liv. 17, 18: 'From time to time ye have rejected the understanding of

the Most High. For his works have not taught you, nor has the skill of his creation which is at all times persuaded you.'

[4] Isa. xliv. 18-20.

[5] Wisd. xi. 15; xiii, xiv, xv. St. Paul's debt to the Book of Wisdom is apparent (1) in the kinds of idols he mentions; (2) in the way in which the thought of idolatry leads on to that of uncleanness and sexual immorality; and (3) in the idea of retribution by the natural law of results.

[6] 1 Thess. ii. 16.

[7] Butler's _Analogy_, part i. ch. 2.

[8] _Pirqé Aboth_, iv. 2 (cited by S. and H.).

[9] S. and H. p. 49.

[10] He implies, as Dr. Farrar points out, 1 Cor. v. 9-10, that pure society did not exist in Corinth.

[11] See my _Ephesians_, pp. 91, 92, 255.

[12] Rom. ii. 13-15.

[13] Rom. ii. 26.

[14] See also app. note E on physical science and the fall.

[15] Cf. F. B. Jevons, _Introd. to the Hist. of Religion_ (Methuen), pp. 394, 395: 'Everywhere it is the many who lapse: the few who hold right on. The progressive peoples of the earth are in a minority.' 'Though evolution is universal, progress is exceptional.'

[16] Cf. Huxley, _Evolution and Ethics_ (Romanes Lecture, 1893, Macmillan), p. 36: 'The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached, and the downward route will be commenced.'

[17] The allusion is to (1) Jevons (_op. cit._ cap. xxv), who seems to think some 'amorphous' form of monotheism may very probably lie behind totemism. He strongly repudiates the notion that the lower form is necessarily the older. (2) Andrew Lang, _Making of Religion_ (Longmans, 1898), chaps. ix and xv. Cp. also Orr's _Christian view of God and the World_ (Elliot, 1893), pp. 212 ff., and notes E, F, G.

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DIVISION I. § 2. CHAPTER II. 1-29.

_Judgement on the Jews._

St. Paul in his judgement of the Gentile world is but repeating, with more of moral discernment, what he would have learned in his Jewish training. But the strict Jews who had taught St. Paul, though some among them must have been good men, ready to enter into the deeply penitential spirit of their psalmists and prophets, do not seem as a rule to have liked to think of their own people as liable to divine condemnation. They chose to suppose that the Gentile world alone was the area upon which divine vengeance would light, while the Jews were to appear as the instruments of God's judgements, or at least themselves exempt from them. They had forgotten all the superabundant warnings against such a spirit which the prophets from Amos to John the Baptist had let fall. This frame of mind--censorious when {88} it looks without, lenient to the point of blindness when it looks within--sometimes appears when one thinks of things in the abstract as almost impossible, in the form at least in which St. Paul here proceeds to attribute it to the Jews. We can hardly believe that any responsible beings could be so blind as St. Paul implies that his pious fellow-countrymen were. But it needs only experience to convince us that even in its grosser forms this frame of mind is extraordinarily common in individuals, in nations, and in churches. Certainly the nation of England is not, and the representatives of religious England too often are not, exempt from the common failing. And in the case of the Jews we have also the witness of our Lord. He represents the religious Jewish world as honeycombed with hypocrisy of a plain and gross sort. They are to Him very types of the men who behold the mote that is in their brother's eye, but consider not the beam that is in their own eyes. St. Paul's witness then is only the same as the Christ's.

Here then St. Paul turns abruptly upon a Jew who may be supposed to have been listening to the indictment of the Gentiles with expressions of sympathy, and bids him look {89} within and recognize that the Jew also falls under the same indictment and on the same grounds. And he proceeds sternly to cut away any possible ground of confidence which he might derive from the thought that he had 'Abraham to his father.' God's judgement is directed by an absolutely impartial 'truth' or estimate of the facts in their inner reality. If in any particular case of persistent sin His judgement seems to linger, it is not that He has forgotten or will overlook; it is only that He is merciful and forbearing, and gives long space for repentance[1]. But, meanwhile, if the opportunity is not taken, if the heart is hard and impenitent, a store is being laid up against the offender in the place of judgement, which will break out in the great day in manifested wrath. God's principle of judgement is absolutely free from partiality. There are men {90} who have steadily in view the true aim of human life, its imperishable glory, its final and permanent honour, and, therefore, preferring eternal to temporal things, patiently go on doing good; they may be Jews or Greeks, but in either case indifferently, the reward that they have sought will be theirs with the accompaniment of inward peace. There are other men who are contentious, and refusing the leading of the truth, make themselves servants to unrighteousness. They may be Jews or Gentiles, but the divine wrath, showing itself in outward suffering and inward anguish, will be upon them all equally. For God judges men impartially in the light of their opportunities. Those who have the advantage of a revealed law shall be judged and acquitted according as they have, not listened to it merely, but obeyed it. For a law known and not kept, so far from commending us to God, is but the instrument of our judgement. And those who have not this advantage are yet not without an inward light in the natural moral consciousness of mankind. Those who have sinned against this light shall find nothing else was needed to bring them to their ruin. And those, on the other hand, who by its help keep the moral law in effect, without {91} any assistance from a revealed law, are their own law for themselves. They have the law in its practical result written in their hearts as their conduct shows, and their natural conscience bears its accompanying witness. For conscience, both individual and social, reflecting on all human actions to condemn, or, more rarely, to acquit, anticipates the final divine judgement which, as St. Paul continually announces, it will be the office of Jesus the Christ to pass unerringly upon things secret as well as open in the 'day of the Lord.'

The specially revealed law on which the Jew relied, which it is his boast to have received from God, and in virtue of which he could rightly claim to have a knowledge of divine things which other men had not, and to be the teacher of the nations, the interpreter to other men of the divine will--this law finds its first application to those themselves to whom it is given. How can they preach the commandments, whether it be the eighth or the seventh or the second that is in question, so long as they have so bad a reputation for keeping them? They cannot deny that as of old, so now, their moral conduct causes the heathen to blaspheme their religion, instead of {92} being drawn towards it. To have received circumcision in physical fact is of no profit at all, unless it be accompanied by the obedience of which the mark in the flesh is but the symbol. Disobedience is in God's sight uncircumcision. And where the obedience is, God will reckon it as if the symbol were there also. The morally obedient Gentile will sit in judgement on the morally disobedient Jew. For that is the divine principle. God everywhere and always looks to the spiritual reality as it is seated in heart and will, and is satisfied never by outward distinctions. Jew (Judah) means 'praise.' But if the Jew is to merit his name, he must not be satisfied with the applause of men. He must commend himself to God who sees the heart.

Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest dost practise the same things. And we know that the judgement of God is according to truth against them that practise such things. And reckonest thou this, O man, who judgest them that practise such things, and doest the same, that thou shall escape the judgement of God? Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the {93} day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgement of God; who will render to every man according to his works: to them that by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and incorruption, eternal life: but unto them that are factious, and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, _shall be_ wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that worketh evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Greek; but glory and honour and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek: for there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned under law shall be judged by law; for not the hearers of a law are just before God, but the doers of a law shall be justified: for when Gentiles which have no law do by nature the things of the law, these, having no law, are a law unto themselves; in that they shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith[2], and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing _them_; in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ.

