THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL STUDIES IN THE FIRST EIGHT CHAPTERS OF HIS EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS V EEV. J. OSWALD DYKES, M.A. D.D. AUTHOR OF THE MANIFESTO OF THE KING," "ABRAHAM, THE FRIEND OF GOD' Kara rb evayye\i6v fiQV LONDON JAMES NISBET & CO., 21 BERXERS STREET MDCCCLXXXVIII PEEFACE, Any one wlio pays to tliis book tlie compliment of glancing through its pages will readily perceive that it is neither a commentary nor a treatise in theology. It is neither addressed to scholars nor to divines. Nor does it set forth any novel interpretation of the Apostle's teaching. After so many centuries of study, the likelihood that it has been reserved for this generation to discover the right sense of St. Paul's most important Letter appears to the Author suflSciently small. What he has ventured to attempt is to restate in plain — that is, non-technical — language the course of the argument and the development of thought through these famous chapters, in such a way as may prove of assistance to readers who possess an intelligent interest in evan- gelical truth. How far he has" been successful in this attempt it is for others to say. About one-half of the volume appeared some time ago in the columns of the "Homiletic Magazine." These chapters have been revised. The rest is printed here for the first time. vi PREFACE. Thanks are due and are hereby given to the University Press at Oxford and Cambridge, the Proprietors of the " Pievised Version," for kindly permitting that rendering of the text to be prefixed to each chapter. No one can be so well aware as the Author himself how far his work falls short alike of its theme and of his own design. May He of Whose Way of Salvation it treats deign to forgive its faults and use it for His own sacred ends, for Jesus' sake. Amen. CONTENTS, PAGE CHAP. I. AT ROME ALSO ^ II. RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH 'IS III. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM . • . ' "2$ lY. THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM .... 38 V. JEWISH OBJECTIONS REPELLED 52 VL EVERY MOUTH STOPPED 65 VII. Paul's evangel 77 VIII. A levelling GOSPEL ^9 IX. A CRUCIAL CASE 99 X. IMMEDIATE RESULTS OF JUSTIFICATION. . . .113 XI. A HISTORICAL PARALLEL 126 XIL FREE GRACE AND SIN ^43 XIIL ASSIMILATION THROUGH FAITH 155 XIV. Christ's death to sin ^^4 XV. OF REALISING THE IDEAL 1 72 XVI. BONDMEN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 1^2 xvir. "law V. grace'' ^9^ viii CONTENTS. CUAP. P-^0» XVIII. A CHAPTER IN SAUL'S EARLY LIFE . . . . 20I XIX. MORE autobiography: dualism in the life . .211 XX. LIFE IN THE SPIRIT 22$ XXL FROM PRESENT LIFE TO FUTURE GLORY . . . 237 XX IL THE GROANS OP CREATION 246 XXIIL WAITING IN HOPE 256 XXIV. THE FIVE LINKS OP SALVATION 265 XXV. THE CHALLENGE OF FAITH . . .' • . -273 THE GOSPEL ACCOEDING TO ST. PAUL. CHAPTER I. AT ROME ALSO. " I am not ashamed of the Gospel : for it is the power of God unto salva- tion to every one that believeth ; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. " EOM. i. i6. 117 HEN St. Paul set himself at Corintli to dictate this ' * long letter which the deaconess Phoebe had under- taken to carry with her to the Roman Church, he had never yet visited the Eternal City. For years, indeed, he tells us, he had cherished a strong desire to do so ; but the necessity of finishing his work in Asia Minor and Greece, together with the disturbed condition of some of the Churches he had founded in these countries, had hitherto prevented him from travelling farther west. Now, however, he was on the point of leaving the Greek provinces. One small piece of business only remained to be done : the sum of money collected at his desire by the Christians of Mace- donia and Achaia for converted Jews in the Holy Land had to be safely conveyed to Jerusalem. This was to be the winding up of his mission-work among the Greeks. A 2 THE GOSPEL ACCOEDING TO ST. PAUL. That fairly accomplislied and off his mind, he saw nothing to keep him any longer from sailing westward, to Italy first, and, if God pleased, far beyond Italy, to the land of the setting sun, the Spanish Peninsula. Already, therefore, his eager mind was full of Rome. The departure of sister Phoebe on business which took her to the capital and would need the help of brethren there, gave him an excellent opportunity to prepare them for his own visit. Paul could not sit down to write such a letter without having his imagination and his feelings stirred. Rome has never ceased to be a name of power from his day to ours ; but nothing in its history since then, no modern analogy, not even the magic which eighteen more centuries of vicissitudes have gathered around the word, can enable us moderns to realise what Rome meant in the first Christian century. London and Paris rolled into one would not be to the world of to-day what Rome was to the world then. It was simply and literally the world's sole capital. Out from it went forth the edicts -which the world obeyed, and the rulers whose coming every land awaited as the coming of its king. Back into it poured without stint or ceasing the tributary wealth of the richest and fairest portions of the cultivated earth and of all navigated seas. Every great road which tra- versed the earth radiated from that one imperial city. There was not a fort or garrison town on civilized or semi-civilized territory but bore its military ensigns. From Anglesea to the Euphrates, from the mouths of the Rhine to the cataracts of the Nile, the world knew but one word of power, and that word was Rome. St. Paul was a Roman citizen : could the thought that he too, at last, should see Rome, and carry his message to the heart of the mighty mistress city, fail to quicken his pulses ? AT ROME ALSO. 3 For a moment, it might almost seem as though the thought shook even his missionary courage. But he re- calls how his gr^at commission laid it on him as a " debt " i which he owed to every Gentile land that he should carry the Gospel to it. So he braces himself for this most arduous call, and, so far as it lies on him, proclaims himself ready, without shrinking, to preach even to the Romans. For what need had he even within that seat of all earthly power, military or political, where its august embodiment sat enthroned and deified in purple, to be ashamed of his message as though it were a weak thing ? Nay, but it too is a word of power ; power, not of a deified man, but of the living God ; power, not to enslave and crush and bleed the tributary nations, but to save, to set free, to lift into everlasting life the souls of men. "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is God's power to salvation to every one that believeth." These are brave words : but how much more would this missionary's confidence in his message have been tried had he been permitted to foresee when and how he should at length attain his desire to visit Rome ! Had he foreseen that within three months he should be lying a prisoner in a Roman castle at Cesarea ; that three years must pass before he should enter the gates of Rome ; that when he did so it should be in a weaker and more shameful fashion than he had ever dreamed of, marching a footsore prisoner along the Via Appia, chained by the wrist to a Roman soldier ; that the time which he hoped to spend in the society of the Roman Church should be simply years of detention under the strong hand of Roman law, broken only by arraignments at the imperial tribunal and re- current fear of execution ; that at the last, alone, forsaken, an aged and helpless captive worn with long imprison- ment, he should look his last at Rome from that memor- 4 TIII<] GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. able spot beyond the Ostian Gate, aiid count it a farewell boon due to his lioman citizenship tliat his head was to fall beneath the swift and merciful stroke of a Roman headsman. Ah ! had the active, hopeful, eager man who wrote these words in Corinth foreseen all this, would he have said as stoutly, *' I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is God's power " ? He surely mi^dit. Paul's word is alive to-day. Where is the word of Nero? J'aul's Gospel is as much as ever the power of CJod. The Home of Nero we dig for to-day beneath its burial mounds. On the ruins of old Home, the message which l*aul preached has built a spiritual empire many times wider than the empire of the Ca)sars. The obscure missionary who was led on foot through the Api)ian Gate among the throng of passengers, bound to a