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St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II

by Charles Gore · English · Gutenberg #32674 · 342,734 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II

Author: Charles Gore


        
Release date: June 3, 2010 [eBook #32674]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS: A PRACTICAL EXPOSITION. VOL. II ***




Produced by Al Haines








_St. Paul's_

_Epistle to the Romans_


_A Practical Exposition_



BY CHARLES GORE, M.A., D.D.

  OF THE COMMUNITY OF THE RESURRECTION
  CANON OF WESTMINSTER; CHAPLAIN TO THE KING



VOL. II

(CHAPTERS IX-XVI)



NEW IMPRESSION




LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET

1901




OXFORD

HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY




{v}

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 dialogue system of exegesis.'  Now no doubt this
principle, like every other, may be abused.  'The Jewish objector' may,
as the reviewer complains, be allowed to 'run riot.'  Still I cannot
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} 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.




{vii}

TABLE OF CONTENTS


THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.

                                                                 PAGE

DIVISION IV  _The theodicy or justification of God for His
             dealings with the Jews_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1

CHAPTER

   IX.  1-13 § 1 The present rejection of Israelites no
                 breach of a divine promise  . . . . . . . . . .   14

       14-29 § 2 God's liberty in showing mercy and judgement
                 always retained and asserted  . . . . . . . . .   31

     30-x.21 § 3 Lack of faith the reason of Israel's rejection    44

   XI.  1-12 § 4 God's judgement on Israel neither universal
                 nor final . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   59

       13-36 § 5 God's present purpose for the Jews through
                 the Gentiles: and so for all humanity . . . . .   68


DIVISION V _Practical exhortation_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   95

  XII.   1-2 § 1 Self-surrender in response to God . . . . . . .   97

        3-21 § 2 The community spirit  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  103

 XIII.   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}

DIVISION VI _Conclusion_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  170

    XV. 4-33 § 1 St. Paul's excuse for writing, and his hope
                 of coming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  171

   XVI.  1-2 § 2 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




{1}

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 {2} contemplation 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 representatives 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
responsibility involved in it, which are vital and necessary 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 unmerited conditions of divine
privilege in which we find ourselves.

{3}

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 objection 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,
    '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 {4} become 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 {5} 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 argument of these chapters under
our eyes, we may well rub them in astonishment, and look again, and ask
why, in the reaction against Calvinism[2], 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 {6} friends and foes.  They have come to
constitute in modern literature a sort of reproach upon
Christianity[3], 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 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'--'Jacob
have I loved, and Esau have I hated'--'Whom he will he
hardeneth'--'Hath not the potter power over the clay.'  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 {7} 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 connexion, 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} of 'election' in
these chapters would then have been apparent.  St. Paul has been
popularly misunderstood 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 subordinately of individuals)[4] 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 {9} 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
absoluteness, or the unrestricted freedom of divine choice, as against
human freedom, or in such a way as to destroy the idea of moral
responsibility.  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
{10} 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 purpose--that is
faith--or malleability under His hand.

This is a doctrine then which lays upon 'the elect,' at any particular
moment, the moral responsibility 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.  {11} Thus, as has already been pointed out[5], 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
justification 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 assumptions, 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 difficulties.'  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 accompanying danger.
When the state of mind contemplated becomes a matter of history, the
argument based on its assumption has lost its power.  In {12} 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 discover in nature any
decisive argument for God or against God, and professed only an
inability to draw any conclusion at all, Butler's argument 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 {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 argument 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.



[1] Ps. lxxxix. 33-7.

[2] 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 hopelessly abandoned to
eternal misery.

[3] 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.

[4] Of course the election of the nation or the church is felt,
especially in the New Testament, or whenever in the Old Testament
individuality is fully realized, to involve the election of each of the
persons composing the nation 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] Vol. i. pp. 114 f.