But if thou bearest the name of a Jew, and restest upon the law, and gloriest in God, and knowest his will, and approvest the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the law, and art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them that are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having in the law the form of knowledge and of the truth; thou therefore that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? {94} thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou rob temples? thou who gloriest in the law, through thy transgression of the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, even as it is written. For circumcision indeed profiteth, if thou be a doer of the law: but if thou be a transgressor of the law, thy circumcision is become uncircumcision. If therefore the uncircumcision keep the ordinances of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be reckoned for circumcision? and shall not the uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who with the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

1. As at the end of the first chapter we asked whether St. Paul was fair to the Gentile world, so now we ask whether he is fair to those of his own race whose religious tendencies he had known so well from inside. And the answer again is that he undoubtedly represents aright the dominant tendency and temper among them. The prophets had always had to fight against the natural but false idea of divine election, which held the Jewish race secure in the favour of Jehovah, simply because He was their God and they were His people. They bring to bear {95} all the activities of an inspired intelligence and heart to make their fellow-countrymen perceive that they are only secure in God's favour so long as they are like Him in character. Now down to the period of the Captivity, the prophets could also denounce the people because they were constantly false to Jehovah in matters of worship as well as of morality. After the Captivity, however, the tendency to idolatry is gone for ever. After the Maccabean period the exclusive and legitimate worship of Jehovah becomes a matter of passionate enthusiasm in the Jewish race. Henceforth therefore their danger from the false idea of election passes into a new phase. We must be in the favour of God, they now could plead, because we have Abraham to our father, and because we keep to the worship of our God with an irreproachable zeal for His law. Against this sort of strengthened pleading John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, aims his bare moral teaching. God's wrath is just about to fall upon His people he declares, because it lacks in real moral righteousness. Repent ye, be changed, get you a new heart--is his one word of preaching. This keynote passes intensified into the teachings and the denunciations of Christ. Nothing {96} more surely stamps the narrative of 'the woman taken in adultery' as historically genuine[3], than its profound truth to the moral attitude of Christ in face of Scribes and Pharisees. The point of His reply to their trial question is that they who would enforce a divine law, and thus stand for God before the world, must themselves be morally sound. 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.' It is moral conformity, not merely orthodoxy, which qualifies us to act for God. It is then precisely this attitude of Christ towards the Jews zealous for the law, which St. Paul is reproducing in the passage which we have just read.

He suggests also in its last words--where he is playing on the meaning of the name of Judah--another deep element in Christ's depreciation of the religious spirit of the Jews. Their religion was a matter of public opinion--with all the stagnancy which belongs to the public opinion of a compact society--not a matter which lived with ever fresh life in the inner relation of the conscience to God. 'How can ye believe which receive glory one of another, and the glory which cometh from the only God ye seek not?' {97} St. Paul then is certainly right in his estimate of Jewish religion. One indeed who describes with as vivid reality as he does the pride of a Jew in his religious privileges--one who had all the reason that Saul of Tarsus had for knowing what it was to feel this emotion from within--could hardly have been wrong in his estimate of its weaknesses.

And if the particular moral defects which St. Paul attributes to the religious Jew are surprisingly grave--theft, adultery, and temple-robbery--here too what he says out of his own experience is confirmed from other quarters. Avarice was a notorious sin of Jews. Our Lord accuses the Scribes of 'devouring widows' houses[4]' under cloak of religion, and denounces the Pharisees also for leaving their outwardly purified cups and platters inwardly full of 'extortion.' It is only a subtler form of theft that He alludes to when He denounces them for sanctioning the practice of dedicating property as a 'corban' to the purposes of religion in order to evade the righteous claims of parents. The story of Susanna, the brief but stern words of our Lord about the seventh commandment in His Sermon on the Mount, and His {98} significant language on the occasion already alluded to of the woman taken in adultery, interpret St. Paul's language as to sins of the flesh. And the language of the town clerk at Ephesus in exculpating St. Paul and his company, suggests that 'temple-robbery' was a not unfamiliar imputation upon Jews. It appears that with all their horror of idols--and though everything connected with an idol was expressly declared to be 'an abomination,' unless it had been already desecrated by Gentiles[5]--they could not always resist the opportunity of appropriating the rich stores of the temples. The 'religious' Scribes and Pharisees (though not of course the best of them) were, in fact, as a body truly hypocrites, as our Lord summarily said they were.

And there lies in the moral failure of the Jews a very much needed warning to us nineteenth-century Christians against censoriousness. 'Judging' occupies so large a part in our ordinary conversation. In the religious world, we condemn so freely--Romanists, Dissenters, those who are of a different party to ourselves: in the social world--those of a different class, those who employ us, or whom we employ, {99} those whom in any way we do not like or who go contrary to us. We are always judging. But to judge, we are taught, is a great responsibility. With what judgement we judge, we shall be judged. It is of the utmost consequence that before we judge others we should have judged ourselves. And to have done that truthfully has a tendency to make us charitable in our estimate of others, because we are deeply conscious of our own need of merciful and lenient consideration.

2. What St. Paul teaches about the moral consciousness, and possibility of moral goodness, among the Gentiles has not a Jewish sound at all. The Jewish teachers generally would not have admitted any goodness acceptable to God in the heathen world. In fact, St. Paul is here, as in his speech at Athens, accepting the principle of a universal presence and operation of God in the human heart, outside the limit of any special revelation, and he accepts it in terms largely derived from current Stoic philosophy.

The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good life. A good life means a 'life according {100} to nature,' or 'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the universal reason or God. And as a help in living according to reason, the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we all do wrong.

'No one,' said Seneca, St. Paul's contemporary, 'will be found who can acquit himself; and any man calling himself innocent has regard to the human witness, not to his own conscience.' He quotes an 'admirable saying of Epicurus,' 'The beginning of safety is the knowledge of sin.' He inculcates the duty of strict self-examination, and tells us how he performed it himself at night: 'when the light is removed, and my wife, who is by this time aware of my practice, is now silent, I pass the whole of my day under examination.' Then he 'opens out his conscience to the gods.' And this conscience is to every man a sort of inward God[6]. It is in fact the representative in each man of the universal, immutable, and divine moral law, the {101} law of nature, in conformity with which is the only true freedom and citizenship of the world. 'For this' (the world of the moral order), said another contemporary of St. Paul, also a philosopher, 'is the common home of all, and its law is no written document (letter), but God. And if a man transgresses what the law imposes, he will be impious; or rather he will not dare transgress, for he could not escape. Justice has many furies, watch-dogs for sins[7].' There is in Cicero's _Republic_ a magnificent expression of the principle of the law of nature: 'There is a true law which is right reason, agreeable to nature, diffused among all men, constant, eternal, which calls us to duty by its injunctions, and by its prohibitions deters us from wrong; which upon the good lays neither injunction nor prohibition in vain; while for the bad, neither its injunctions nor its prohibitions avail at all. This law admits neither of addition nor subtraction nor abrogation. The vote of neither senate nor people can discharge us from our obligation to it. We are not to look for some other person to expound or interpret it; nor will there be one law for Rome and another for Athens, nor {102} one at this date and another later on; but one law shall embrace all races over all time, eternal and immortal; and there shall be hereby one common master and commander of all--God, who originated this law and proposed it and arbitrates concerning it; and if any one obeys it not, he shall play false to himself and shall do despite to the nature of man, and by this very fact shall pay the greatest penalties, even if he should escape all else that is reckoned punishment.' It is of interest to notice that the words cited by St. Paul before the Areopagus[8], 'We are also God's offspring,' occur in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes, full of the thought of man's relation through his reason to the universal and divine law.

Of this type of thought and language then St. Paul avails himself, in spite of the immense differences which disclose themselves below the surface between the Stoic and the Christian ideas of God. He avails himself of Stoic phraseology about men being God's offspring in his speech at Athens, as being in accordance with what he, the Christian apostle, had to teach. And here he adopts in substance the Stoic language with regard to conscience. As by inference from {103} nature all men can know of God's power and divine attributes, so, St. Paul says, from the witness of conscience they may know the principles of His moral government[9]. St. Paul, however, rightly refuses to be satisfied with the individual conscience. The social judgement--the social verdicts of condemnation or acquittal continually being passed--co-operate with it to anticipate the judgements of God. And in virtue of the inward light of reason, and the conscience[10] both individual and social, he held that men who lie outside the region of special revelation can possess the moral law in effect in their hearts, and, it is implied, can keep it.

