on it appears also that upon
the chosen people centres a hope for all nations, and a
purpose is discovered in universal history. The special

Note E 221

intellectual qualities of various races or civilizations, as of
Egypt and Tyre, are recognized by some of the prophets,
and recognized as part of a divine purpose for the world 1 .
The Bible then is the book of development ; it looks
forward, not backward. But it is also true that all this
development is represented as having been (we may say)
a second-best thing. It has not been according to God's
first purpose. There has been a great and continual
hindrance, which has consisted in a persistent rebellion
or sin on man's part against God ; and this again has had
its root in a certain perversion of the heart of mankind
which is regarded as approximately universal. If we now
take into account again the first three chapters of Genesis
(which, however, have left much less trace than is com-
monly supposed in the Old Testament as a whole 2 ) we find
that they describe an original act of rebellion on the part
of the first human pair, which is there spoken of as at
least entailing external consequences of a penal sort upon
their descendants that is death, pain, and the loss of
Paradise ; and that later, especially in the teaching of St.
Paul, the universal moral flaw in human nature (original
sin) is also represented as having its source in this initial
act of rebellion.

Sin is therefore, according to our Christian scriptures,
something unnatural to man : the violation of his nature by
his rebellion ; and it is a continual element of deteriora-
tion. But the idea that man was created perfect, i. e. so
as not to need development, is not suggested. No doubt
theologians, from the age of Augustine down to recent
times, have done something more than suggest it. Thus
Robert South supposes that 'an Aristotle was but the
rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of
Paradise'; and Milton implanted the idea in theimagina-

1 See especially Ezekiel xxviii, xxxi. 2 See vol. i. p. 193.

222 The Epistle to the Romans

tion of Englishmen ; but it is in no way suggested by the
Bible, and was expressly repudiated by the earliest
Christian theologians in east and west. Thus, in answer
to the question whether Adam was formed perfect or
imperfect, Clement of Alexandria replied, 'They shall
learn from us that he was not perfect in respect of his
creation, but in a fit condition to receive virtue.' And
Irenaeus says that it was in the power of God to make
men perfect from the beginning, but that such an initial
perfection would be contrary to the law of human nature,
which is the law of gradual growth \ We must therefore
modify the statement of Christian doctrine from which
we started, thus : Man has been slowly led, or has slowly
developed, towards t/ie divine ideal of his Creator ; but his
actual development has been much less rapid and constant
than it might have been, owing to the fact of sin from which
he might have been free.

Now, can it be fairly said that science can take any
legitimate exception to such a statement ? The progress
of man which anthropological science discloses is very
broken, very partial ; if development of some sort is
universal, progress is very rare, distinct deterioration not
uncommon. Science, like poetry and philosophy, must
bear witness to the disappointing element in human
nature, of which He was so conscious of whom it is said
that ' He did not trust himself to man, because he needed
not that any one should bear witness concerning man, for
he himself knew what was in man 'the sad secret of
human untrustworthiness and unsatisfactoriness 2 .

Again, can science assert that this actual development
of man, so thwarted and tainted and partial, has been the
only possible development, and that there could not have
been a better? If it cannot say this, there is in the

1 Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 12. 96 ; Iren. c. Haer. iv. 38.

2 See also above, vol. i. pp. 78, 79.

Note E 223

general view of human progress and deterioration no
antagonism between religion and science.

II. But it may be said, 'Science certainly does say
that the actual development of man has been the only
possible development. Science excludes the idea of sin
in the sense of something which need not have happened,
because it excludes the idea of freedom or contingency
altogether. Good and bad characters are like good and
bad apples mere facts of natural growth'; or more
suggestively, ' Sin (so called) is only the survival of brute
instincts, which, from a higher condition of evolution,
men have come to be ashamed of.'

It cannot be made too emphatic that here is the real
battle-ground of religion and science to-day, though the
fact is often concealed in popular controversy. / do not
believe there is any real difficulty in adjusting sufficiently the
relations of religion and science as to the Fall when once the
idea of sin has been admitted that is, the idea of free,
responsible action, with its correlative, the possibility of wrong
action which might have been avoided. Christian and other
teachers have, no doubt, often failed to see how limited
human freedom is, but they have never been wrong in
asserting that the reality of freedom within limits is
essential to Christianity and morality. Sin is not a mere
fact of nature. It is a perversion which ought not to have
been. This subject is not what is directly before us
now ; but the heart of the controversy is here ; and
I will make the following very brief remarks upon it.