{14}

DIVISION IV.  § 1.  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 elect--his 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 forgetting 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 {15}
that He redeemed it and made it His own son[1]: to them was vouchsafed
the shining of His continual 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 repeated 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 members 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 {16} 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, physically
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. 10).  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
{17} of natural claim--in 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
declares that, whereas Israel is His beloved son, Esau, that is Edom,
He has 'hated' (Mal. 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[3] that I myself were anathema from
Christ for my {18} 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.


1.  St. Paul's earnest asseveration is very noticeable in form.  It
shows so much of his instinctive inward life.  He lives 'in Christ,'
who is light as well as life[4], and to speak the truth is the very
atmosphere of this new life[5].  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, {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 truthfulness.  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[6].  'And now, O Lord, if thou wilt forgive their
sin--; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou
hast written.'  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.

{20}

We may illustrate St. Paul's feeling by comparing a fine expression of
a more commonplace sorrow over the ruin of Israel from a period after
the destruction of Jerusalem[7].  '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 {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 'glory,' which belonged once to the
Jewish 'ministration of condemnation,' belongs in deeper and fuller
measure to the Christian 'ministration of the Spirit[8].'  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
accomplishment; 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
greatness of our responsibility; 'For I would not, brethren, have you
ignorant[9],' St. Paul would {22} say; he would not have us fail to
profit by the warnings of old days.  And another voice warns us 'Of how
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[10].'

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 'God' is used by
St. Paul as a proper name of the Father.  But Christ is continually
recognized 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[11].  His blood, as shed for our ransoming, is God's own
blood, or {23} (possibly) the blood of one who is 'His own'[12].  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[13].  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[14]: 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[15]!'

{24}

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[16], as 'our great
God and Saviour.'  It was only because He was essentially 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.  'We have Abraham to our
father,' and that is enough[17].  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
privilege[18], and that, though a faithful remnant would {25} never
fail, yet unfaithfulness in the bulk of the nation would bring
destruction upon them and loss of God's favour[19].  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[20].  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 '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 {26} the outer darkness[21].'
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[22].

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.  {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 not 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 cannot
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} 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 judgement upon the rejected mass of mankind in
the time of the Flood.  That physical catastrophe at least was an
instrument of mercy in disguise[23].  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[24].'  But
{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
vengeance, 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} 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
'with change of name the tale is told of thee[25].'



[1] Exod. iv. 23; Hos. xi. 1.

[2] Exod. xvi. 10.

[3] Or 'pray' (marg.) literally 'I was praying.'

[4] Cf. Eph. v. 8-14.

[5] Cf. Col. iii. 9.

[6] Exod. xxxii. 32.

[7] 2 Esdr. viii. 15-16, x. 21-23.  The latter passage is not spoken to
God, but by one Jew to another.

[8] 2 Cor. iii. 8.

[9] See 1 Cor. x. 1-13.

[10] Heb. x. 29.

[11] 1 Thess. i. 10; Rom. viii. 3.

[12] Acts xx. 28.

[13] Phil. ii. 6-11.

[14] Without the article which makes it a proper name of the Father.

[15] R. V. margin^2.  It does further violence to the Greek to
translate as R. V. margin^1, 'He who is God over all is (be) blessed
for ever.'  I have nothing to add on the matter to S. and H. _in loc._,
especially p. 236.

[16] Tit. ii. 13.  This is probably the right rendering.

[17] St. Matt. iii. 9.

[18] 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.

[19] 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.'

[20] Gen. xii. 3; Isa. lxvi. 18; Zech. viii. 23, &c.

[21] Matt. viii. 11, 12.

[22] In Weber's _Jüdische Theologie_ (Leipzig, 1897, formerly called
_System der Altsynagog. Palästin. 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.

[23] 1 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.

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

[25] Mal. i. 2, 3.  'Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the Lord: yet
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 (1)
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.