St. Paul is mainly occupied in this epistle in contrasting the Christian Church, as a region where spiritual power is given in response to faith to enable a man to fulfil the divine law, both with the heathen world, plunged in moral wickedness, and with the Jewish Church in its failure to attain to divine righteousness by the law of works--of which more hereafter. {104} But there were among the Jews true sons of Abraham: and there were among the Gentiles good men acceptable to God, like righteous Job. St. Paul does not theorize about this. But there is at least no reason to deny that he would have declared these righteous men to be justified by faith and sanctified by grace, i.e. justified by that degree of truthful correspondence with God which was possible for them; and kept in harmony with the will of God by His Spirit. There is no reason to believe that St. Paul would not have admitted some action of faith and grace among the non-christian Gentiles, as he undoubtedly does among the prae-christian Jews who lived under or before the law. When he says of the good heathen that they do '_by nature_ the things contained in the law,' he uses the expression not as equivalent to 'by their own unassisted powers, without the help of God,' but simply to mean 'without the help of any special revelation[11].'

{105}

Universally then, according to St. Paul, two sources of the knowledge of God exist; nature, with its evidences of the divine power and other similar attributes, and conscience, with its witness to divine righteousness. And, though the sciences of nature and man have grown since St. Paul's day past recognition, nothing (we may boldly say) has really weakened either element of this double witness. It is, and remains true, that the only reasonable argument from the universal order of nature is to a universal reason or mind: and that the method by which the moral conscience may be believed to have developed out of 'animal intelligence,' makes no difference as to the cogency of its witness to a divine righteousness, in response to which alone it could have developed as in fact it has done. It is worth notice also before we leave this part of our subject, that St. Paul's line of thought affords a true explanation of the double fact that, on the one hand, the actual moral standards with which the conscience of different individuals, races, and generations is satisfied, greatly varies; and, on the other hand, that all the standards tend towards unity in a common idea of righteousness. The tendency towards unity St. Paul would attribute to the divine righteousness {106} which lies behind conscience and which it exists to reflect. The variations would be due to the different degrees of development reached; or still more to the different degrees of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, attention or inattention, with which the conscience of the race or the individual has responded to the light. The conscience, like the speculative reason, is an instrument for coming to the truth; but an instrument capable of every variety of racial or individual error or obtuseness.

3. It appears clearly enough in this chapter, that St. Paul's doctrines of free grace and justification by faith must be grossly and carelessly misconceived unless they are viewed upon a deep background of what we commonly call 'natural religion,' that is (practically) the religion that appeals straight off to the conscience of almost all honest and civilized men. It is 'natural religion' to believe that God will judge men with absolute power and insight and impartiality according to their conduct and their characters: that there can be no 'making believe,' no substitute for a good character, and no escaping with a bad one. The prophets are full of this principle. Our Lord reasserts it. It is emphasized by St. James, whose plain {107} point is that we are justified not by right belief (which is what he means by 'faith'), but by a good life. But no one could assert the principle more simply and absolutely as the basis of all his special evangelical teaching than St. Paul. And whatever is true about free grace and justification by faith only, is true because, and only because, this free grace and this justifying faith are necessary means or steps towards the realization of actual righteousness. So St. Paul states it--'that the requirement of the (divine) law might be fulfilled in us who walk[12]' according to the principles of the 'gospel of the grace of God.' The doctrine of grace is rooted and based upon the truths of natural religion, and leads up to their realization. It has been then a most perilous mistake when missionaries have preached the doctrines of grace and redemption in regions where there had been no preparatory training in natural religion--in the truth of the unity and power and moral character of God: of the reality of our responsibility towards Him: of His inexorable holiness: of His inaccessibility to any kind of bribe or attempt to find some substitute for moral obedience. Men must have known what {108} it is to tremble in the recesses of their being 'as guilty men surprised' before God's awful righteousness; to 'tremble,' like Felix, at the message of 'righteousness, temperance, and judgement to come,' before they can safely learn the lesson of His grace and pardon.

And there are two minor elements in natural religion, as commonly understood, for which St. Paul here makes himself responsible. It has been generally understood that all men instinctively desire their own happiness, and that this is natural and right; and that as we should reasonably prefer our more permanent and deeper good to what is only transitory and superficial, so we should strive for the happiness and satisfaction which is eternal--the eternal reward, which only the stern pursuit of virtue can obtain for us. This deep desire for our own substantial happiness our Lord sanctions and continually suggests as a principal motive for right living. The love of others does not annihilate it. 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour _as thyself_.' So then St. Paul also, following his Master, recognizes it as lying at the heart of what is right and true in mankind, that we should 'seek' for ourselves 'glory, honour, and incorruption'--the glory and honour which abide {109} eternally. It is plain that he would have us pay no heed to that truly unnatural modern altruism which would disparage and depreciate this motive of a right self-love, and which would treat the desire for eternal happiness, and fear of eternal loss, as a base and unworthy element in religion. No doubt it is not the only motive. It is not even the characteristically Christian motive. But it is a natural and legitimate motive all the same. It is an inextinguishable consciousness in us that we were meant for blessedness.

But, once more, the only true happiness is moral happiness: it is a 'glory and honour' springing out of the man's character and belonging to it: it is a happiness that is in this sense deserved. True, the servant of God in heaven will always feel that what he is receiving is infinitely beyond his deserts, and that his deserts are what God has wrought in him, not he himself. None the less the reward springs out of and belongs to what God has actually made him to be. Heaven is not a happy place in such a sense that we could be made happy by being 'put there' by an arbitrary fiat of God. It is fellowship with God, the All-holy; and God's holiness is intolerable, it is 'devouring fire and {110} everlasting burnings,' to those who are not morally like Him. Here lies the reason why a heaven is not possible to moral beings without the accompanying possibilities of a hell. For the moral possibility of acquiring the holy character involves the opposite moral possibility: and it does not lie in the moral nature of things that the bad character should receive anything except what it deserves--the 'indignation and wrath' which God, because He is God, must express towards the sinful, wilful character, and which to the character itself means 'tribulation and anguish.' This, St. Paul says positively, must be the lot of 'every soul of man that doeth evil.' It is this inevitably two-sided law that a large part of the kindly-disposed world to-day are trying to get rid of, or to forget, on its severe and dark side. But it is in fact a law that works even more necessarily and inexorably than physical laws, inasmuch as it is the expression of God's necessary moral being. God cannot 'let us off' the punishment of our sins, which is only their inevitable fruit. Nor does He disclose to us any necessary limit to the ruin which we may work in our being. This stern principle of natural religion is taken up into, and indeed intensified in, the gospel. {111} St. Paul, however, neither here nor elsewhere uses 'immortality' to describe the future state of those whom God condemns. He uses it only of God and of those who enjoy the vision of God. The 'immortality of the soul'--the idea that every soul as such necessarily and consciously exists to all eternity--is an idea which the language of Scripture does not seem to warrant.

4. There are also two less prominent points in the second chapter that we must not entirely pass over.

St. Paul, we should find, if we were to investigate the matter, is wholly true in his interpretation of the Old Testament in general. He interprets its spirit and meaning with perfect insight. But he is not always what we should call critically exact, any more than the other interpreters of his day, in his use of particular texts. Thus, in this chapter he gives to some words of Isaiah[13] a meaning which is indeed to be found elsewhere in the prophets[14], but does not really belong to the original of this particular passage. Isaiah is saying that God's name is being blasphemed _by the oppressors of {112} Israel_--'Continually all day long my name is blasphemed.' But the Greek version of the Bible inserted the words 'through you' (the Jews[15]); and St. Paul interprets this insertion to mean that it was the moral inconsistency of the chosen people themselves which caused God's name to be blasphemed. Perhaps the fact that he uses the formula of quotation 'as it is written' after the words referred to, is a sign that he had employed the words in his own sense before he became conscious that they were in fact a quotation. But in any case he shows no anxiety to follow critically the original meaning of a particular passage which he cites.