(i) A theory that cannot be put into practice, or a theory
that cannot account for the facts, is a false or at least
inadequate theory. Now the theory of necessary deter-
minism cannot be put into practice. To believe that our
own conduct is not really under our own control that
the idea of responsibility is at bottom an illusion is
to destroy the basis of human life and education. Even

224 The Epistle to the Romans

the holders of the theory admit that it must be kept out
of sight in practice.

Further, it is a theory that cannot account for the
facts viz. for the* existence of the universal sense of
responsibility; and the application to human action
of moral blame and praise, which penetrates the whole of
thought and language, and which holds too large a place
in human life to be a delusion. We are not ashamed of
a physical accident, but we are ashamed of telling a lie.
And this difference is fundamental and based on reality.

(2) The Christian assumption may be stated as follows:
granted that we cannot increase the sum of force
which passes from external sources into our system, and
passes out again in manifold forms of human action, yet
within certain limits we can direct it for good or evil i.e.
the ' voluntary ' part of a man's action may be determined
from below, so to speak, by purely animal motives, or by
rational and spiritual motives. In the latter case, the
action is of the proper human quality, and stamps
a rational and spiritual character upon all that falls
within its range. In the former case, it may be truly
regarded as a survival of the physical instincts of animal
progenitors, and no doubt it emerges as a part of the
physical order of the world. But, considered as human
action, it represents a lapse, a culpable subordination of
the higher to the lower in our nature, a violation of the
law proper to manhood 1 . This is the point. St. John
says, ' All sin is lawlessness,' and (by the exact form of
expression which he uses) he implies also that all
lawlessness is sin. Here, and here only where voluntary
action begins, do you see violation of law, and therefore,
within limits, a disturbance of the divine order some-
thing which ought to have been otherwise.

1 On the meaning of ' freedom of will,' see vol. i. pp. 230 ff.

Note E 225

(3) The belief that the moral evil of our nature does
not properly belong to our nature but is its violation, and
that if once the will be set right it can be remedied, has
been the secret of the moral strength of Christianity.
Christianity has said to all men, However corrupted your
nature, the corruption does not essentially belong to you.
Give your wills to God, and, if slowly, yet surely, if not
fully in this world, then beyond it, all can be set right.
'According to thy faith be it unto thee.' And the practical
power of this appeal, shows its agreement with reality.

(4) On the other hand, it cannot be claimed that the
theory is contrary to any real scientific knowledge-, for
biology confesses that it knows very little as to the actual
methods by which force is redistributed in human action.
It is contrary only to some large and unverifiable assump-
tionsassumptions which ignore the abstract character of
biological psychology, as of other sciences.

Now granted this reality of free voluntary action, it
will hardly be denied that history discloses to us
a practically universal prevalence of sin 1 , in the present
and in the past ; and we can hardly fail to perceive, lying
behind actual sins, a tendency to sin what Shelley calls
'the ineradicable taint of sin,' a perverse inclination
inhering in the stock of our manhood, which is what
theology calls original sin.

HI. But here a more modern objection occurs.
Christianity assumes that this moral flaw or taint, weak-
ness or grossness, in human nature is the outcome of
actual transgressions, in other words that original sin
is due to actual sin, whereas the tendency of recent
biological science is to deny that acquired characters can
be inherited, and therefore to deny that any acts of any
man or men could have any effect on the congenital
moral nature of their descendants ; the taint or fault in
1 See above, vol. i. pp. 80-1.

II. Q

226 The Epistle to the Romans

human nature, must be a taint or fault in that original
substance which what is called man derived from his
pre-human ancestry. To this I reply : This is no doubt
the view which Professor Weismann has made more or
less prevalent. The substance of heredity (' germ-plasm ')
is taken to be a substance per se, which has always
occupied a special * sphere' of its own, without any
contact with that of 'somatoplasm' further than is
required for its lodgement or nutrition ; hence it can
never be in any degree modified as to its hereditary
qualities by use-inheritance. It has been absolutely
continuous ' since the first origin of life.'