soldier of Nero's army, has proved the mightier of the two ; and who shall say to-day at Home that Paul had any cause to be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ? Lot us look more closely at the ground of St. Paul's conlidence in his message. It was a word of powder which the man had to speak. So far, there is nothing novel in this. It is by no means a new thing or without example, that a man with no ollicial or armed strength to back him should have a message on his tongue before which the brulo force of arms and empire shall turn out to be but weakness. It is a long while indeed since men found out that truth is that which *' endures and is always strong," which " lives and conquers for evermore." '' All works shake and tremble at it, ibr with it there is no unright- eous thing." To know the righteous truth, and to love it and to speak it, is to be more than a king. For it is by their thoughts men are really ruled, and he who can sjieak true thoughts which seize and sway the spirits of his fellows-men may win an empire wider than Home's. AT ROME ALSO. 5 Paul witnessing to the Gospel at Nero's bar is a repetition of his INTaster witnessing to Himself at Pilate's bar ; and the force on which Jesus rested His own Kingship was no other than this, that He was born to bear witness unto the truth. There was, therefore, no reason to be ashamed of the Gospel merely because it was no more than a Gospel, a message, a story, a word of truth ; for words of truth are stronger than armed men. The very fact that when (Jod undertook to save men from their sins He elected to do it by what Paul elsewhere calls the " foolishness of preaching" — that is, by a spoken word — proves that among the mighty forces of human history this is, after all, the mightiest. But then, in Paul's day, the world was grown very w^eary of words which had in them no power at all, or, if power, at least not power to save. Some centuries earlier, Greece had held the sceptre among the nations, and held it by virtue of her wisdom. Her words had been words of teaching. Mythologies, philosophies, literature, rhetoric, science, art — the whole many-provinced realm of intel- lectual effort had been hers without a rival ; but out of her wise words there had come no power of salvation for suffering and sinful men. Her golden age was over now ; her philosophies discredited ; her faith dead; her arts hired out to the foreigner for gain ; and the net result before men's eyes was confessedly this : that by its wisdom the world had failed to know God. Cowardice, greed, licen- tiousness, luxury, superstition — these were the things which (as contemporary literature shows) flourished in the chief Greek communities where Paul had for years been labouring. As for any healthful or regenerating power men had once dreamt of in Grecian thought or Grecian letters, these agencies had proved as weak before the vices of mankind as tow in llame. 6 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. Words of power, indeed, there still were in that world which Paul knew ; words strong enough to hold both Greek and barbarian in discontented quiet ; words of law and order running swiftly through every land, and felt at the extremities of the empire. But they were words, not of learned, thoughtful Greece, but of rude, warlike Kome. They were the words of imperial edicts and severe jurisprudence and military command ; and no one could have lived as Paul had done in many provinces of the empire without knowing well that the fearfully strong grasp of Eoman despotism, while it held the earth meantime tranquil, and on the whole ruled it justly, was a grasp which could never save, could only strangle and kill the lives of nations and of men. The world of that day was weary enough of both. Weary of words which promised life but had no power to give it ; brain-spun speculations about God and man which made nothing clear, which had no influence what- ever over the bad passions of the individual, which brought no hope to the poor or the slave : in these Greek theories there was no Gospel of power unto salvation. Weary too of words which had behind them the terrific and sometimes brutal strength of Roman legions, but used it not to elevate subject races, to enfranchise the enslaved, to regenerate public manners, to purify, to teach ; used it only to bind the yoke firmer on the degenerate peoples, to crush out every nobler instinct, to debauch the mob with cruel spectacles, to make the great world one vast pre- serve, feeding the pride and luxury of an Italian court. In the words of Roman rule also there was no Gospel unto salvation. In the midst of all this, St. Paul carried what he knew to be a divine message of help — God's own miraculous word, charged with a loftier wisdom than that of Greece, AT ROME ALSO. 7 backed by a mightier authority than that of Rome, and instinct with spiritual life and everlasting salvation for the men of every land. What that heavenly message is it was the object of this long letter to unfold. Briefly, it may be said to be the revelation of God's righteousness in His Son and of God's life by His Spirit. Of God's righteousness first, which was by faith of Jesus Christ to all them that believed, in virtue of which God, by a gratuitous act of His grace, declared them righteous through the redemption that was in Christ, whom God had set forth as a propitiatory sacrifice for sin. By this new and divine method of declaring sinful men righteous in His sight, St. Paul taught that God set them free at once from the curse of His law, gave peace to their uneasy consciences, and restored them to the joy of His favour. St. Paul's message had in those days, and has still, this much at least to recommend it, that it pushed forward into prominence, as its very earliest gift, a liberation of the conscience from that unatoned guilt against which men had hitherto struggled in vain to be free. Always that memory of a sinful past had haunted earnest minds ; always that fear of penalty had paralyzed their efibrts to be good and chilled their hope in God. No theory of evil as merely another form of good could shake the plain testimony of the human conscience affirming guilt. Sacri- fice and lustration had proved ineffectual to lift off this dread of a nemesis to come. Like a gravestone on every soul dead in its sins lay the sentence of God's avenging justice ; for while neither Nature nor philosophy availed to reveal any way of justification for a sinner, the wrath of God was sufficiently revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men to put them beyond excuse, and fill them at times with soul-shaking alarms for the " indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish," which 8 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. overhung " every soul of man thab did evil." Amid heathen darkness more dimly — in the twilight of Judaism more vividly — men everywhere felt that the Powers on high were angry. It was, therefore, a most welcome feature of Paul's message from God, that to men in their sins, as they were (if they would but repent), He offered pardon and gratuitous acceptance as righteous persons in Christ Jesus. This, however, was but the first half of the divine word. The same faith which identifies a sinful man with Christ, so that he becomes justified in Him through His death, brings to that man divine life as well. To be in Christ (Paul taught) is to be made a new creature, alive with a new life, thenceforth no longer the willing slave of sin, but free to serve God as His adopted child, inspired by His Holy Spirit. If, while wicked men were still God's enemies, God reconciled them through the death of His Son, how much more, now that He has reconciled them to friendship, will He go on to save these friends of His by His Son's life ! Before the man who hears such words, who accepts Christ as his Quickener, there opens out a prospect of ultimate deliverance from everything bad, or base, or unworthy, of final emancipation into the glorious freedom and felicity of the children of God. God will not do His work by halves. Having taken up our case so strongly. He will spare nothing now for the sake of men for whom He has already sacrificed His Son. The message grows more wonderful and glorious as it rolls along. Starting from justification, it ends in glory. It is good news at its beginning ; better news at its^ close. At first it is the word of God cancelling guilt ; by-and-by it be- comes also the power of God unto the complete and ever- lasting salvation of fallen humanity in soul