At the end of this passage occurs the antithesis familiar in modern language of 'the letter and the spirit.' In its modern sense it is used as equivalent to the literal and the metaphorical, or the definite and the vague. But this is not at all its sense in St. Paul. With him 'the letter' means the written law, and 'spirit' means, in this connexion, what we may broadly describe as vital moral energy. Thus, {113} in its most characteristic use with St. Paul, the antithesis distinguishes the mere external information as to God's will, which was all the written law ('the letter') could give the Jews, from the activity of the Holy Spirit or the spiritual power of moral freedom which, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we enjoy under the gospel. In this passage the antithesis is similar, but not the same. It contrasts the merely physical state of circumcision according to the written law--'with the letter and circumcision' means 'having the written law and being accordingly circumcised'--with what the Old Testament had called 'the circumcised heart,' i.e. the really obedient will or 'spirit' which may exist independently of the outward rite. 'Spirit,' we observe, may refer to the activity of either the Holy Spirit of God, or of the human will, or of both without discrimination.

[1] Cf. Eccles. viii. 11: 'Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is emboldened to do evil.' Ps. x. 11: 'He saith in his heart, God hath forgotten.' Wisd. xi. 23: 'Thou overlookest the sins of men to the end they may repent.' Ecclus. v. 4: 'Say not, I sinned, and what happened unto me? For the Lord is longsuffering.' 2 Pet. iii. 9: 'The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness; but is longsuffering to youward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.' Cf. also Isa. lvii. 11.

[2] Or rather 'their own conscience bearing witness with them and, in their mutual relations, their reflections accusing or even excusing them.'

[3] It is certainly misplaced as it stands (John vii. 53-viii. 11).

[4] Mark xii. 40; Luke xx. 47; Matt. xxiii. 25.

[5] Cf. S. and H. _in loc._

[6] See for Seneca, Lightfoot, _Philippians_, 'St. Paul and Seneca,' pp. 278-280.

[7] See _Pseudo-Heracleitus_, Letter ix, p. 91 (Bernays).

[8] Acts xvii. 28.

[9] See Rom. i. 32 as well as Rom. ii. 14.

[10] 'Conscience,' as used by St. Paul's contemporaries and by himself, is not a repository for positive moral guidance, but rather a faculty for reflecting upon our own already accomplished actions. See further, app. note B, on the idea of conscience.

[11] See on this subject _Life and Letters of Dr. Hort_ (Macmillan), vol. ii. p. 337: 'Faith itself, not being an intellectual assent to propositions, but an attitude of heart and mind, is present in a more or less rudimentary state in every upward effort or aspiration of man.' Also Gibson, _Thirty-Nine Articles_ (Methuen), ii. p. 420.

[12] Rom. viii. 4.

[13] Isa. lii. 5.

[14] See in Ezek. xxxvi. 22: 'My holy name, which ye have profaned among the nations, whither ye went.'

[15] Dr. Gifford suggests that the LXX was subsequently modified by St. Paul's citation (as in the next chapter, iii. 10-18), instead of his citation being moulded by the LXX. Is there any evidence in support of this view?

{114}

DIVISION I. § 3. CHAPTER III. 1-8.

_Jewish objections._

This passage is interesting as showing us, what is more often the case than appears on the surface, that St. Paul has in mind as he reasons the familiar objections of an opponent--his own objections, perhaps in part, before he was a Christian. St. Paul, that is to say, very frequently writes controversially, and argues _ad hominem_: and his own reasoning is only rightly understood when we have clearly in view what he is opposing. It of course very frequently happens in literature generally that a saying is completely misunderstood, because that with which it is contrasted is overlooked. Thus, John the Baptist's advice to the soldiers to 'be content with their wages' is commonly interpreted to mean--'Be satisfied with your wages {115} as they are, and do not ask for more.' This might have been good advice or bad advice to give to the soldiers, but it is not John the Baptist's. He means, 'Be satisfied with your pay and do not supplement it by robbery and unauthorized exaction.' Here then the implied contrast is necessary to enable us to interpret aright the positive advice. Similarly in the case of St. Paul, his doctrine of the absoluteness of the divine election, as stated later in this epistle[1], has been misunderstood, because it has been supposed that he is asserting the divine absoluteness as against the claim of man to moral freedom, and to equitable judgement in accordance with responsibility. But in fact this is what he is indirectly vindicating. What he is arguing against is the claim of the Jews that God was bound to their race. It is against this claim--this immoral claim to perpetual privilege on the part of one race, however they might behave--that St. Paul exalts the absolute freedom of God to choose or reject as He sees fit. It is of great importance then, especially with a writer so frequently controversial as St. Paul, to watch continually to see which is the phase of thought or feeling that {116} he is opposing. Frequently, as I say, it hardly appears on the surface of St. Paul's writing that he really has a definite opponent in view. Sometimes, as in the passage now to be considered, it becomes apparent, and the argument is best exhibited in the form of a dialogue (though to let the dialogue appear clearly, missing links have to be supplied) thus--

_Jewish Objector._ But if all this is true--if Jews are no better off than Gentiles--of what use is it to be a Jew? What is the value of our circumcision and the position into which it initiates us? (ver. 1)

_St. Paul._ Its value is manifold. To take one point first[2], it lies in the fact that the oracles of God--His teaching and promises--were entrusted to our race (ver. 2).

_J. O._ But if God thus of old gave special promises to us as His special people, and if now we are simply like the heathen under His wrath, the conclusion is that He has been false to His promises (argument implied in ver. 3).

_S. P._ No: that is not to be thought of. It is not God who has played false, it is man: it is our race. The Jews refused to believe: not however all of them, but some. If there is {117} a trial between God and His people as to which has been true, it is God who must be vindicated as the Psalmist says[3] (vers. 3, 4).

_J. O._ But if, as your teaching proves, all our unrighteousness is made to serve as a background on which God makes His righteousness all the more evident--that is enough. Our wrong-doing serves its purpose in this way. God has no right both to use our wrong-doing for His own purposes, and then, besides this, to visit His wrath upon us (ver. 5a).

_S. P._ Such thoughts our human nature suggests (ver. 5b). But we know they are false. God is the judge of the world, and His action necessarily supplies the standard of all judicial righteousness (ver. 6).

J. O. But do consider my point. If the result of my playing false to God is that His fidelity is only thrown into higher relief and the whole process ministers to His glory, why am I, the unconscious instrument of His glory, treated as an offender? and why should I not resolve to go on freely doing wrong (as you yourself are sometimes accused of teaching), so as to give God more abundant opportunities to overrule my action for the greater good? (vers. 7, 8a.)

{118}

_S. P._ A man stands justly condemned in the very using of such an argument (ver. 8b).

What advantage then hath the Jew? or what is the profit of circumcision? Much every way: first of all, that they were intrusted with the oracles of God. For what if some were without faith? shall their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God? God forbid: yea, let God be found true, but every man a liar; as it is written,

That thou mightest be justified in thy words,

And mightest prevail when thou comest into judgement. But if our unrighteousness commendeth the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unrighteous who visiteth with wrath? (I speak after the manner of men.) God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world? But if the truth of God through my lie abounded unto his glory, why am I also still judged as a sinner? and why not (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say), Let us do evil, that good may come? whose condemnation is just.