But this doctrine does not appear yet to have assumed
a fixed form * ; and in its extreme or absolute form it is
highly disputable, and rejected by large sections of bio-
logists. Professor Haeckel 2 declares contemptuously that
he should feel it more reasonable to accept the Mosaic
account of special creations ! The late Mr. Romanes,
after summing up the evidence on both sides without
any contempt, decides: 'No one is thus far entitled
to conclude against the possible transmission of acquired
characters 3 .' Again, 'that this substance of heredity is
largely continuous and highly stable, I see many and
cogent reasons for believing. But that this substance
has been uninterruptedly continuous since the origin of
life, or absolutely stable since the origin of sexual
propagation, I see even more and better reasons for dis-
believing 4 .' And he remarks 5 , 'I doubt not Weismann

1 Romanes, Examination of Weismannism (Longmans, 1893),
pp. 61-70, 153.

3 The Last Link (Black, 1899), p. 79.

3 Romanes, Darwin and after Darwin (Longmans, 1895^, ii.
p. 279.

* Examination of Weismannism, pp. 114, 115.

5 Darwin and after Darwin, ii. p. 90.

Note E 227

himself would be the first to allow that his theory of
heredity encounters greater difficulties in the domain
of ethics than in any other unless indeed, it be that of
religion.'

I ought to add, in view of the apparently improbable
event of the doctrine of Weismann becoming in its
absolute form the accepted doctrine of biologists, that
of course it only concerns the material organism. No
one who is not a materialist would deny the possibility
of the character of the parent modifying at its very root
that of the child, without even the smallest conceivable
modification of the physical organism ; because in the
origination of a spiritual personality, and in the link which
binds it to the antecedent personalities to which it owes its
being, there is that which lies outside the purview of
biological science. There may be an inheritance of sinful
tendencies derived from sinful acts in the region of the
spiritual personality, even if no physical transmission is
possible.

However it be explained, it appears to be the case
that Christianity is bound to maintain the position that
in the region of moral character there is, in fact, a solidarity
in humanity. We are bound together. Our acts, as they
form our own character, do somehow or other, however
slightly, modify the characters of our descendants for
good or evil. And this modification of the tendencies of
the race by the acts of individuals may have been more
marked at the beginning than it is to-day.

On the other hand Christianity is not in any way
interested in denying that man derives a physical heritage
of habits and tendencies from a pre-human ancestry. All
I imagine that Christianity is interested in affirming is
this that when the animal organism became the
dwelling-place of the human spirit (so to speak) that
human spirit might have taken one of two courses. It
Q 2

228 The Epistle to the Romans

might have followed the path of the divine will ; and in
that case human development would have represented
a steady and gradual spiritualizing of the animal nature
reaching on towards perfection. It might have taken,
on the other hand, and did in fact take (more or less), the
line of wilful disobedience. And the moral effects of
this wilfulness and disobedience from the beginning
onwards have been felt from parent to son. So that the
springs of human conduct have been weakened and
perverted, and no man has started without some bias in
the wrong direction which would not have been there if
his ancestors for many generations had been true to God.

It is worth noticing in passing that ' original sin ' is not
a fixed quantity derived from one lapse of the original
man, but is a moral weakness continually reinforced by
every actual transgression, and, on the other hand,
reduced in force by moral resistance and self-control.
Individuals start at very different levels of depravity.
Only it would appear that practically in no man but One
is there any reason to believe the fundamental nature
immaculate.