{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 unrighteousness.  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 disclose Himself as bound to
show mercy on Moses the Israelite, or to harden and judicially condemn
Pharaoh the Egyptian?  No, He declares to Moses His unrestricted
freedom to exhibit His {32} 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 absolutely 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 compassion 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 consequently a very real responsibility and room for {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 rebuked 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: 'For a
potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously mouldeth each several vessel
for our service: nay, out of the same clay doth fashion both the
vessels that minister to clean uses, and those of a contrary sort.  All
in {34} like manner; but what shall be the use of each vessel of either
sort, the craftsman himself is the judge[2].'  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 purposes in the
great social economy[3].  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[4].'  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 {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[5] 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) foresaw this choice of a yet
unrecognized people to be God's people.  Isaiah again (x. 22)
anticipated 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 {36} 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 compassion 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 destruction: 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 {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
righteousness 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, rejecting 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} of history[6], as an
example of hardening judgement, 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[7].'  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 {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[8].

By means of the famous simile of the potter St. Paul asserts two
principles about God: (1) that God is free, and condescends to give no
account to His creatures, in absolutely determining 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' 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
{40} 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 carefully 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 themselves 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 language
carefully--for the idea of any predestination to _rejection_, as
distinct from predestination to higher or lower purposes.  And the New
Testament is full of assurances that a predestination 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 {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[9]; he does not touch the question how or how
far human wilfulness can be allowed to disturb the divine order.  In
the Pharisaic schools he would certainly 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[10].'  That is to say, he would have been educated to believe
both in predestination and in freedom, without any {42} 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 perception 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[11], St. Paul takes the words which come {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 characteristic 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[12].'



[1] Isa. xxix. 16, xlv. 9, lxiv. 8; Jer. xviii. 6; Ecclus. xxxiii. 13.

[2] xv. 7.

[3] 1 Cor. xii. 22-5; 2 Tim. ii. 20.

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

[5] 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.

[6] 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 example 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.

[7] See Matt. xiii. 14, 15; Mark iv. 12; John xii. 40.

[8] Cf. vol. i. p. 75.

[9] On the meaning of divine foreknowledge in St. Paul see vol. i. p.
317.

[10] See Joseph. _Antiq._ xiii. 5, 9; xviii. 1, 3; _Bell. Jud._ ii. 8,
14.  Cf. Schürer, _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.

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

[12] Isa. vi. 13.




{44}

DIVISION IV.  § 3.  CHAPTER IX. 30-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 pursuing 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 righteousness, 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 {45} observances 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 accustomed 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[2] (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[3]; but the Jews, {46} preoccupied with maintaining a standard of
righteousness 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 perceive 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 disclosure 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[4], stands to
preserve 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 compassion brought near to it.  Moses of old told the Israelites[5]
that the commandment was not {47} too hard for them, neither was it far
off.  _It 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[6]--if a man but believe (in the
Christ) there is no {48} 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[7].  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[8] 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 {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[9]?'  (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[10].  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 (religiously speaking) was no nation, a people
without understanding, that God would use to provoke His people to
jealousy, and stimulate their emulation[11].  Again, Isaiah uses
startling words, and declares that God has been discovered by those who
never sought Him, and revealed to those who never asked for
Him[12]--that is the Gentiles.  But the words of Isaiah {50} 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 contradiction (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 righteousness, 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 {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 righteousness;
and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.  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, Whosoever
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.

{52}

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 freedom, 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 standard was that which
distinguished Israel from the rest of the world, and what they had
become 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 {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
substitution 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[13].

So also we have already become familiar with the simplicity of the
message of God in Christ, and the simplicity of the faith which, {54}
rooted in the consciousness of sin and need, and equally possible for
all men who can share this consciousness, is required to welcome 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.

1.  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 '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 existing in the Jewish theocracy, was the fruitful germ
deposited under the surface, which was one day to burst forth and
become the peculiar character {55} of the new covenant[14].'  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'[15]: and in this lay hid all that
is essential to the Christian creed.  Already then in the earliest
church subjective faith involved a certain objective and public
creed[16] 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 {56} instinctive 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 anticipate, they made provision for a due succession {57} in
the 'episcopate' on the death of those first appointed[17].