What is of interest here is to notice that St. Paul reproduces the argument of his Jewish opponent with great sympathetic force. It had clearly been weighed in his own mind. It was urged, no doubt, against his own teaching, that it gave an excuse for sinning by suggesting that the greatness of the sin only glorified the super-abundant greatness of the pardoning love. It is only too probable that some of his followers were persuaded by some such argument or acted as {119} if they were. Thus St. Paul states it with vigour, but thereby only makes all the more apparent the meagreness of his reply. Not that the argument is such as makes reply difficult. In a slightly different form St. Paul deals with it elaborately in chapters ix-xi. But here he clearly treats it as contemptible when its true character has once been disclosed. And why? Because it is professedly an explanation of the ways of God with man, which is at the same time an excuse for immorality. It is an intellectual exercise at the expense of conscience. And St. Paul shows, by the very contempt with which he treats it, that a man who will play false with his conscience, and then proceed to find intellectual justifications, is not to be met in the intellectual region at all. He has been condemned already.

St. Paul then, we find, will not argue with one who reasons at the expense of his conscience; and this is an important principle. When the intellect is acting purely, it must be free, and must be dealt with seriously on its own ground. But the conscience must be followed first of all. Its light is clearer than the light of intellect, and must be left supreme. Whatever be the bewilderment of my intellect, I am self-condemned, {120} God-condemned, if I play false to the moral light. And arguments to the contrary, however clever-sounding or philosophical, are in fact sophistry. There is, we must confess, a good deal of such sophistry to-day in the use of arguments drawn from the current philosophy of necessitarianism and the idea of heredity.

[1] Chapters ix-xi.

[2] The points are resumed in ix. 1.

[3] Ps. xxxii.

{121}

DIVISION I. § 4. CHAPTER III. 9-20.

_Sin and condemnation universal._

At this point the direct argument with an opponent is dropped; and St. Paul restates what he has so far been occupied in proving. It is not that Jews are in a worse position than Gentiles. It is that all together are involved in the same moral failure. To deepen the impression that this is a true statement, St. Paul culls from various psalms and from Isaiah a series of passages describing a general state of depravity, moral blindness, apathy, failure, unprofitableness, falsity, hatred, and outrage against God and man. These utterances of the book of 'the law' (here used for the Old Testament scriptures generally) are meant for those first to whom this law belonged. They condemn Jews as well as Gentiles. They show all equally to be under {122} divine judgement. They prove that if the written law could teach men God's will, it could not, by the works that it enjoined, enable him to satisfy God. It had its function only in teaching him to know his sinfulness by contrast to his plainly declared duty. The conclusion is then that all men, Jews and Gentiles alike, are involved in sin, are under the wrath of a holy God, and are in utter need of a deliverance which they are incapable of procuring for themselves.

What then? are we in worse case than they? No, in no wise: for we before laid to the charge both of Jews and Greeks, that they are all under sin; as it is written,

There is none righteous, no, not one; There is none that understandeth, There is none that seeketh after God; They have all turned aside, they are together become unprofitable; There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one: Their throat is an open sepulchre; With their tongues they have used deceit: The poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood; Destruction and misery are in their ways; And the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it speaketh to them that are under the law; that every {123} mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under the judgement of God: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for through the law _cometh_ the knowledge of sin.

1. The 'Scripture proof' which St. Paul here offers of universal human corruption is, according to a recognized Hebrew practice, made up by stringing together a number of separate texts,--Ps. xiv. 1-3, v. 9, cxl. 3, x. 7, Isa. lix. 7, 8, Ps. xxxvi. 1. They represent the impression made by human wickedness upon the righteous observer. The estimate covers Israel as well as, indirectly, the world at large[1]. It is thus an authoritative rebuke to Jewish self-complacency. It is as if an English preacher were to rebuke similar self-complacency in Englishmen by a collection of passages from standard English authorities, in which our nation was judged, in common with others, in a manner most humiliating to its pride. It is this, though, inasmuch as the psalmists and prophets were and are believed to have spoken under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, it is also something more.

It is well known that, as the quotations in {124} the New Testament have frequently affected the Greek text of the Old, so here this conglomerate of quotations came to be attached altogether to Ps. xiv in some Greek MSS., increasing it by four verses. Thence they passed into the later Latin Vulgate. Thence into Coverdale's Bible and into the Great Bible, and so into the Prayer Book version of the Psalms. But our present Bible version remains true to the Hebrew original.

2. 'To be justified,' in ver. 20, means to be acquitted, or proved righteous, or reckoned righteous in the trial before God. This, and not to _make_ righteous, is the meaning of the word 'to justify,' both in the Old and New Testament and elsewhere. There is scarcely an exception. It is a forensic word, that is, a word derived from processes of law, and it describes the favourable verdict after a trial. It is used of vindicating God's character to His people[2], or of vindicating one's own character; of God's judicial acceptance of men or men's judicial acceptance of one another[3]. And so far as real righteousness is necessary for judicial {125} acquittal, the word implies real righteousness, but it does not primarily mean it.

3. Here we find briefly stated St. Paul's apparently wholly original view of 'the law,' as given simply to enlighten the conscience by keeping men informed as to their duty, without supplying them with any moral assistance in performing it. Thus the ultimate aim of the law was to make man know his own sinfulness; to convince him that his attempted independence was a failure, and that he could not save himself; and so to prepare him to cry out for the gift of grace, and to welcome it when it was given. 'The law was given,' as St. Augustine is fond of saying, 'that grace might be sought, and grace was given that the law might be kept.' This antithesis is thoroughly after St. Paul's mind.

This first division of our epistle gives us as a whole a great deal to think about. There are, we may say, two spiritual evils conspicuous to-day. People with consciences in any degree awakened are apt to be nervous, anxious, despondent, complaining, sullen. The second division of our epistle supplies the antidote to this error by consolidating the awakened conscience in divine peace. But there is another, {126} and perhaps more conspicuous, spiritual evil of our day which this first division is calculated to meet--the habit of excusing oneself--the absence of the sense of sin.

Hold thou the good: define it well: For fear divine philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the lords of hell.

Because philosophy and science have been bringing into prominence the influence of heredity and physical environment on character, we use this consideration, and often with little enough knowledge of real science, to obliterate the sense of sin. We are apt to regard sin as it appears in the world at large as a result of ignorance, or social conditions--as in one way or another a form of misfortune. And so viewing it in the world, we view it in ourselves. We make excuses for ourselves. We have largely lost the sense that sin is wilfulness; that it is an inexcusable offence against God; that it does, and necessarily does, bring us under God's indignation; that necessarily, because God is what He is, the consequences of sin in this life, and much more beyond this life, are inconceivably terrible. It is this sense of sin that St. Paul must help to restore in us. We must believe {127} that God is holy, and we must learn to tremble under His necessary holiness, before we can in any right sense realize that He is loving. We must learn once again to be really penitent; to confess our sins in general and in particular with utter humiliation; to expect the divine judgement upon them; to use with reality the stern language about sin of the Bible and the Prayer Book. And learning this for ourselves with regard to our own personal sins, we must learn also to feel, like Daniel, what our church and nation deserve in God's sight. We must confess our own sins and the sins of church and nation[4]--aye, of the human race. Only through such a restoration of evangelical severity can there be a restoration of evangelical joy. The deepened sense of personal sin is the needful step to spiritual progress. Certainly no more in our case than in that of the Jews will orthodoxy, or ritual accuracy, or frequent services, or superior education, or philanthropic zeal, be accepted as a substitute for moral severity, for the spirit of penitence and the readiness for penance. Let us judge ourselves, brethren, that we be not judged of the Lord.