and body. It ends at once in a challenge and a triumph. ^' Who shall AT ROME ALSO. 9 lay anything to tlie charge of God's chosen ones ? " " In all things we are more than conquerors ! " This is that word of good tidings which St. Paul felt he could carry without discredit to the capital seat of empire. Already he had proved it upon the Greeks ; and Coriuth, where he wrote, was evidence that ^' the foolishness of God " had shown itself " wiser than men." Now he was ready to prove it also upon the Eomans ; persuaded that, as the weakness of God, it would turn out stronger than men. The power which resides in a word, or which operates through a word, requires one (and no more than one) con- dition for its operation — it must be believed. Old Eli, bowed with the weight of years, sat in the city gate of Shiloh, when a message came to him which had in it a power of death. But if Eli had not believed the fatal tidings of that Benjamite who professed to report the disastrous issue of the day's engagement, Eli would not have fallen dead in a fit by the side of the gate. The message which another Benjamite spoke at midnight to the Roman jailer had in it, on the contrary, a power of spiritual life. But if that jailer had not received Paul's record of God concerning His Son, no life could have visited his rude, dark, heathen soul. Faith is no excep- tional demand on the Gospel's part. It is the condition of all power which comes by word, whether it be a word that teaches or a word that commands. Though the power of God, operating through His Gospel, is an excep- tional power, since it is the direct energy of the Holy Ghost which quickens dead souls, yet God has chosen this particular vehicle of speech for His life-giving, saving, spiritual energy, and having chosen it. He respects its ordinary laws. Salvation must come by faith, because faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. lO THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. It is, therefore, to him only who believes its message, but to every one who does believe it, that the Gospel proves to be God's power unto salvation. Faith on the part of the hearer is that which must liberate the divine might which resides in the word ready to operate. We have in this law of the Gospel's operation a ready explanation, if at any time we feel surprised that the Gospel seems to effect so little. It has been a long while in the world since St. Paul wrote ; yet ours is far from being a saved world. It has been told to the men of our own generation in this land, till not a few have grown quite weary with hearing it ; yet everywhere there is a cry in the air that vice spreads and society grows not a whit wholesomer. But it is no fair reproach to any sal- vation which comes by word that it fails to benefit people who do not believe it. The reproach would only be fair if you could show that any man had honestly accepted this message, and lived upon the faith of it, yet for all that had been none the better for it. No enemy of Chris- tianity, who knew what he was saying, has ever been bold enough to allege that. Look how it has been with our- selves. This Gospel of gratuitous justification and spiritual renewal in Christ Jesus ha^s been familiar to every one of us from childhood. In every conceivable form of words it has been addressed to us. By words of the Holy Book and words to explain the Book — by words spoken and words printed — by hymns learned in childhood at parents' knee and sermons from a hundred pulpits. In fact, it has as good as saturated the whole religious, and literary, and social atmosphere we live in ; till we fancy there is nothing in this world we know so well — no story ever told which has been worn so threadbare. All your days, therefore, one might say to any unbelieving person, you have been in ceaseless contact with the saving strength AT ROME ALSO. I I of God. A divine force has been round about you, touch- ing you, playing on your nature through that Gospel story as a vehicle, a force competent to deliver you from sin, and intended to do so. Is it impertinent now to ask, Has it saved you ? What appreciable good effect can you trace to it ? Have you the peace of forgiveness from God ? Have you the Spirit of Christ ? Are you set free from the love of sin, or transformed in temper and tastes into child-like resemblance to the Heavenly Father ? These are the things which the Gospel does when it is God's power to the salvation of a man ; and it is fair to ask if such effects have become visible in you. Shall we blame the Gospel if they have not ? Is it then grown weak ? It claims to wrap up within it the highest divine energy. Is that a delusive boast ? Stop a- moment. Before you call the Gospel weak, ask how you have received it. The faith which has to be exercised about any word varies with the nature of the word. This word from God is spiritual, and it asks not an intellectual but a spiritual faith, a moral submission, a religious surrender of the whole being to the influence of the truth told and the authority of the Person speaking. Have you yielded it that sort of faith — the only sort which, in a case like this, is faith ? You hold all Christian teaching for true, and you hear it with respect ; but have you accepted of God's method for your justification, and welcomed God's Spirit into you for your regeneration ? To lay your con- science and religious affections open to the free entrance and fair play upon them of God's loving words in His Son is not an accidental of Christianity ; it is essential. It is on your side the indispensable condition of any energy put forth on you by God for your salvation. Blame not the Gospel, therefore, but yourselves. The power is there, as much there for you as for others. But it lies I 2 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. dormant because hitherto you have received God's message as a word only, not a power ; because you are careful to keep it outside of your real life, in the region of your notions, opinions, or professions, but will not let it in among those everlasting verities which practically form you and rule you and animate you from hour to hour, which are the ever-present companions of your thoughts, the springs of your desires, and the lords of your will. Do this, and see if the Gospel of Christ leave you long an unaltered, unbettered man. Do this, and if it develop no power of salvation within you which you can call divine — then be ashamed of it for a weak pretender, like the other systems in the world which profess great things and achieve little ; then, but not till then. It is the power of God unto salvation — only you must do it the justice to believe it. ( 13 ) CHAPTER II. RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH. "For therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith. " — ROM. i. 17. rpHESE words are to be read in close connection with those -^ of the preceding verse. The two verses form a single compact sentence which may be put thus : " The Gospel is God's power to salvation to every believer, because in it God's righteousness by faith is revealed to faith." The Gospel which Paul was not ashamed to preach even at Rome is a divine power able to save all sorts of men ; to save them, of course, from their sins and to an eternal life with God. It has this saving power, because in it there is revealed God's own righteousness. And it exerts its saving power on believers only, because the righteous- ness which it does reveal is one " from faith to faith." So put, the whole sentence forms, as every student of this Epistle knows, its fundamental proposition or thesis; to the explanation, proof, and enforcement of which the doctrinal portion of the letter is devoted. In no other portion of St. Paul's writings does he so carefully lay down at the outset what he is about to establish. Nowhere else does he so rigorously carry on a logical proof of his main pro- position throughout an entire treatise. I may add, that nowhere else does he set himself so expressly to explain in what the Gospel actually consists — that is, the 1 4 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. essential truths lying at the heart of the Christian revela- tion. It is to be expected, therefore, that a proposition of such consequence will be very carefully and accurately worded ; that its terms will be employed in their most strict and technical Christian sense ; and that everything for the right understanding of the sentence must turn upon a correct definition of its language. Before we can arrive, therefore, at the chief ideas which are tied up compendiously in this sentence we must first try to reach the correct sense of its principal words. The study of these, in fact, will conduct us of itself to the ideas. (i.) The most characteristic and weighty expression,' of course, is God's righteousness^ the revelation of which makes the Gospel to be a saving power.