IV. But it will be said 'You have not yet touched
upon a big central contradiction between religion and
science. According to the Christian doctrine mankind is
derived from a single specifically human pair, made
human by a special inspiration of the Divine Spirit.
According to the theory of evolution, a certain species
of apes under specially favourable conditions gradually
advanced to become what might be called man, though
of a very low type.' To this I am inclined to make reply
thus : Christianity is really bound up with maintaining
four positions (i) the reality of moral freedom ; (2) the
fact of sin, properly so called as distinct from imperfection;
(3) its practical universality, at least as an inherited
tendency ; and (4) the unity of the human race in such

Note E 229

sense that the same postulates may be made with regard
to all men, and the same capacity for moral redemption
(more or less) assumed to be in them. Now, as regards
the first three of these positions enough has been said
already, and the last of them does not appear to be at
present in dispute between science and religion. St. Paul
says, ' God made of one ' (or ' of one blood,' for this
reading is possibly right) 'every nation of men' (Acts
xvii. 26). And of one blood, if not of one individual, all
men are, according to the present conclusions of biological
science. A recent work on ethnology, by Mr. Keane
(Cambridge Geographical Series), speaks thus: 'The
hominidae are not separately evolved in an absolute
sense i.e. from so many different anthropoid precursors,
but the present primary divisions are separately evolved
from so many different pleistocene precursors, them-
selves evolved through a single pliocene prototype from
a single anthropoid precursor 1 .'

It does not seem to me, then, that Christianity is really
bound up with anything more than the unity of the
human race, which science also strongly asserts. But to
pass from these positions, which may be regarded as
certain, to something more conjectural (apart from any
question of the literary character of Genesis iii), we may
argue thus : Sin is a fact having the same character
universally in human history, though the sense of sin has
varied greatly, reaching back as far as human history
extends. This would lead us to suppose that it goes
back to the roots of the race. It suggests some original

1 See also in Haeckel, Last Link, p. 148 : ' We assume the
single monophyletic origin of mankind at one place, in one dis-
trict ' ; and passages cited above, vol. i. p. 196, n. i. The science
of comparative religions also suggests the same conclusion.
Everywhere common underlying religious needs and tendencies
appear. Acts xvii. 27 is justified by a comparison of religions.

230 The Epistle to the Romans

fall, some tainting of the race in its origin. I do not see,
then, anything absurd or contrary to evidence in such
a hypothesis as this. The Divine Spirit is assumed to be
at work in all the development of the world. The ' laws
of nature' are but His methods. At a certain moment
a new thing had emerged in the universe hitherto
inorganic. It was the fact of life. It was new 1 . But it
was in continuity with what had gone before. This
principle of life had its great development, vegetable
and animal. It had attained a form in certain anthropoid
apes such as we are familiar with in men. Suppose then
that the Divine Spirit breathes Himself, again in a new
way, into one single pair or group of these anthropoid
animals. There is lodged in them for the first time
a germ of spiritual consciousness, continuous with animal
intelligence, and yet distinct from it. From this pair or
group humanity has its origin. If they and their offspring
had been true to their spiritual capacities the animal
nature would have been more rapidly spiritualized in
motives and tendencies. Development physical, moral,
spiritual would have been steady and glorious. Whereas
there was a fall at the very root of our humanity; and the
fall was repeated and reiterated and renewed, and the
development of our manhood was tainted and spoiled.
There was a lapse into approximately animal condition,
which is dimly known to us as primitive savagery. So
that the condition of savage man is a parody of what God
intended man in his undeveloped stages to be, just as the
condition of civilized man in London and Paris is a parody
of what God intended developed man to come to. And
there have been long and dreary epochs when men have

1 It must not be left out of sight that the idea oflife as naturally
derived from what was inorganic, has not yet been made to appear
even scientifically probable, in view of the evidence.

Note E 231

seemed to lose almost all human ideals and divine
aspirations ; when, in St. Paul's phrase, they were ' alive
without the law,' living a physical life unvisited by the
remorse consequent upon any knowledge of better things.
And there have been, on the other hand, epochs and
special occasions of spiritual opportunity and spiritual
restorations. And so, on the whole, side by side with
the continually deteriorating effect of sin, has gone on
the slow process of redemption, the undoing of the evil
of sin and the realization of the divine purpose for man.
Such an idea of human history, partly only hypothetical,
partly assured, conflicts with no scientific ethnology, and
is but a restatement of old-fashioned Christianity in all
that has religious importance.