4.  St. Paul's singularly free, but deeply inspired, 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 covenant as the foundation of
Israel's polity in the other (Isa. xxviii. 16).  Jewish tradition had
possibly already referred them to the Christ[18]; and certainly our
Lord's use of Ps. cxviii. 22--'The stone which the builders
rejected'--as applying to His own rejection, made the reference more
obvious.  It is indeed in deepest accordance with the spirit of Isaiah:
and St. Peter (1 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 lxv, which originally refers altogether to
apostate Israel, is divided, {58} 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 universal 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.



[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.

[2] Isa. viii. 14; xxviii. 16.  Cf. Matt. xi. 6.

[3] See above, vol. i. p. 17.

[4] Levit. xviii. 5.

[5] 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.

[6] Isa. xxviii. 16.

[7] Joel ii. 32.

[8] Isa. lii. 7.

[9] Isa. liii. 1.

[10] Ps. xix. 4.

[11] Deut. xxxii. 21.

[12] Isa. lxv. 1, 2.

[13] See vol. i. pp. 7 ff., 165 f., 250 ff.

[14] Godet _in loc._

[15] Cf. 1 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).

[16] Cf. 1 Cor. xv. 1-3.

[17] Clem, _ad Cor._ 42, 44.

[18] See S. and H. _in loc._




{59}

DIVISION IV.  § 4.  CHAPTER XI. 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[1].  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, {60} 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 Gentiles 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[2].

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[3]: an abiding {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 perceive 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 {62} 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[4]? 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 obtained 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:
  {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 Gentiles, 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?


1.  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[5]
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
Himself, because they have not utterly refused to {64} 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 {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 stumblingblock to many--especially the 69th (here
cited by St. Paul) and the 109th.  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 identifies himself, represents afflicted righteousness.  It is
God's people, His 'servant' and 'son' according to the language of the
Old Testament, 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 {66} of the modern critics
we have in the main purged away the element of private vindictiveness,
these psalms no doubt 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 implication taken up--where we should
least expect them--into the mouth of the Son of Man[6].  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 judgement which
proceeds out of His mouth.  He, the administrator of the righteousness
of God, {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 judgement 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
imprecatory psalms; and in these days of a philanthropy that often
lacks the stern savour of righteousness, it is very necessary that we
should make this sense our own.



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

[2] 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 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.'

[4] Rather, as margin, in Elijah, i.e. the passage of Scripture about
Elijah.

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

[6] Both in this passage and in Acts i. 20.




{68}

DIVISION IV.  § 5[1].  CHAPTER XI. 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 {69} a good end--the bringing back of the outside world into the
fellowship of God[2]: 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 offering' of the 'first of the dough'[3]
consecrates the whole lump, so the first of the nation offered to
God--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--have consecrated the whole nation.  The
holiness of the root of God's olive tree[4] 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 belonged to the tree.  What advantage it
now has it wholly derives from that which it is {70} affecting to
despise.  It is the root that supports it, not it the root.  And are
the Gentiles disposed 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
maintain 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 Gentiles.  Yes, goodness towards
Gentiles; but so long only as they abide faithfully in His goodness, 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 {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[5], 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[6].  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 {72} 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 repented of and recalled.  Thus we know what to
expect.  As the Gentiles passed out from disobedience 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 disobedience 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 {73} has determined?  How
can we fail to recognize our utter incompetence to explore His
judgement, or track out His ways?  Like inspired men of old[7] 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 _is_ 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 bearest 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
{74} 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: otherwise 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 disobedient to God, but now have obtained mercy by their
disobedience, even so have these also now been disobedient, that by the
mercy shewn to you they also may now 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
{75} unto him again?  For of him, and through him, and unto him, are
all things.  To him be the glory for ever.  Amen.