* Perhaps the first idea to strike any one on hearing this phrase, "the righteousness of God," would be that it described an attribute of the divine character. It is the foundation of Jehovah's judicial sovereignty that He is just (or right- eous) in all His ways. His acts or decisions are always in conformity with His moral nature ; and His nature is in perfect harmony with eternal and absolute rectitude. Unquestionably, this ground character of Godhead is the * There are unfortunately two English words in use for the one Greek word everywhere used by St. Paul. Pirst we have the root word, just ; and this yields us the most complete set of expressions. Thus : The just man is he whom God justifies. By that divine act of justification the man is declared to possess justice in the sight of God. So our fathers would have said. Only it unfortunately happens that we cannot now use justice in this sense. Formerly it was good English to do so ; but now justice has come to mean only a virtue of character, and not that obedience to commands which justifies from blame. Hence we have to borrow another word and say "righteousness." There would be no harm in this if we could run this word, like the other, through all the forms we need. But we cannot. We cannot well say, for example, The righteous man is he whom God calls righteous; ye require to substitute the phrase, "whom God justifies." ' RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH. I 5 only basis on which men can put their trust in Him. We could have no confidence in an unequal, unfair, or inconsistent judge. But if we examine St. Paul's words a little, we shall see that it cannot be this he is speaking of. For one thing, the justice of the Most High was no novelty which we needed a Gospel to reveal to us. All men knew that by nature ; or if they did not, the Hebrew Law had long ago revealed it. For another thing, a reve- lation of God's justice would have been no Gospel for sinners — no " good tidings of great joy " to any people. It would simply have been another exhibition of that righteous wrath of God against sin which had already been revealed from heaven, and which St. Paul goes ou to speak of as the antithesis or opposite of the Gospel. Besides, the justice which belongs to the nature of God does not depend (as this is said to do) on human faith. It does not spring out of men's believing. Above all, such a sense of the phrase yields no meaning at all when you apply it to the quotation from Habakkuk : "The man who is righteous (or just) by his faith, shall live." For here it is plainly man's righteousness which is spoken of — a righteousness which belongs to the just man, not to God. In whatever sense, therefore, the right- eousness revealed by the Gospel can be called God's, it certainly must describe, not an attribute of the divine nature, but some condition or relation in which men themselves are made to stand. To find out what that is we must look forward to a passage of this present letter to Eome, in which St. Paul falls back upon his thesis and Repeats it in ampler and more explicit language. The passage occurs near the end of the third chapter.* At the twenty-first verse he there proceeds to sum up the results of his long dis- * iii. 21-26. 1 6 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST, PAUL. cussion. ^'Now," says he, "apart from the Law, God's righteousness has been manifested" — exactly as here in i. 17 he had said it is "revealed" in the Gospel, so that the two passages are quite parallel. Then he goes on to define or describe it. It consists (iii. 24) in every sinner who believes " being justified freely by God's grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Again (iii. 26) it is defined once more : it consists in God's " being just and the Justifier of him who believes in Jesus." On our side, it implies our being justified when we believe ; on God's side, it implies His justly justifying us when we believe. It is not, therefore, an abstract virtue inherent in the Deity; but it has to do with a justified condition into which it pleases God to put men — such men as believe in the Redeemer. In this sense of the word, justice or righteousness belongs, not to the judge who condemns or acquits, but to the judged, who are acquitted and not condemned. A judge is righteous (or just) who pronounces a true sentence upon the merits of the case, whether he acquit or condemn. In this sense alone can God be righteous or possess righteousness. But the ac- cused subject who stands to be judged is righteous (or just) only when the sentence passed on him turns out to be one of acquittal. This is the sense in which a man may be righteous, or possessed of righteousness. The Pauline use of the word, then, as we interpret him, is this : Righteousness is the condition of any man's being justified, vindicated in law, or acquitted of blame, by his righteous Judge. And the characteristic of the Gospel — its joy and glory — lies here, that it has revealed how that condition of our justification has been reached. It shows by what means God may be just and yet justify the sinner. We are quite familiar with this sense of justification in ordinary human life. It is the simple EIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH. I / opposite of condemnation; as our Lord said, *^By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." And there have never been wanting plenty of people who (like a certain man in the Gospel) are " willing to justify themselves." Any one who is mis- represented or calumniated may succeed in clearing him- self from blame by a justification of his conduct. Nay, so far as regards condemnation at the bar of earthly justice or of human opinion, there are some righteous men who can defy their accusers to convict them of open guilt, that is, who may claim to be justified from sin. But to be just in Heaven's esteem, to claim acquittal at the Divine Bar, to have a righteousness which God can recognize and on the footing of which God will justify a man — this was, when Paul wrote, a new thing on the earth. It had been foretold, foreshadowed, and looked forward to; but it had never before been revealed. It needed to be revealed, in the proper sense of a divine or supernatural making known of what is concealed ; for of its own nature it was absolutely undiscoverable. The question, ^'How shall man be just with God?" was for man an unanswerable question. Human consciousness was always a consciousness of sin. Or if, in any particular, any man could dare to say (like Paul himself in one place), "I am conscious of no fault in myself," he had to add, with the humility of ignorance, "Yet am I not hereby justified; but He that judgeth me is the Lord." Every human law (like the law of Exod. xxiii. 7) forbids a judge to "justify the wicked" — to discharge a criminal from the tribunal uncondemned. Yet this is precisely what St. Paul declares that God does. He " justifieth the ungodly " (Rom. iv. 5). There is " now no condemnation" (viii. i). How or on what ground this seemingly unjust acquittal of sinners can proceed was a secret hid from 1 8 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. past ages, but it is now revealed. Such a righteousness for man as will sustain in the case of any one a verdict of acquittal from "the righteous Judge" is the grand dis- covery of the Gospel. By its disclosure of that for the trustful acceptance of mankind, it becomes a message with power unto salvation. (2.) We are now in a position to see in what sense this righteousness revealed in the Gospel is GocCs. Man's it certainly is, or must become, in the sense of constituting a ground on which man may justly be acquitted of guilt. But man's, as his own moral act, it as certainly is not. For it is expressly contrasted with what Paul called "mine own righteousness ;" and the Jews missed finding it just because they went about to establish one of " their own." So far as the personal acts of any sinner are concerned, the whole argument of this Epistle and the whole New Testament emphatically set aside the notion of his ac- quittal depending on any righteousness of his own. The Gospel righteousness, therefore, originates from God in the first instance — is a superhuman and supernatural provision of His grace which men were so far from being able to find or make, that they could not even imagine it till it was revealed to them. It is God's in its inception ; for He it was — the Father of all mercy — who in the beginning^ when we were "yet sinners," "enemies" of His, and "without strength," "sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law," to " condemn our sin in His flesh," and redeem us from the law's sentence of condem- nation. It is God's in its achievement ; for He it was — the Son of the Father — who in the fulness of time " made many righteous by His own obedience," and "by His blood justified" us from all things, obliterating the writing which accused us, and " reconciling us in the body of His flesh through death." It is God's in its revelation : EIGHTEOUSJSESS BY FAITH. 