And it is all-important what our standard of {128} judgement is. The Jews failed because they judged themselves by a mainly external and therefore easy standard. So do most respectable Englishmen. We are satisfied if we do nothing discreditable. But the religious sense of sin, as it is experienced by the psalmists, or St. Paul, or Luther, or John Keble, arises from the intense perception of a personal relation to the All-Holy. The 'falling short,' or rather 'experienced need[5],' of which St. Paul goes on to speak, is the experienced need of something very lofty, to which it is possible for men to be quite insensible--'the glory of God.' God's divine brightness, the eternal light, streams forth into nature. 'The whole earth is full of His glory.' Man also in his natural and moral being is meant to have fellowship with God. He is meant for the divine glory also. It is in proportion as he realizes what he was meant for, and becomes conscious in himself of a capacity for God, that his present actual pollution and sinfulness becomes a reality to his consciousness. It is in the light of God, {129} and in aspiration after the glory of God, that the sense of sin really awakens. 'Thou requirest truth in the inward parts,' says the Psalmist. 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.' 'If thou, Lord, shouldst be extreme to mark what is done amiss, Lord, who may abide it?'[6]

[1] Dr. King (The Psalms in Three Collections, &c.: Cambridge, 1898) has remarked that Ps. xiv. 1-3 closely resembles the general condemnation of 'all flesh upon the earth' in Gen. vi. 5, 12.

[2] Cf. above ver. 4, from Ps. xxxii.

[3] See Ps. li. 4; Job xxxii. 2; Prov. xvii. 15; Isa. v. 23; Matt. xi. 19; Luke vii. 29; x. 29; xvi. 15.

[4] Cf. Dan. ix. 4-20.

[5] The word for 'fall short' in ver. 23 is a 'middle' verb, and apparently implies not only failure in point of fact, but conscious failure. Thus in Luke xv. 14, the prodigal son begins to _feel_ his destitution (middle). But in Matt. xix. 20, the rich young man asks, 'What, as a matter of fact, is wanting to me' (active)? See Gifford, or S. and H. _in loc._

[6] Cf. app. note C, on recent reactions from the teaching about hell.

{130}

DIVISION II. CHAPTERS III. 21-IV. 25.

_Justification by faith only._

§ 1. (III. 21-31.)

_Christ our propitiation._

Now we have been brought to recognize the true state of the case as between ourselves and God--the facts about ourselves as we are in God's sight. We were meant for fellowship in the divine glory. 'The glory of God,' says an old Father, 'is the living man: the life of man is the vision of God.' But, meant for fellowship in the divine glory, we have fallen short of it and have come to appreciate our failure. We have sinned, and that universally and wilfully. We are such that God cannot accept us as we are: the 'day of His appearing' could be for us but a 'day of wrath.' And in this dire situation we are helpless. We can supply no remedy. 'Can the Ethiopian change his {131} skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil[1].' But to acknowledge this--to abandon the claim so dear to the human heart, that we can be independent and manage our own life successfully: to repudiate all our false pride, and to come before God all of us on the same level, confessing our failure and our sin--this is to let man's necessity be God's opportunity, and to open the flood-gates of the divine righteousness. God is righteous in all the richest meaning of that word, and that righteousness of His He is now extending to us and giving us admittance into it. And this He does purely and simply as His gift. On His side it is pure and gratuitous giving, on our side simple and unmeritorious receiving. We contribute nothing. No distinctions are admitted between those inside the law and those outside it. The gift is quite apart from the law, though law and prophets bore witness to it. No questions are admitted as to what we have done or what we have left undone. Purely and simply out of the freedom of His love, who is our Creator and our Father, now, when a bitter experience has taught us again our true attitude towards Him, He offers us {132} admission into His righteousness, all on the same level, if we will simply believe in Jesus Christ His Son, that is, take Him at His word and believe His promises (vers. 21-24).

And what is this offer? It is, first of all, what befits the captives of sin: it is redemption. God, who of old bought His people out of captivity in Egypt, without any co-operation of theirs, by a pure act of His power, has now again, without any co-operation of ours, but by a manifestation this time of self-sacrificing love, in the person of Jesus Christ, bought our freedom from sin. And this redemption He offers to us first of all in the form which befits sinners conscious of sin and guilt, as the mere gift of forgiveness, the mere power to break with the past, the mere right to stand and face the future with a clean record. For as the brazen serpent was lifted up before the eyes of rebellious Israel, bitten of the fiery serpents, and those who looked unto it lived, so upon the open stage of history God set forth Jesus Christ shedding His life-blood--obedient, that is, to God and righteousness unto death, even the death of the cross. And this sacrificial shedding of the life-blood of the Son of God--to which we {133} contributed nothing[2]--is accepted by the Father as propitiatory, that is, as something which enables Him to show His true character of righteousness, and to acquit or accept among the righteous, irrespective of what he has done or been, every one who has faith in Jesus (vers. 24-26).

And why (we in our age are disposed to ask) did not God simply declare His forgiveness? why this roundabout method of a propitiatory sacrifice? It was (St. Paul's language suggests) to prove or vindicate His righteousness, which means both holiness and mercy. All the long ages past of the times of ignorance, God had been 'overlooking' or 'passing over' sins in His forbearance, never 'suffering His whole displeasure to arise,' but allowing all nations to walk in their own ways and to find out their own mistakes and helplessness[3]. The result of their being thus left to themselves was that men did indeed become conscious of their misery {134} and need, but also came to entertain all sorts of slack or unworthy ideas about God. A mere declaration of forgiveness might have left men with an impression of an easy-going or 'good-natured' God who would make light of sin. But the awful burden laid upon Jesus on account of human sin, the awful sacrifice of His life which He readily offered, restores the sterner element to our thoughts about God, just at that crisis or opportunity in the divine dealings, when by God's declaration of free forgiveness we are made to feel His love. God does forgive us, but it costs Him much. And no one who under these conditions comes and takes at the hand of Jesus the gift of pardon can fail to receive with it the awful impression of the divine holiness and of the severity of the divine requirements. All the former 'passing over of the sins done aforetime' was made morally possible because God had in view that 'now at the present season,' or opportunity, He would 'show,' or prove, His whole righteousness, and be before men's eyes the righteous being that He is in fact (righteous rather than merely 'just'); and be able, without the danger of a great misunderstanding, to give His righteousness full scope by admitting into {135} it, by a pure act of pardon, every one who comes simply taking Jesus at His word[4].

Here then there is no room for pride or glorying. It is utterly excluded because there is here no consideration of human merit. It is a pure and unmerited boon of the divine bounty bestowed, without reference to any law known or observed, simply on those who, utterly confessing their need, accept in faith the offer of love. Again there is no reference to any chosen race. Jew and Gentile, circumcision and uncircumcision, are all in the same case. All have the same need. God is the same, with the same offer, for all alike. He will accept the Jew because he believes, and He will accept the Gentile with no other equipment but his faith. Yet this principle of faith involves no repudiation of the principle of law; rather, it realizes the very end which law was intended to serve (vers. 27-31).

But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that believe; for there {136} is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God set forth _to be_ a propitiation, through faith, by his blood, to shew his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the shewing, _I say_, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus. Where then is the glorying? It is excluded. By what manner of law? of works? Nay: but by a law of faith. We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. Or is God _the God_ of Jews only? is he not _the God_ of Gentiles also? Yea, of Gentiles also: if so be that God is one, and he shall justify the circumcision by faith, and the uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make the law of none effect through faith? God forbid: nay, we establish the law.

i.

For our understanding of this famous passage a good deal depends on our fixing, as exactly as possible, what the 'righteousness of God' here spoken of means. Beyond all question it means in part God's own moral character. This is quite certain, as in the Bible generally, so in this very chapter[5]. But it is also certain that God's character is, especially in this epistle, viewed as revealed to us in such a sense that we can take hold of it and become identified with it. {137} Thus (especially in i. 17) _human_ faith is spoken of as the starting-point or region for revealing divine righteousness. It extends to and embraces the believers[6]. It is a righteousness communicated to us from God on the basis of faith[7]. The 'righteousness of God' is what we men are to become[8]. This transition of meaning from what God is in Himself to what we are by the gift of God is of course thoroughly natural. The grand idea of the Bible is that of a moral fellowship between man and God. The grand idea of the New Testament is, further, that of a disclosure and communication to us of the divine life.