1.  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[8]' 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 tremendous 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 {76} 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[9].  All the time that St. Paul is fighting Judaism and
vindicating Catholicism, laying down the lines of the great church of
the nations, this is the vision that cheers him--an Israel, penitent,
humbled, worshipping the Christ whom she had crucified, and therefore
welcomed back again with the honour due to her great memories and her
inextinguishable vocation.  But we notice by the way, as throwing an
unmistakable light on the circumstances of Roman Christianity, that
while St. Paul thus shows his own Jewish feeling, he speaks to the
Roman Christian as in the mass Gentile[10].

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
foreknowledge of God been overruled so as to {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 accompany the
(second) coming of the Christ would take place at once?  This thought
would be very natural to St. Paul, and thoroughly agreeable 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} of Ezekiel's
vision[11]: 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[12]--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
{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 justification 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[13].'  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[14] and John
{80} 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 transference 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 representatives.  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[15].  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 possibility 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 transferred to the catholic Israel, as
in fact its Jewish {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 advocates 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), {82} and not the stock upon which it
is grafted (which represents the Jews), would determine the character
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[16].  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 stimulate 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 {83} 'to have
mercy upon all men.'  But, in interpreting 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 ultimately attain the end of their being and
the fellowship of God.  In these passages, as elsewhere, 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 completely 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 {84} 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 opportunity 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 judgements 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.

{85}

      *      *      *      *      *

_Retrospect over the argument_

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 overcome 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 {86} 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 themselves to Him to be refashioned after the divine image.
Through all national and personal vocations 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--

  'God unmakes but to remake the soul
  He else made first in vain, which must not be[17].'

{87} --must not be, that is, so far as the resourcefulness 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[18].'

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) ignominious vocations among
races and individuals; {88} that some men are born for the top, and
other men for the bottom of society; that there are 'honourable' 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[19].  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; {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
expansion, and lost some rich part of its heritage because it was
self-satisfied, and therefore blind?  How often does a 'good catholic'
fail to recognize that he is utterly misusing the gifts of grace, {90}
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
carelessness of those who had inherited an honourable 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 condemnation.

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 {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, accomplish 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} but still important
points.  It is the function of the catholic church to let its light so
shine before men that it 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
unworldliness, the expansiveness, the love of the brotherhood of
Christ.  And we do show it--what?  Is there that in our common
Christianity, 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 {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
complementary 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} 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-sidedness '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.



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

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

[3] Num. xv. 20, 21.

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

[5] On 'mystery,' see _Ephesians_, p. 73.  It means a divine secret
disclosed to the elect.

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

[7] Isa. xl. 13.  Cf. Job xxxviii. 4; xli. 11; Wisd. ix. 13.

[8] Jer. xxxviii. 4.

[9] Ezek. xvi. 61.

[10] See above, vol. i. 3.

[11] Ezek. xxxvii.

[12] See my _Ephesians_, pp. 258 ff.

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

[14] Ezek. xiv. 14.

[15] 1 Cor. vii. 14.

[16] 'All Israel,' in 1 Kings xii. 1, 2 Chron. xii. 1, Dan. ix. 11,
means 'Israel in general.'

[17] 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 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.'

[18] Luke vi. 35, or 'despairing of no man,' marg. R.V.

[19] 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.'




{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
unanticipated.  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 intellectual 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 grasping 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} 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-surrendering 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. 32.  See Driver's _Parallel Psalter_, Oxford (1898).

[2] 1 Cor. iii. 21-3.

[3] Phil. iv. 13.




{97}

DIVISION V.  § i. CHAPTER XII. 1-2.

_Self-surrender in response to God._

And first of all the general attitude of mind is defined, which it
befits us to adopt towards God as He has now revealed Himself to us.
It is the response of entire self-surrender--the response of sacrifice
to sacrifice.  St. Paul 'beseeches,' or rather 'encourages,' or
'summons' the Roman Christians, using for his motive power[1] all the
rich store of divine compassions which he has just been occupied in
disclosing or explaining to them, to make the only response really
possible to such an exhibition of divine love; and that is to present
themselves in sacrifice to God.  What God asks is not dead victims but
living men, in body as well as spirit consecrated to His service and
rendered acceptable in His sight: and this sort of self-oblation, {98}
on the pattern of Christ, is the only reasonable sort of divine service
for man to offer.  The transitory world, to 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, acceptable to God, _which_ is
your reasonable service.  And be not fashioned according to this world:
but be ye transformed 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 'therefores[2]' by
which St. Paul shows his constant 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 {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 character--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 {100} into full vitality every faculty of body as well as of
mind (and that in an active society or brotherhood), 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[3].'  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, {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[4].