V. Of course, in all this I am assuming that the doctrine
of sin and of the Fall in its true importance has a much
securer basis than the supposition that Genesis iii is
literal history. The doctrine of the Fall is, as I have
said, not separable from the doctrine of sin, or the doc-
trine of sin from that of moral freedom. It rests upon
the broad basis of human experience, especially upon
Christian experience, which is bound up with its reality.
Most of all it rests, for Christians, on the teaching of
Christ. For Christ's teaching and action postulate
throughout the doctrine of sin. But that doctrine in
its turn goes back upon the Old Testament, which is
full of the truth that the evils of human nature are due,
not to its essential constitution, but to man's wilfulness
and its results; that the disordering force in human
nature has been moral, the force of sin; that human
history represents in one aspect a fall from a divine
purpose, a fall constantly reiterated and renewed in acts
of disobedience. These constant acts of disobedience are
in part caused by an evil heart in human nature, and this
in its turn exhibits the fruits of past sins. Granted this,

232 The Epistle to the Romans

the story in Genesis iii, whether it be historical or whether
(as not only many modern Christians, but some of the
greatest of early Christians, have thought) it be not an
historical account of a single event, but a generalized
account of what is continually happening, has, at any
rate, vital spiritual truth. The character of its inspiration
is apparent. Teach a child what sin is, first of all on the
ground of general Christian experience and the teaching
of Christ, and then read to it the story of Genesis iii, and
the child must perforce recognize the truth in a form in
which it cannot be forgotten. There in that story all the
main points of truth as to the meaning of sin are sug-
gested, and the main sources of error precluded. Sin
is not our nature, but wilfulness ; sin is disobedience to
the divine law, the refusal of trust in God ; there is such
a thing as being tempted to sin, and yielding to it, and
then finding that we have been deceived, being con-
science-stricken and fearing to face God ; and the curse
of our manhood springs from nowhere ultimately but
our own evil heart. And if our sins lay us under an
outward discipline, which is God's punishment, yet in
the very discipline lies the hope of our recovery. God
the destroyer is also the God who promises redemption.
Thus all that we most need to know about God and man,
about obedience and disobedience, about temptation, about
the blessing and the cursing of human nature, about con-
science good and bad, is to be found in the story of
Genesis iii, written in language suitable to the childhood
of the individual and of the race.

VI. But once more, and for the last time, the biologist
will reply, ' You are not going to get off so easily. The
fact of physical death is inextricably interwoven into the
structural growth of the world long before men appeared.
But Christianity regards it as a mere consequence of
human sin.' This is not the case. Long before science

Note E 233

had investigated the early history of life on our globe,
Christian teachers both in East and in West St. Augustine
as well as St. Athanasius had taught that death is the
law of physical nature, that it had been in the world
before man, and that 'man was by nature mortal,' because,
as being animal, he was subject to death. How, then, do
they interpret the language of Scripture ? In this way :
They hold that if man had been true to his spiritual
nature, the supernatural life, the life in God, would have
blunted the forces of corruption, and lifted him into a
higher and immortal state.

Certainly, in some sense, death, as we know it, for man,
is regarded, especially in the New Testament, as the
penalty of sin. But then what do we mean by death ?
If sin is said to have introduced human death, Christ is
constantly said to have abolished it. ' This is the bread
that cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat
thereof and not die.' 'Whosoever believeth on me shall
never die.' 'Christ Jesus abolished death.' Sin, then,
we may suppose, only introduced death in some sense
such as that in which Christ abolished it. Christ has not
abolished the physical transition from this world to the
invisible world, but He has robbed it of its terror, its
sting, its misery. Apart from sin we may suppose man
would not have died ; that is, he would never have had
that horrible experience which he has called death. There
would have been only some transition full of a glorious
hope from one state of being to another.

We are again in the region of conjecture. All that I am
here interested in asserting is that Christianity never has
held to the position that human sin first introduced death
into the world. What it has taught is that human death,
as men have known it, with its horror and its misery, has
represented not God's intention for man, but the curse
of sin.