And what is this moral quality described by 'righteousness' which belongs to God and is communicated to us? Righteousness is a term belonging primarily to man. A righteous man, in the Old Testament, is one who fulfils all that is expected of him, one who is blameless--towards man, but especially towards God. But if God expects such and such conduct in men it is because of what He Himself is. His requirements express His character. God Himself therefore is believed to be righteous, incorruptibly and awfully righteous. But a great {138} strain is put upon this belief in the 'wild and irregular scene' of this world, the Governor of which appears so often indifferent to the sufferings of His most faithful servants. Thus the righteous cry out to God to vindicate Himself, and God's righteousness is, in the Old Testament, largely identified with God's vindication of His own character by righteous acts or judgements accomplished in the past or expected in the future; acts of such a character as that in them the wicked and insolent are put to confusion, and the meek and holy justified and exalted. Such righteous judgement is expected to characterize the kingdom of the Christ. Of course, in the general lowering of moral ideals among the Pharisaic Jews, the idea of righteousness suffered with all else. The righteous came to mean those who strictly keep the outward Jewish law; and God's righteousness was identified with His expected vindication of those who keep the law, i.e. the pious Jew, at the coming of the Messiah[9]. Our Lord, and His disciples after Him, were engaged in nothing so much as in deepening the idea of righteousness again. Especially it is something much more than the mere observance of outward ordinances. {139} It was, in fact, the fundamental error of the Jews to confuse the two. Righteousness in man must be real likeness to God, and God's righteousness is His holy character which He is now once more manifesting in the gospel of His Son; a character which is still shown in acts of justice[10], in punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous, but which manifests itself also more especially as love, and by gracious promises of forgiveness and acceptance[11]. Thus, in Rom. i. 17, 18, the present 'revelation of divine righteousness' is a gracious manifestation which is put in contrast to the 'revelation of divine wrath,' the place of which it is intended to take. And yet, though the quality of mercy is made emphatic, it is not isolated. God's righteousness is not mere good nature. It would not be rightly revealed by any mere ignoring or passing over of sin. God's mercy is inseparable from His holiness, and His righteousness includes both[12]. It needed the severe requirement of the atoning sacrifice, as well as {140} the free gift of forgiveness and new life, to prove or exhibit it.

And if God's righteousness shows itself first of all in a simple act of justification of sinners--in simply forgiving men or pronouncing them righteous, irrespective of what they are in themselves at the moment, if only they will take God at His word--three points have to be borne in mind. First, that the mere offer of forgiveness is put in the forefront because this readiness on our part to be treated as helpless sinners is the annihilation of the one great obstacle to our reconciliation with God--the proud independence which led the Jews, and has led men since their day, to resent being dealt with by mere mercy, and to want to justify themselves. If the Christian character is to grow aright, it must have its root in an utter acknowledgement that we owe to God our power even to make a beginning in His service: that we can run the way of His commandments, because, and only because, He by His own act has set our hearts at liberty.

Just as I am, without one plea But that Thy blood was shed for me, And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come!

{141}

To many really good Christians this sort of language has come to have an unreal sound because they have been surfeited with it, and because it has been associated with a very one-sided Christianity. But, for all that, the moral necessity remains that we should dig out of its last refuges the claim of human independence, if the Christian character is to grow healthily. In other words, the only root of Christian thankfulness and progress is the recognition that our spiritual life rests at its basis on a pure act of the divine bounty in accomplishing our redemption from sin and giving us the forgiveness of all our sins.

Secondly, it must be borne in mind that our forgiveness through the sacrifice is only the first step towards fellowship with God. It is only the removal of the preliminary obstacle which guilt had raised against actual admittance into the life of God. The language of the New Testament refuses to allow us to separate the forgiveness of our sins from our admission into the 'body of Christ' by baptism[13], or, in other words, our incorporation into the life of the redeemed people, the new Israel. For the faith {142} which accepts forgiveness is the same identical quality which corresponds with all the later movement of the new life. God's free gift of grace is not forgiveness only, but forgiveness and new life; it is 'forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith that is in Christ[14].' St. Paul does not contemplate, or contemplates only to repudiate, a faith which accepts forgiveness and stops there--indifferent to actual holiness or baptismal incorporation. For it would be no real faith at all. The preliminary justification or acquittal is simply and solely to serve as a basis for the life of consecration and glory. The stages of justification and sanctification are separable in idea but not in fact. The refusal to proceed from the threshold of the acquittal into the palace of the new life would expel even from the threshold; even as the failure of the unthankful servant to behave as one should behave who has been excused the debt he could not pay, cancelled all his acquittal and left him with the weight of the old debt rolled back upon him to his destruction.

Lastly, and in one word, it must never be left out of sight that even the initial movement of {143} faith, the taking Christ at His word and believing His promises, involves the element of moral allegiance. His gracious person and character attract even while the boon is being accepted, and a new motive enters into life. Justifying faith at its very root is a faith which yields allegiance to its object.

ii.

To a Jew, and to almost all races when St. Paul wrote, the idea of an expiatory sacrifice for sin seemed natural and obvious. But for the special Christian doctrine of expiation the basis is to be found in the memorable chapter liii of the 'later Isaiah.' That great prophet of the captivity is assuring Israel of their restoration to their own land. This restoration is to follow on the due punishment of her sins--'She hath received of the Lord's hands double for all her sins.' And the restored people is to be, before all else, a righteous people--'all righteous'--a people of God's favour, because they are living according to God. But there is so much sin still remaining in them as to make it necessary that the new life of the recovered people should be based on a great act of {144} propitiation. The Righteous Servant of Jehovah, who is, at starting, the idealized people itself, but who comes to be represented as an individual acting for the people while repudiated by them, offers his life a willing sacrifice for their sins. The chastisement of their iniquities falls on him, and he accepts the burden, and is obedient unto death. Dying he makes his soul a guilt offering: and, living through death exalted and powerful, he becomes an intercessor accepted with God, the head of a new seed whom he 'justifies' before God by the intimate knowledge of God's mind and character which in his voluntary humiliation he has won. This wonderful prophetic picture represents a vast advance in moral teaching on what had gone before. It is not only that the self-sacrifice of a perfect human will is substituted for the animal victims to which the enlightened conscience of God's people already refused to allow any real efficacy; but also that the idea of propitiation is put in a context where it is made plain that it can only be the prelude to a state of actual righteousness in those who are to be justified by it. It occurs as part of the answer to the question, not--How is Israel to escape punishment? but, How is Israel to {145} become the really righteous nation, living in the likeness of God?

In the later books of the Maccabees we have this idea of the expiatory sacrifice and intercession of the ideal Israelite still retained, but degraded, probably under Greek influences. 'And I, as my brethren,' says the Maccabean martyr, 'give up both body and soul for the laws of our fathers, calling upon God that he may speedily become gracious to the nation ... and that in me and my brethren may be stayed the wrath of the Almighty, which hath been justly brought upon our whole race[15].' 'Be propitious to my race,' prays Eleazar, in another Alexandrian version of the story, 'being satisfied with our punishment on their behalf. Make my blood a propitiation for them, and receive my life as a substitute for theirs[16].' These passages are on a lower moral level than Isaiah's, because in them the prominent idea of propitiation is that it is a means of procuring from God exemption from further punishment, not a step to the restoration to holiness. The idea both of what God desires and of what man desires is lower. And indeed all conceptions of propitiation may be distinguished into true {146} or false, according as righteousness or exemption from punishment is the end which is specially in view.