The true service of God is intelligent correspondence 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 transform_ 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, {102}
leaving God out of account[5].  For if the worldly world is suffered to
_fashion us in accordance with its shallow and 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] For the use of 'by,' cf. xv. 30; 1 Cor. i. 10 ('through' is the
same word); 2 Cor. x. 1.

[2] See further, _Ephes._ pp. 172 ff.

[3] It is more likely, however, that the phrases '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 Ebreitate_, 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.

[4] 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.

[5] See _Ephes._ p. 92.




{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 service' 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 community 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
{104} 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 distribution 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 service;
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 {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[3] 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 everywhere 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[4]; 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[5]; he is never to quarrel with any one if he can
possibly help it; he is completely to suppress his resentment {106}
when he is wronged, and simply to leave the matter to the wrath of God,
as indeed the law would have him do[6]; so that, by his very meekness
and returning good for evil, he may, according to the wise man's
saying, heap burning shame upon his enemy, like coals of fire[7].  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 it_ 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; {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 condescend 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 shall heap coals of fire upon his head.  Be not overcome
of evil, but overcome evil with good.


(1) It is the idea of corporate life which dominates 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 faith in Jesus admits him is the
life of a community, and its virtues are the virtues of community life.
The strengthened individuality is to go to enrich an organized society.

{108}

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[8].  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 {109} the community
received their appointment.  There is no ground for a positive
assertion of any kind[9].  Again we hear of special gifts, such as
powers of healing, speaking with tongues and prophesying, 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[10].  But in this place he is not distinguishing.
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, {110} then, is to realize his own gift and
correspond to it.  The gift involves a certain 'measure of faith.'  The
faith of 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
something 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[11], even though
another prophet with a larger faith might rightly say what he may not
venture upon.  'Let each man be fully {111} persuaded in his own mind.'
For any assertion which goes beyond what the faith of the individual
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
development 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 {112} 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-aggrandizement, 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
distinction 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 {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 churchwardens' 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 community the mediaeval English parish was.  Let
me extract a few sentences from the excellent preface[12] which Bishop
Hobhouse prefixed to an edition of the surviving _Churchwardens'
Accounts_ of a number of Somersetshire parishes.

'The (parish) community was completely organized 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 inspection and (if need should be) restraint from central
authority.'  'The whole adult population were accounted parishioners,
and had an equal voice {114} 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 '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
{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[13].

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] See i. 5, 11-15; xv. 15-17.

[2] Jas. i. 17.

[3] 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.

[4] Cf. xi. 25, and Prov. iii. 7.

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

[6] Deut. xxxii. 35.

[7] Prov. xxv. 21.

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

[9] See, however, p. 196.

[10] 1 Cor. vii. 7.

[11] 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.

[12] _Somersetshire Records_, vol. iv, 1890.

[13] 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. 2, 1899.