1 9 for He it was — the Holy Spirit who comforts us by His teaching — who first through the Apostles of our Lord discovered it to all nations for the obedience of faith. Wherefore "to God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever." Praised be the wise and generous mercy of the Father who devised ; praised be the obedience and grace of the Son whose mortal passion achieved ; and praised the comforting revelation of the Spirit who still within our hearts makes known to us this righteousness of faith : — God's righteousness for sinful men ! (3.) In the composite title given by St. Paul to the contents of his Gospel, there remains but one more word to be explained. He calls it — in full — " God's righteous- ness of (or, out of) faith ; " and this expression may most fitly be read as if it were one compound epithet descriptive of a single object. Each of the parts of this compound name has its own separate use, if one would adequately char- acterize what the Gospel reveals to us. It is a " righteous- ness," because on it the acquittal of accused and sinful men justly proceeds. It is " God's-righteousness," because provided by the Triune God through the human obedience of the Second Person. It is " God's-righteousness-of-faith," because, in order to our becoming justified by it, faith is the solitary condition. The relation of Gospel righteousness is thus expressed by its very name, on both sides — toward God and toward man. As respects God, it is His^ in a sense opposed to its being mine; His as its Author, Originator, meritorious Achiever, and proper Proprietor. The simple personal possessive marks His relation to it : it is " God's.'' But as respects my relation to it — it comes to me, stands me in stead, is reckoned to me for my acquittal, " hy faith" in consequence (that is to say) of my believing in and trusting to Him. The expression, " by faith," stands exactly opposed to another often recur- 20 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. ring in St. Paul : " by law-works " (ef epycov vo^ov^ iii. 20), that is, personal acts of obedience, carrying with them some merit in God's sight. It is, of course, conceivable (though it is practically impossible) that sinful men should do something in their own person to clear or j ustify themselves from guilt — something to atone for sin, or to deserve acquittal. If they could, that righteousness would be their own — not another's in any sense ; not God's. And it would be a righteousness arising to them out of their own actions, "out of law- works" done by them. In sharp contrast to this self-provided righteous- ness stands the Gospel righteousness provided by Another. It comes to me, not out of any act or work of mine by which I have justified myself, but out of my reliance on the act or work of Another, by which Another justifies me. Just because this righteousness is Another's, it can only be made available for me by my relying upon that Other and accepting it as a gratuitous present from His kindness. (Cf. 97 Saypea iv 'x^dptrt, Rom. v. 1 5.) Because it is God's, it comes to me out of faith ; and it is " out of faith, that it may be by grace" (Rom. iv. 16). Thus it is that the whole of this composite title, " God's- righteousness-by-faith," hangs together and receives one consistent sense. It is at every point the clear contrary to " Man's-righteousness-by-works ; " and accordingly the Apostle's efforts through nearly three following chapters are directed to abolish the latter, that he may establish the former and shut us up to accept of it. If it can be shown that by the deeds of the law can no man be justified before God, then it will follow that any justifying righteousness available for us must be a righteousness not ours, but God's; which comes to our account, not on our doing it, but on our trusting to it as our Saviour's deed. And it is just such a righteousness which in the Gospel is revealed unto us; RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH. 21 This discussion of tlie terms of the text may appear to some unduly long ; but there are no words in the peculiar vocabulary of Christianity to which a greater importance attaches than these. The teaching of the New Testament on the way of salvation turns on them as on a pivot, and they issue, as we shall presently see, in an urgent practical demand. Besides, through what has been said upon the words of the text, we have really reached to its very ideas and central meaning. So much so, that little remains to do now but in a few words to recapitulate the thoughts which have emerged as we went along. Let us see how these come out. (i.) A message which pretends (as the Gospel does) to have the power of saving sinful men must show how men are to be justified or acquitted by God. The very first fact to confront any would-be deliverer of human beings is, that we are all guilty and deserve to perish. We are under sentence for sin. We are righteously condemned to die. Till you can lift off from the human conscience that appalling, remorseful load of guilt, with its paralyzing sense of hopelessness, and its exasperating fear of the blessed God as an incensed avenging Judge, you have done nothing — nothing effectual — for any earnest religious nature. To reverse the doom of the race, cancel our sentence, and reinstate us in the approval of Heaven, is the very alphabet of our salvation. (2.) Only some supernatural revelation could do this. Many things men could and did find out, but atonement for guilt, or a good and just cause why any one who had once broken the law of God should not die but live, as if he had kept it — this no man could find. If there never had come any other true message sent down by a miracle from above or spoken by the very voice of God, this must be such a message. How can I trust the clever guesses 22 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. of any man about the terms on whicli the Almighty will acquit me of my sin ? He must speak and tell me. (3.) The way of justifying sinners which this heavenly message does reveal is by a righteousness of God's own providing. Obedience is rendered to magnify the broken Law ; its sentence of death is satisfied ; guilt is abolished by atonement; a just basis for pardon is laid: — but the doing of all this is not ours, it is God's. It is a righteous- ness accomplished for each man, not by himself, but by Another ; by no sinful man, yet by a Man ; by a Man, and yet by God. The miracle of the incarnation introduced into our race a Divine Actor whose obedient passion solves the problem of sin, and achieves the task of right- eousness. On that flesh which bore the " likeness of sinful flesh " (Rom. viii. 3), and stood " for sin," " God condemned sin " till there was " no more condemnation." The flesh of our Rescuer " was delivered over " indeed to death for the expiation of "our off'ences," but it "was raised again" from death "because of our justification" (iv. 25). It follows from the nature of this revealed ground of our acquittal that — (4,) We have nothing to do but to build our hopes on it. To take God at His word, and rely on His revealed righteousness as the basis of our acceptance and forgive- ness becomes, from the simple necessity of the case, our one way to peace. When the message is sent that God has executed a work on the footing of which He is willing to acquit and j ustify us from our sins, it is plain that we have nothing left us but to believe it, and act henceforth on the faith of it. Such a righteousness, being Another's work, must be (so far as we are concerned) a righteousness to he trusted to — a righteousness of faith. Here, then, we reach the last thought, which is really the RIGHTEOUSNESS BY FAITH. 