234 The Epistle to the Romans

VII. Now I have endeavoured to face and meet the
points which are urged in the name of science against
the Christian doctrine of the Fall. I have endeavoured
to point out that what is essential to Christianity is to
believe in the reality of moral freedom, and the conse-
quent reality of sin, as something which need not have
been in the individual, or in the race considered as a
unity. This is all that Christianity is really pledged to
maintain. In maintaining this we are maintaining what
is absolutely essential to the moral well-being of the
race, and, moreover, what has the deepest roots in man's
moral experience and in the teaching of Christ. In
holding this we hold the doctrine of the Fall, a doctrine,
that is, that man's condition has been throughout a parody
of the divine intention, owing to the fact of sin tainting
and spoiling his development from the root. But Chris-
tianity is not in any kind of way pledged against the
doctrine of development, only against the doctrine which
no reasonable science can hold, that the actual develop-
ment of man has been the best or only possible one.
Nor, I have urged, can it be reasonably said that the
Christian doctrine of sin and of the Fall is bound up with
one particular interpretation of Genesis iii. All, then, that
we must admit in the way of collision between Christianity
and science is, on the one hand, that Christianity is not
intended to teach men science, and that when there is
any great advance in human knowledge it takes a little
while for Christianity to extricate itself from the meshes
of the language and ideas belonging to one stage of
scientific knowledge, and to assimilate the terms and
ideas of the new. But, on the other hand, there is
perennial and necessary warfare between Christianity
and materialistic science, or a science which denies the
reality of moral freedom. And as to Christianity giving
up what is proper to its own ground its teaching about

Note E 235

freedom and sin and the Fall, and God's purpose for
man, and the love shown in his redemption to give up
this is to give up what is the best and deepest motive of
human progress, and what is most surely certificated
by the witness of Christ and the spiritual experience of
Christendom. Indeed all schemes of human improve-
ment are shallow and inadequate, which do not deal with
man as what, in fact, he has been proved to be, a sinful,
that is a fallen, being, needing not only education but
redemption.

Before leaving this attempt to show that there is
no necessary conflict between biological and theological
science, it is important to call the attention of the intelli-
gent public to the fact that what formerly appeared to be
the solid consistency of the ' Darwinian ' creed, has been
broken up into a state not far removed from chaos. It
has become apparent how very little way has really been
made towards showing what have been the actual factors
in evolution how the fact of evolution through variation
has actually occurred. Thus Mr. Bateson l remarks, ' If
the study of variation can serve no other end, it may
make us remember that the complexity of the problem
of specific difference is hardly less now than it was
when Darwin first showed that natural history is a
problem, and no vain riddle.' What is the cause of
variations occurring ? What law do they exhibit in
their occurrence? Do variations occur with a certain
degree of sudden completeness 3 ? Or how are we to

1 W. Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variations, treated with
especial regard to discontinuity in the origin of species (Macmillan,
1894), p. xii.

3 Biologists are now apparently more disposed than formerly
to admit the sudden appearance of considerable and important
modifications and rapid developments. Cf. Haeckel, /. c. p. 144,
and Bateson, p. 568. He concludes that ' discontinuity of species

236 The Epistle to the Romans

explain the maintenance of variations, which in a more
developed stage are to be very useful, before they can
be shown to be useful at all? What is the place held
in evolution by ' natural selection ' ? What, if any, the
place held by use-inheritance ? Is the factor of 'mimicry/
supported by Darwin, an important or even real factor
in evolution ? What is to be the issue of the controversy
between the biologist and the physicist on the question
of the time required for organic development ? Are we
to suppose that organic development at the beginning
proceeded very much more rapidly than at a later stage ?
Or even that it exhibited laws of which we have no
experience now, such as would admit of a 'natural'
development of life out of what is not living ? All these,
and many more questions, appear to be so completely
open that, granted the general theory of continuous
evolution as against special creation, hardly anything
as regards the factors or causes of evolution can be said
to be scientifically settled. Thus on such subjects as the
origin of the human race, its exact relation to an animal
ancestry, and the right interpretation of the fact of sin,

results from discontinuity of variation.' 'The existence,' he says,
' of sudden and discontinuous variation, the existence, that is to
say, of new forms having from their first beginning more or less
of the kind of perfection which we associate with normality, is
a fact that disposes, once and for all, of the attempt to interpret
all perfection and definiteness of form as the work of selection.
The study of variation leads us into the presence of whole classes
of phenomena that are plainly incapable of such interpretation.'
This relative perfection of variations at starting Mr. Bateson
attributes in great measure to the principle of ' symmetry/ or
' repetition of parts ' in living things. An organism is symmetri-
cal, and thus what happens in one of many similar organs repeats
itself normally in all the others. Change in one part is not an
isolated fact, but there is 'similarity and simultaneity of change.'