Thus when we pass on into the New Testament we find in Caiaphas' saying, 'It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not[17],' the typical expression of the quite immoral notion[18] of the forcible sacrifice of an innocent person in order to exempt a guilty race from punishment. In our Lord's teaching, on the other hand, we find the doctrine of atonement raised to its highest moral power. As the Forerunner had revived the teaching of the later Isaiah by pointing to Him as 'the Lamb of God who taketh away (i.e. taketh up and expiateth) the sin of the world[19],' so Christ Himself spoke unmistakeably of the new covenant which He came to inaugurate, as to be based upon the sacrificial offering of His body and the outpouring of His blood[20]: spoke also of 'the remission of sins' as the benefit to be expected {147} from His expiation. But no teacher in the world ever made it so plain that God can be satisfied with nothing that any other can do for us--with nothing but actual likeness to Him in ourselves. No teacher ever made it so plain that what we are to desire is not to be let off punishment, but to be actually freed from sin. He left no room for doubt that only by following His steps, even to the cross and surrender of our lives, can we share His fellowship. The very life which is offered in sacrifice to lay the foundation of the new covenant is a life or spirit which we are to share. We are to eat and drink His sacrificed flesh and blood--the blood which is the life--and so to be one with Him and He with us. He sacrificed Himself, in other words, in order to make possible, through His life and Spirit, a new covenanted society, in which men should have perfect fellowship with God and with one another. He did not reject the idea of a propitiation won for man by His vicarious sacrifice--the truth is far from that--but He keeps it in inseparable connexion with the life which is to be based upon it; and in the eucharist He brought back the idea of sacrifice to what had been its starting-point in all primitive usages. 'The one point,' says {148} Professor Robertson-Smith, 'that comes out clear and strong (from the examination of ancient sacrificial customs), is that the fundamental idea of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and that all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing their efficacy to a communication of divine life to the worshipper, and to the establishment or confirmation of a living bond between them and their God[21].'

Still Christ's sacrifice of propitiation, to which we contribute nothing, in which we do not share, remains a necessary prelude to the establishment of the new life. It is in virtue of this that we are justified and accepted and allowed to start afresh. This fact the New Testament in general takes for granted, and offers no explanation of it; as indeed the human heart has in general accepted the benefit in all thankfulness and asked no questions. But the speculative modern intellect has found a difficulty in the matter--in the matter at least as commonly represented--and we have noticed that a suggestion of explanation is made by St. Paul in this passage. God had long gone on 'passing over' sin all over the world in loving forbearance, bearing with all men's sinfulness, {149} till they had thoroughly learnt the lesson of their own need of God and inability to save themselves. But this very forbearance rendered God's character liable to complete misunderstanding. He might have been supposed to be kind indeed, but indifferent to sin. 'These things hast thou done and I kept silence: thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself[22].' Thus the severity manifested in the claim of the 'righteous Father' upon the Son of Man, His claim of an obedience unto the shedding of His blood, and the ready response to His claim on the part of the Son of Man gladly rendering up His life in homage to the Father--these taken together, the claim of the Father and the sacrifice of the Son, vindicated within the area of the Christian faith the true character of God, and forced the believer in Jesus to hold the severity and the love in their inseparable unity as making up the divine righteousness.

Does not this thought open at least an intelligible vista into the mystery of the Atonement? Christ is the Son of Man. He is to inaugurate the true manhood. But first He must deal with the manhood that has gone {150} astray, and make an act of reparation to the Father for all the outrage that our sins have done Him. Thus in contrast to all our self-pleasing, self-indulgence, self-excusing, in contrast to all our clamorous insolence towards God and indifference to His laws, we behold the Son of Man recognizing the Father's strict requirements, and lifting before His eyes, in the name of the manhood which He represents, the great reparation of an unshrinking obedience and loyalty unto death. The Father spared not His only Son the natural consequences of obedience in a world of sin. The Son spared not Himself, but shed His blood--the 'blood which is the life'--at the Father's will. This is the one full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It is the sacrifice offered in the power of nothing less than 'eternal spirit.' Henceforth, then, no man can come to God in faith in Jesus, in the faith which even at its root is moral allegiance, and think lightly either of God's holiness or of his own or others' sin. God forgives him his sin, but it cost Him much to forgive it. The Cross is the measure of the antipathy between God and sin.

And it is well to notice how the great {151} thought of this passage is made intelligible to the ordinary English reader again, only by the Revised Version. In the old Bible the word signifying 'passing over' of sins is translated 'remission'--the very thing with which it is in fact contrasted. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in this and very many places of the epistles, the Revised Version for the first time renders the thought of the apostles again intelligible to the English reader. And if the Revised Version is not popular, as the booksellers tell us it is not, this is, I fear, only a sign that the majority of English Christians do not really care to _understand_ the meaning of the message with which, as a matter of words, they are so familiar.

iii.

The metaphor of 'redemption' and the metaphor of 'propitiation' complete and check one another. As in the parables it is only the exact point of comparison between the earthly and the heavenly which can be pressed for the spiritual lesson, so it is with these metaphorical words, which are in fact parables compressed. The word 'redemption' is meant to suggest a price paid by God, or by Christ, for our being {152} made free; it is the price of the Son's death. He 'gives His life a ransom for many.' The word 'propitiation' again is meant to suggest that the offering of the life in sacrifice was the means to win for us forgiveness from God. So far, both metaphorical words have their clear and harmonious meaning. But in old days the metaphor of redemption was worked out by Origen and others beyond the exact point of the original suggestion. The price, they argued, must have been paid to the enemy who held us captive; i.e. Christ's life was offered as a price to the devil in order that his claim might be satisfied and we might be justly set free. But this extension of the scope of the metaphor is wholly alien to the New Testament. On the other hand, the idea of propitiation has suggested at many periods the horrible notion that the Son wrung from the angry Father the pardon which He was unwilling to give. Such a notion is again wholly alien to the New Testament. But in fact the two metaphors are mutually corrective; and each tends to exclude the misuse of the other. The idea that Christ offered anything to the devil is corrected by the notion inherent in the phrase 'propitiation (of the Father).' What the Son offered was a sacrifice {153} directed to the Father only. On the other hand, the idea that the mind of the Father needed to be changed towards us, is corrected by the suggestion inherent in the other metaphor of redemption; for it is He who, because He loved us, gave up His own Son to buy us out of the slavery of sin. Each metaphor suggests a single idea--each complementary of the other, and corrective of its misuse--and both combine to tell us of the one inseparable love of the Father and the Son, uniting in a sacrificial act which is ascribed to both, to redeem us from the tyranny of sin and to set the pardoning love free to work upon us, without obscuring the true hatefulness of sin or the true character of God.

If, especially recently, the doctrine of the atonement[23] has involved intellectual difficulty, on the other hand it has proved itself, as the popular Christian literature of all ages sufficiently shows, widely and deeply welcome to the human heart. This wide welcome which it has received shows that it contains a deep truth. And from this point of view, from the point of view of our practical spiritual needs, we do well to meditate {154} much and deeply upon this doctrine. We can depend upon it, that if we are to go on patiently doing good in a world like this, so full of disappointments and anxieties and moral failures and torturing scruples, we must have peace at the heart. And this is what the really evangelical doctrine is capable of giving us. It bids us continually look out of ourselves up to God, and assures us that His love, manifested in the sacrifice of His Son, is there continually, unchangeably. It is there, waiting till first we turn to Him, to give us the assurance of entire absolution and admission into the divine fellowship, wholly irrespective of what we have been or done; and it is there continually, however often we fall, with the same large and liberal hand to pour out continual forgivenesses, and never wearies of restoring us again and again to the solid foundation of the peace and grace which are by Jesus Christ. We are not meant to be miserably anxious or morbidly introspective. We must confess our sins, and that with exactness, without self-sparing, without self-excusing, in utter humility and truth; but 'if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.'

[1] Jer. xiii. 33.

[2] Except the sins which slew Him.

[3] I have combined this passage with the illustrative passages in St. Paul's speeches to the heathen. Acts xiv. 16: 'Who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways.' Acts