{116}

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[1].  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 {117} principles made submission to government by 'the
uncircumcised' at least a real abandonment of a religious ideal[2], 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[3], the attitude of the Christians, who were identified with
them, might easily be misunderstood.  Or on the other hand the Jews
themselves, at Rome as at Thessalonica[4], 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 {118} tendencies at Thessalonica[5], 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[6].  Thus the Church was not a theocracy, but a 'settlement of
strangers and exiles[7],' 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 voluntary and catholic (or
non-national) basis.  Therefore, 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 {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[8], to maintain justice and right.  Its
officers are God's ministers (as truly as the officers of the Church,
though in a different order), and must be obeyed accordingly, under
peril not only of civil punishment 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 {120} 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: for he is a minister of God, an avenger
for wrath to him that doeth evil.  Wherefore _ye_ 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 {121} God was to come, and the
great overthrow, whatever 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 framework 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[9].'  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 {122}
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[10].  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 almighty 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 {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 obedience.'  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 {124} maintain the divine order in the world, or to represent
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
reinforce 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 retaining, authority which is
entrusted not to the State, but to the Church.  Attempts are recorded
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, belong 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
{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 repugnant to it; and
there can evidently be no reasonable religious government in the Church
of England till it is conducted again in obedience 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 independent 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 {126} 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 ministers': 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 administration of the
good laws which already exist, national and municipal, and to promote
intelligently 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.



[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.

[2] 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 certainly explain these words, but St.
Paul knew all about the occurrence from Priscilla and Aquila, whom the
expulsion had brought across his path at Corinth.

[4] Acts xvii. 7.

[5] 1 Thess. iv. 11; v. 14; 2 Thess. iii. 6.

[6] Jer. xxix. 7; cf. 1 Tim. ii. 2.

[7] 1 Pet. i. 11.  The word for such a 'settlement of strangers,'
_paroecia_, has become, by a suggestive history, our 'parish.'

[8] Cf. 2 Thess. ii. 6.  'That which restraineth' the outbreak of
lawlessness is (almost certainly) the empire, and 'he that restraineth'
(ver. 7) the emperor.

[9] Acts v. 29.

[10] 1 Pet. ii. 13-17.




{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 '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 satisfaction 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
commandment.

{128}

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 shall 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 thyself.  Love worketh
no ill to his neighbour: love therefore is the fulfilment of the law.


St. Paul gives here a very noticeable expansion 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 {129} to all the Gentile
world[1], 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 portentous 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, towards 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 {130} make
the best of themselves, as he has himself; let him steadily refuse to
'exploit' 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 thoughtfulness 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[2].'  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
combinations are combinations of individuals, and that neither
individual responsibility, nor responsibility for the individual, can
be obliterated by union or by numbers.

St. Paul, we notice, is here plainly {131} reproducing our Lord's
saying about love and the law[3]; 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[4].
The {132} Christian 'enthusiasm for humanity' has thus its roots in a
disclosure of the character of God, and of His mind towards every man.



[1] Rom. i. 14.

[2] ver. 8, 'his neighbours': margin, 'the other.'

[3] Matt. xxii. 40; cf. Gal. v. 14, and James ii. 8.

[4] 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, 1895), p.
80.  (I was referred to this work by Dr. Bernard, _Pastoral Epistles_,
p. 24.)  Hence, i.e. from the popular speech of Greek Egypt, it passed
into the Greek Bible and so into Christianity.




{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 realities, 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
darkness 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} ourselves.  As
for our lower nature, it is to be our servant merely--not a master,
whose clamorous 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 revelling
and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, 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 expectation of the immediate
second coming of Christ; and that expectation has proved mistaken.  Now
our Lord plainly did not mean His disciples to know when His judgement
was to be made manifest, and St. Paul apparently recognized this[1], 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 {135} St. 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 reasonable 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[2].

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
{136} Him[3], appropriating and drawing out into ourselves 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[4].

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
sentence, as if a light of certainty had been poured into my heart, all
the shadows of doubt were scattered[5].'



[1] 1 Thess. v. 1: '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. 1).

[2] It is interesting to compare this passage with the closely similar
one of Thess. v. 1-4.  Cf. Eph. v. 14 ff.; vi. 11.

[3] 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.

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

[5] _Conf._ viii. 12.




{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 fundamental
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 community--difficulties on those small points of
religious observance which seem so unimportant {138} 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[2], 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 between 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[3]'?

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[4],' as He had opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
And the vision which reassured St. Peter on the {139} latter point, and
forbade him 'to call any man common or unclean[5],' 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[6].  But at the Jerusalem conference 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 {140} the Gentile
shambles, where also much of the meat which was for sale would have
been offered to idols[7].  By the observance of such a concession,
then, Jew and Gentile were to live and eat together in peace.