Note F 237

before science can make demands on theology, there
must be more agreement in her own camp.

NOTE F. See vol. i. p. 215.

BAPTISM BY IMMERSION AND BY AFFUSION.

The following passage in the Didache, c. 7, is of the
plainest importance for the history of this matter : ' If
thou have not living [i.e. running] water, baptize into
other water ; and if thou canst not in cold, then in warm.
And if thou have not either [in sufficient amount for
baptism, i. e. immersion in the water] pour forth water
thrice upon the head into the name of Father and Son
and Holy Ghost.' Cf. Dr. Taylor, Teaching of the Twelve
Apostles (Cambridge, 1886), p. 52 : ' The primitive mode
of baptism was by immersion. According to the Jewish
rite a ring on the finger, a band confining the hair,
or anything that in the least degree broke the con-
tinuity of contact with the water, was held to invalidate
the act. The Greek word "baptize," like the Hebrew
tabol, means to dip : to " baptize " a ship is to sink it.
The construction [in the above passage of the Didache]
"baptize into other water," points to immersion, as
likewise does Hermas, when he writes (Simil. 9) :
" They go down therefore into the water dead, and
come up living ; " and Barnabas (chap, xi) : " Herein he
saith that we go down into the water laden with sins and
filthiness, and come up bearing fruit in our heart, and
having our fear and our hope towards Jesus in the
Spirit." This was still the normal way of administering
the rite, but it was no longer insisted upon as necessary :

238 The Epistle to the Romans

" If thou have not either? not enough of " living " or
"other" water for immersion, '''pour water thrice upon the
head!' &c.'

NOTE G. See vol. ii. p. 136.
A PRAYER OF JEREMY TAYLOR.

O holy and almighty God, Father of mercies, Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Thy love and eternal
mercies, I adore and praise and glorify Thy infinite and
unspeakable love and wisdom ; who hast sent Thy Son
from the bosom of felicities to take upon Him our nature
and our misery and our guilt, and hast made the Son
of God to become the Son of Man, that we might become
the sons of God and partakers of the divine nature ; since
Thou hast so exalted human nature be pleased also to
sanctify my person, that by a conformity to the humility
and laws and sufferings of my dearest Saviour I may be
united to His Spirit, and be made all one with the most
holy Jesus. Amen.

O holy and eternal Jesus, who didst pity mankind
lying in his blood and sin and misery, and didst choose
our sadnesses and sorrows that Thou mightest make us
to partake of Thy felicities ; Let Thine eyes pity me, Thy
hands support me, Thy holy feet tread down all the diffi-
culties in my way to heaven ; let me dwell in Thy heart,
be instructed with Thy wisdom, moved by Thy affections,
choose with Thy will, and be clothed with Thy righteous-
ness; that in the day of judgement I may be found having
on Thy garments, sealed with Thy impression ; and that,
bearing upon every faculty and member the character of

Note H 239

my elder Brother, I may not be cast out with strangers
and unbelievers. Amen.

O holy and ever blessed Spirit, who didst overshadow
the Holy Virgin-mother of our Lord, and caused her to
conceive by a miraculous and mysterious manner ; be
pleased to overshadow my soul, and enlighten my spirit,
that I may conceive the holy Jesus in my heart, and may
bear Him in my mind, and may grow up to the fullness of
the stature of Christ, to be a perfect man in Christ Jesus.
Amen.

To God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ ; to the
eternal Son that was incarnate and born of a virgin ; to
the Spirit of the Father and the Son, be all honour and
glory, worship and adoration, now and for ever. Amen,
Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living ; see his Works, vol. iii.
p. 238.

NOTE H. See vol. ii. p. 147.