23 point of the whole, that to which all tends, and by which the Gospel reaches us, touches us, and pierces our heart. It is this : — (5.) This message from God in heaven about a provided righteousness by reliance upon which we may be justified, is sent to us for this very end — that vje should rely on it. For thus saith the Apostle: '^In the Gospel message God's righteousness, which is by faith, is revealed to faith" i.e., revealed on purpose to be trusted in. This benevolent and serious design of God in revealing His faith-righteousness makes this Gospel word a sword with a double edge to every one among us. For God did not simply reveal His righteousness to His wide world — " to the Jew first and also to the Greek." He has guided the actual course of its disclosure along the great lines of history ; guided it to our shores ; guided it down the curi'ent of our ancestral generations ; guided it in spoken and written words to our door, to our eye and ear, to our mind and spirit. To us He has as literally and pointedly revealed it as if, in our secret closet, God's voice from heaven had spoken to each one by name, disclosing, for our individual salvation, a secret concealed from every other man — this namely, that Christ's work is a righteous- ness for yoity by which, if you trust to it, you shall be justified. His purpose in telling you that ? His meaning ? His wish ? That you — you yourself — should believe it for yourself and be saved ! Oh ! the unspeakable stress of the divine heart against our own, when He, who passes sentence on sin, who also died to put sin away, comes right up against each with this personal message, that, if we will only lean on His righteous work, we shall live. No one can mistake the meaning of that communication. You may refuse, but you cannot misunderstand, God. He means you to put your trust in the ground of acquittal 24 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. revealed to you. He means you to be saved thereby. To no soul of man among us is this way of pardon made known for a mockery, to tantalize with unattainable desire. It is revealed to faith ^ with a serious call that we would let it in and fasten our trust upon it ; that we would abandon all other reason for hoping in the divine mercy, and would hope to be, nay, trust to be, nay, con- fidently count on being, pardoned, acquitted, justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the sake of His righteous work. ( 25 ) CHAPTER III. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness ; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them ; for God manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity ; that they may be without excuse : because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks ; but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonoured among themselves : for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions : for their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature : and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due. And even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting ; being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, eovetousness, maliciousness ; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity ; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, inso- lent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, with- out understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful : who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they which practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them." — Pv,om. i. 18-32. rPHE writer of these words was Christ's greatest witness -*- to the ancient world of heathendom. He was the man whom God sent to assail the overgrown system of classical 2 6 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. paganism. To this task he devoted the mighty labours of his life ; and although, while he lived, he might seem to have effected little (for it took three centuries to develop the results of his work), yet, in fact, polytheism never recovered from the wound which it sustained at the hands of Paul. For all that, we hear very little from St. Paul about the idolatries of his time. This passage has the dis- tinction of being the only one in which he speaks of the religious and moral condition of the heathen world at any length ; almost the only one in which he speaks of its heathenism at all. Two of his sermons reported in the Acts were preached to idolaters ; one to rude rustic idola- ters in a Lycaonian town ; the other to cultured idolaters in the city of Athens. The language which he used on both these occasions harmonizes with this passage and throws on it a helpful light. Here, however, he is writ- ing to a capital which, as it had gathered into its hands the military and administrative power of all civilized governments, so it had provided a home for the deities of all its subject lands. In Rome's tolerant Pantheon, when Paul wrote, were assembled the gods of every land. At Piome, license was accorded to the rites of every form of worship, however impure or fraudulent. There, therefore, one might conveniently study the latest results of man's religious development, and trace in the faith and morals of its vast heterogeneous population what polytheism in every shape had been able to do for mankind. There was an appropriateness in setting before the Roman Christians so elaborate a picture as we have here of that mighty multiform paganism in the midst of which they lived and had their being. Let it be noticed with what design the passage is intro- duced. In last chapter we have discussed the words in which the Apostle lays down his theme. He is to prove THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. 2 7 that the Gospel of Christ has brought with it a novel power to save men from sin, because it reveals a way of being acquitted from condemnation by simply believing. It will prepare us for this if he can show that mankind at large need such a salvation to be revealed ; that they are under condemnation for sin, and that no existing religion had succeeded in saving them from that condemnation. The Gospel, he says, reveals God's righteousness by faith. But there had been a prior "revelation" in the world of God's " wrath " against the sins of men. Under that dis- covery of divine displeasure the whole world lay helpless in its guilt. Before the apprehension of coming judgment from heaven, clearly enough foreshadowed already, the whole race sat dumb, self-condemned, and without hope. Prove that, and you have proved the need of a new revela- tion, if men are to be saved at all. Prove that, and you prove that deliverance from the doom and power of sin is the need of humanity; a need which only God Himself can supply. So far as the Gentile or pagan world went, it hardly needed proof, to any man who lived in it, that its moral condition was infamously bad. We possess the most abundant contemporary evidence of this in its literature and its monuments. No scholar questions that the classical nations of Paul's age were steeped in vice, socially dis- organized, and abandoned to unnameable forms of personal impurity. No Christian in Rome, when Paul's letter reached it, but had the evidence of this before his eyes. These things needed only to be pointed at. What most needed to be shown was the connection between heathen conduct and heathen religion, and how, for the faults of both, the heathen must be held responsible. This leads St. Paul, not simply to enumerate abominable and pre- valent forms of sin, but to trace the genesis of heathen 2 8 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. morals out of heathen religion, and to establish the pro- position, that, both for the primary religious declension or apostasy from God, and for all the frightful sins to which it had led, men were to be condemned without excuse. The whole passage is in truth a profound and inspired sketch of what I may call the natural history of heathenism ; and as it is the history also of such heathenism as still to this hour faces the Church of Christ on every side of Christendom, it is by no means a needless or obsolete task to analyze the apostolic teaching in this passage. St. Paul's first proposition is, that from the first the heathen knew enough of God from His works to render them ivithout excuse for not luorshipping Him. The testimony of Nature to God was a familiar thought to St. Paul, for he uses it, as he does here, both in his sermon at Lystra and in his sermon at Athens. The Divine Being in His divine attributes is, of course, person- ally and essentially invisible. Yet He has impressed so much of Himself upon the visible creation that His own invisible attributes have thereby become evident to the intellectual vision of man — no less clearly evident to the understanding than if they were literally seen by the eye. The primary attribute manifested by creation is the power of God. Creation, indeed, in the strict and Biblical sense of that term (I mean, making something out of nothing), is not a truth of natural religion. It is the earliest doctrine of revelation, to be received as an article of faith. Yet in the composition and organization of matter into such innumerable forms of use, majesty, and loveliness as everywhere surround us, the world carries on its front the signature — not perhaps of infinite, but at least — of supreme and transcendent might. But mere power, though the first, is neither the last nor the best feature in that char- THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. 