The actual enactment of the Jerusalem conference had a limited
application to the Gentile Christians of Antioch and Syria and
Cilicia[8].  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 indifferentist 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 {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[9],
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[10].
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[11], 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 {142} St. Paul in the passage we are now to study, in
principle plainly approves of the indifferentist practice of the
majority.  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 {143} troubling our brother, or even
(what is worse) leading him to act against his conscience and eat what
he feels he ought not[12], 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 altogether from
flesh and wine too.

In passing St. Paul had noticed another indifferent matter besides the
eating of meats.  It was the observance of days.  St. Paul undoubtedly
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[13],' 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
{144} 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
tendency.  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[14].  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 {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[15].

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
{146} 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 thyself before God.  Happy is he that
judgeth not himself in that which he approveth.  But he that doubteth
is condemned if he eat, because _he eateth_ not of faith; and
whatsoever is not of faith is sin.


1.  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[16].  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
{147} the familiar saying 'in necessary things unity: in those less
than necessary liberty: in all things charity[17].'

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[18].'  '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 preaching vain, your faith also is vain[19].'  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
Christian body must exercise upon its members the severity of
judgement[20], 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[21], nor {148} the recognition of the authority of the
apostolic ministry which is to be the centre of unity, nor the
sacraments, which 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[22].'  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 practical abandonment of the fundamental
Christian principle--then 'Behold, I Paul say unto you, that, if ye
receive circumcision, Christ will profit you nothing[23].'

Here, then, are St. Paul's essentials, as to which he is intolerant--a
fundamental tradition 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 subordination {149}
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[24].'

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 disposition, in great measure,
ritualist or puritan, ecclesiastically 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 {150}
subject I will ask my readers' attention to the following extracts from
a suggestive book[25].

'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.'

'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.'

'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 conditions 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 {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 conscience
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
conscience[26], 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 {152} congregation in adopting a popular
practice, without its real basis and justification being considered.
But fashion and the influence of members is a great danger in religion.
'Let every man be fully assured in his own mind.'  'Whatever is not of
faith is sin[27].'

2.  Plainly, when St. Paul wrote his epistles, there was no observance
of a Sabbath obligatory upon Christians[28].  But was there none of
Sunday?  '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[29].  It was already sufficiently
distinctive for St. Paul to name it as the appropriate day for laying
by alms for the poor[30].  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 {153} all days of the week
alike.  Nothing less than this can satisfy St. Paul's words.  In
principle, as Bishop Lightfoot said[31], '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 Wednesday 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
offering 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 {154} 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[32].  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, private 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 {155} about in the corporate social life of the Church of
England, through the neglect of the surely moderate amount of
regulation which was provided 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 'acquiring 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
repudiate the idea that any rules of worship and observance, other than
those which are necessarily involved in the administration of the
sacraments, 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}

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[33].'
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 positively 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?

{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[34].'  And the word used
is the word which, in its substantive form, is 'eucharist.'  And indeed
there is meaning in this.  The thankful reception 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 {158} 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[35].



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

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

[3] Ecclus. xxxiii. 9.

[4] Mark vii. 19.

[5] Acts x. 28.

[6] The matter of 'eating with the Gentiles' was prominent, cf. ii. 12.

[7] 1 Cor. x. 25.

[8] Acts xv. 23.

[9] 1 Cor. viii, and x. 23-33.

[10] 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.

[11] 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.

[12] Cf. 1 Cor. viii. 10.

[13] 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.'

[14] 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.'  1 Cor. xii. 10: 'discernings of spirits,' i.e. decisions as to
their true character.

[15] From Isa. xlv. 33.

[16] Cf. Ephes. pp. 271 f.

[17] See app. note H, p. 239.

[18] Gal. i. 8.

[19] 1 Cor. xv. 12, 13.

[20

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