THE ORIGIN OF THE MAXIM ' IN NECESSARIIS UNITAS, ETC.*

The expression 'In necessariis unitas, in non necessariis
libertas, in omnibus caritas ' is cited by Richard Baxter
in the dedication of On the True and Only Way of Concord of
all Christian Churches, 1679, thus, * I once more quote you
the pacificator's old and despised words.' But the pacifi-
cator appears to be no one older than a Protestant who
wrote (1620 to 1640), under the name of Rupertus Melden-
ius, a Paraenesis votiva pro pace ecclesiae ad theologos
Augustanae Confessionis. In the Paraenesis occurs the
sentence 'si nos servaremus in necessariis unitatem, in non
necessariis Hbertatem, in utrisque caritatem optimo certe
loco essent res nostrae.' See A. P. Stanley in Macmillan>

240 The Epistle to the Romans

Sep., 1875, referring to G. C. F. Liicke, Ueber das Alter,
den Verfasser, die ursprungliche Form und den wahren Sinn
des kirchlichen Friedensspruchs : ' in necessariis unitas &c.,'
G6ttingen, 1850.

This information was supplied me in correction of a
mistaken attribution of the saying of which I was guilty
in a sermon ; and has been verified for me by Mr. Arthur
Hirtzel. The saying has been commonly attributed
to St. Augustine, and indeed the matter of it is thoroughly
in his spirit ; cf. my Ephesians, p. 272 ; and see also De
Gen. ad lift., viii. 5 : ' Melius est dubitare de occultis quam
litigare de incertis.' De Civ. Dei, xix. 18 : ' qua [i. e. faith
in scripture] salva atque certa, de quibusdam rebus quas
neque sensu, neque ratione percepimus, neque nobis
per Scripturam canonicam claruerunt, nee per testes, qui-
bus non credere absurdum est, in nostram notitiam per-
venerunt, sine iusta reprehensione dubitamus.'

NOTE I. See vol. ii. p. 179.

ST. AUGUSTINE'S TEACHING THAT 'THE CHURCH is THE
BODY OF CHRIST OFFERED IN THE EUCHARIST.'

The following passages are full of interest : De Civ. D.
x. 6 : 'So that the whole redeemed city, that is the con-
gregation and society of the saints, is offered as a universal
sacrifice to God by the High Priest, who offered nothing
less than Himself in suffering for us, so that we might
become the body of so glorious a head, according to that
' form of a servant ' which He had taken. For it was this
(our human nature) that He offered, in this that He was
offered, because it is in respect of this that He is mediator,
priest and sacrifice.' Then after a reference to Rom. xii.

Note I 241

1-6 he continues, 'This is the Christian sacrifice: the
" many " become " one body in Christ." And it is this
that the Church celebrates by means of the sacrament of
the altar, familiar to the faithful, where it is shown to her
that in what she offers she herself is offered.' And x. 20 :
Of Christ's perfect sacrifice of Himself ' He willed the
Church's sacrifice to be a daily sacrament. For as she is
the body of Him the head, she learns through Him to
offer up herself.' Again xix. 23 : ' God's most glorious and
best sacrifice is we ourselves, that is His city, of which
we celebrate the mystery in our oblations, which are
known to the faithful.' Cf. xxii. 10 : ' The sacrifice itself
is the body of Christ, which is not offered to them (the
martyrs), for they themselves also are it ' (quia hoc sunt
et ipsi). Cf. Serm. 227 : ' If you have well received (the
body of Christ in the sacrament) you are what you have
received ... He willed us to be His sacrifice.'

In all this we have a very plain and much forgotten
teaching. But we must not misunderstand St. Augustine's
use of apparently exclusive language as if the sacrifice
of ourselves was the only sacrifice offered in the eucha-
rist. The sacrifice of the Church is offered up through
Christ, Thus he also speaks of the celebration of the
eucharist (on the occasion of his mother's death, Conf.
ix. 12) in the phrase ' the sacrifice of our ransom (pretii
nostri) was offered for her.'

We do well to remember by the way that in De Civ.
x. 5, 6, St. Augustine twice over defines what he means
by sacrifice thus : ' A true sacrifice is everything that is
done in order that we may by a holy fellowship inhere
in God.'

II.

OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

227.1 93307

G660

Gore, Charles'

227.1 93307

60 v.2
3ore, Charles

3t.Paul"s Epistle to the Romans

17137