29 acter whicH He wlio made the world has left as His mark upon it. What St. Paul calls the "divinity" of God, means the sum of His peculiar divine properties, and among these Paul himself would perhaps have signalized (as at Lystra he did signalize it) the bountiful goodness of God. Nature bears witness, no doubt, to the severity as well as to the goodness of the Power that is above. But her ordinary processes, her faithful seasons, her salutary pro- vision for the repair of disorder, her often lavish and prodigal return to the hand of diligence, these things tell of One who is slow to anger, but who does good with both hands earnestly. Now, is it true that any candid and reverent mind might learn so much of God in this way as to lay upon it the duty of pure and grateful worship ? Nay, is it not true that so much as this has actually been known by men who had no book to read in but the book of Nature ? We find historical traces of this primitive nature-lesson about God in all the great polytheisms. We find behind the many gods a recognition of one supreme and remoter God. We find that the further back we can track pagan faiths, the simpler and purer they appear to become. We find the strongest testimonies to God's unity and to His attributes, with a ritual comparatively pure, in the oldest sacred books of the heathen, in the Yedas, for example, and in the earliest classics of China. Even under a later and more developed polytheism, the tendency of the deepest and most unbiassed thinkers has been towards a truer conception of God than the popular one. These things afford support to the Apostle's funda- mental position, that Nature has always told enough of its Maker to the intelligence of man to make him inexcusable if he did not pay to the One True God the fitting tribute of adoring praise and affectionate gratitude. But, secondly, the Apostle declares that the heathen have 30 THE GOSPEL ACCOEDING TO ST. PAUL. culpably repressed aiid liindered from its just influence tJie truth which they did hnow respecting God. He traces polytheistic and idolatrous worship to its root. (l.) Its first origin he finds in a refusal to walk honestly by such light as Nature afibrded. For this primary step in the very old and very fatal path of religious declension (a path trodden by the earliest fathers of our existing races in days long antecedent to the dawn of history) men could excuse themselves under no plea of ignorance. As yet, false divinities had not been invented. Cruel theologies had not become traditional. The large, fair page of a fresh young world lay all before them, with no misleading glosses, and from it was reflected the blessed face of a Father in heaven. One strong and just and kind. Men with good hearts in them would have loved and praised the God of earth and heaven. The bulk of men did not. They withheld from God the righteous return of honour and affection due to Him for what they really knew of Him. They neither paid Him worship as God, nor gave Him thanks. By thus refusing to let the truth rule them and work out its legitimate moral and religious effects upon them, they took the earliest step in a swift and easy apostasy. (2.) The next step followed surely. All such ^' holding back," or repression of acknowledged truth, in unrighteous- ness, has this for its penalty, that the eye for truth itself becomes evil. So it proved. That truth about God's real nature and properties, which men would not strive fairly to express in their worship, became obscured. Vanity and error entered into human reasonings on religion. The relations of God to His natural works grew cod fused. Instead of the clear straightforward vision of an honest heart, there came speculations, guesses, fictions, and would-be wise inventions of the intellect. More and THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. 3 I more the great God whom they would not worship was thrust back out of popular thought, and His place taken by a crowd of subordinate divinities — personified powers of Nature or deified heroes of mythical history. God can only be rightly known so long as He is faithfully served and loved. The wicked, fallen heart did not think it fit to retain such a practical acquaintance with God as that; and it paid the penalty in the falsification of its ideas about God, and the consequent darkening of its whole moral and religious life. " Men became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened." (3.) The third step downward was practical folly in religion. Wisdom rests on truth ; but when the truth of God has been rejected for vain inventions of man's own, there remaius — self-conceit, indeed, in a baseless pretence of wisdom (misnamed philosophy), but at bottom utter, abject unwisdom — that deep incredible folly in the pro- foundest of all human affairs, of which pagan idolatry has been everywhere the melancholy monument. The rejec- tion of the true God, whom His works proclaim, led to the gradual banishment of Him out of mind, and the eleva- tion into His room of the personified powers of Nature — that is, of His own works erected into divinities in His stead. Nature-worship involved symbol-worship. Symbol worship rapidly degenerated into sheer idol-worship. Then the folly culminated. When men can bow down to a dead, dumb image of their own making, and that the image of nothing nobler or greater than themselves, but of a brute, as in Assyria, India, or Egypt, or at best of another man, as in Greece; when the quadruped, the fowl, the reptile, is enshrined in the place of God, revered with the honours of God, and besought for the blessings of God, as if its foul and mean similitude could be any likeness of the Eternal Incorruptible Framer of all things, 32 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. surely a stage has been reached in human senselessness which degrades the worshipper as much as it insults his God. Yet this is but the legitimate penalty, as it has been the natural and universal result, of that primeval sin which refused to glorify as He deserved the God whose glory shone on man from the works that His fingers framed. It was quite in the spirit of Paul's reasoning when Isaiah pleaded with the besotted idolater that he would open his eyes and consider in his heart. In a voice which is not audible, and yet goes throughout the earth, the heavens do proclaim God's glory. In these heavens which God stretched forth alone — on the earth which He spread abroad by Himself, any man might discover enough to save him from setting up the wood of a graven image, or praying to a god that cannot save, if only ^' a deceived heart " had not first turned him aside." In the third place, it is in this deplorable and criminal per- version of the truths this religious apostasy, that Paul finds a key to the personal and social vices of heathendom. It is not simply that the ancient pagan idolatries were them- selves polluted. It is true that they deified lust and cruelty and fraud ; true, that they set up lewd and foul images ; true, that they enjoined rites which were bloody and licentious ; true, that to be pious it was needful to be impure. But this was not all. Such general abandonment to vice, till the very distinction of good and evil became confounded, was a divine retribution on man for his aban- donment of God. When the human heart shut out the self- manifestation of the true God, refused to know Him, and worshipped base creatures in His room, it cut itself off by its own act from the source of moral light and moral strength. A bad and false religion must breed a bad and false character. The worshippers grow like their divinity. You may call this a law of human nature, if THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. ^^^ you like, for it is that; but it is no less a law of the Divine Governor who made human nature ; and the execu- tion of it may be described as His just deed. He it is who has decreed, and takes care that the decree be exe- cuted, that, where men turn from Him to idols, their moral vision shall become dark and their moral taste false. Therefore, says St. Paul, both sins against personal purity and sins against social justice grew upon the pagan world as a direct and frightful penalty for its root sin of idola- trous departure from God, They " changed the glory of God into an image " — ^' wherefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness" — such uncleanness as dare not be explained in the clean ears of Christian men and women. Yes, " for this cause," he repeats ; because they exchanged the truth of God for the lie of creature- worship. It was " the recom- pense of their error which was due." Moreover, '^ even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, so God gave them up unto a reprobate mind," to be '* filled with all unrighteousness." The long dark catalogue of sins against society, sins of spite and fraud and heartlessness and in- humanity, with which St. Paul closes his dismal picture of heathen life as he knew it, might readily be paralleled, no doubt, by scattered instances drawn from Christian lands. But it is not the existence of envy, murder, or deceit which is cast up against heathendom, but the pre- valence of these and similar sins. It is that heathen society was full of them, to an extent which it is happily difficult for us to conceive ; that the moral sense of society had been by false religions so debased that the grossest sins awoke little notice and scarcely any censure ; that, in fact, men not only did such things but consented with those who practised them. Out of this analysis of the genesis and guilt of c 34 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. heathenism several points arise which carry with them a practical lesson. In the first place, St. Paul leaves it plain that, among the heathen, equally with Jews or Christians, the root sin of all and the secret of guilt lay in wilful unfaithfulness to such religious light as they had. The knowledge of God possessed by the heathen never was to be compared of course with that of men who enjoyed a positive super- natural revelation ; still, it was knowledge of the truth, so far as it went, and they were to blame for repressing it through unrighteousness. The nations chose to forget God. As generations passed, to be sure, the lies which grew up and became venerable covered out of sight every trace of that primitive but forgotten knowledge, and made it increasingly difficult for even the wisest heathen to find the true God, even supposing them to seek Him and feel after Him. One's heart grows very sore for those few noble lovers of the light, whose pathetic, hopeless yearn- ing for a purer faith amid the night of paganism, makes the darkness in which they dwelt only the more dark. Still, the testimony of God's works to God was not a testi- mony that spoke once and then was dumb. From age to age, in the ears of each new generation, the heavens and the earth had their old message to repeat. Nor could the wise and witty and ingenious pagan races have gone as they did, from bad to worse, into crasser superstition, into fouler indulgence, unless there had been a continual turn- ing away of the evil heart from such faint light as did shine, and a continual loving and choosing of the dark. The history of heathendom, old and new, is a history of deterioration; and the key to that deterioration is the prevailing bias of the human heart against God as He really and truly is. It ought never therefore to be forgotten, in the next THE NATUEAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. 35 place, tliat heathenism is not simply a misfortune in the world for which the bulk of men are to be pitied, but not blamed. It is a crime — a huge, next to world-wide, age- long crime, with its roots in a deep hatred of God, and bearing a prolific crop of utterly inexcusable and hideous vices. To prove this is the very end for which the passage is introduced by St. Paul. His object is to exhibit the absolute necessity for the Gospel as a divine revelation of a new way to be saved. So far as the great majority of our race — its pagan portion — was concerned, man was sunk deep in sin, out of which his own religion could so little extricate him, that it was just his own self-chosen religion of lies which had plunged him deeply into it. Apart from the Gospel there is neither salvation nor any hope of it for mankind. Heathenism at least has none to offer. We need to remember this in order to guard ourselves against that shallow and very modern liberalism which thinks all religions respectable and loves to extol heathen virtues as a set off to Christian pretensions. We need to remember it that we may adequately admire the patience of Eternal Justice, which has borne through long ages with the ceaseless insults of polytheism against God, with the self-degradation of the idolater, and with the unspeakable iniquity perpetrated in the name of religion. We need to remember it, above all, that we may have our compassion more profoundly stirred over those vast popu- lations who to this very hour sit, where they have always sat, in " the region of the shadow of death," amid the "gross darkness'' which covers the nations. I say "our compassion." To be convinced that the worship of idols and false gods is a sin which loads the worshipper with guilt and paves the way for other sins : — this does not make the heart less pitiful or less eager to deliver our brothers. On the contrary, it is the latitudinarian theory ^6 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. which thinks that we have a deal to learn from paganism, and that pagans run as fair a chance of heaven as we do, which really steels the soul against pity and chills missionary zeal. No : to feel that heathen rites are a standing outrage against the Most High; to burn for His honour who is dethroned that dead men and brute beasts and fictitious monsters may take His place; to have one's spirit stirred, like Paul's own at Athens, because the fairest and most populous regions of the globe are still wholly given to idolatry ; to realise that heathenism to-day means as much as ever the apostacy of souls from God, the darkening of human hearts, the turning of men into fools, the abandonment of whole races to vile afiec- tions ; and to remember with an awful horror of soul that for these things God will bring men into judgment : this is not to quench charity and humanity (God forbid !), but rather to enkindle in the soul a consuming, unappeasable compassion ; such a compassion as in every age has made of earnest men missionaries and martyrs, and has taught the heralds of truth and mercy, with yearnings like those of God's missionary Son and a self-sacrificing love kindled at His own, to endure all things for the elect's sake, that they may obtain salvation. But for the signal grace of God to our fathers in send- ing to these shores His Christian Gospel, we had been to-day part and parcel of heathendom. He alone has made Englishmen to diSer. The responsibility on us is not just a responsibility for the faithful use of Christian light and Christian grace, lest having had the greater privilege we end by incurring the greater guilt. No, not that only — though all heathendom, from Pekin to Patagonia, should rise in judgment to rebuke us. But on us there lies the tremendous obligation to give what we have received and as we have received; to pity as we have been pitied, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PAGANISM. 37 teacli what we have been taught, and by God's help save others — we who have been saved ourselves. What do I say ? " The tremendous obligation ! " Ought I not to have said, the supreme privilege and blessedness? that for sake of which England is, and for sake of helping in which it is worth while to be an English Christian? Verily, to us of all nations has been entrusted a steward- ship of the Gospel. Woe unto us if we preach not the Gospel ! But what shall be our honour and reward, if English adventure, English commerce, and English gold, prove to be pioneers or aids to English Christianity, in its task of bringing light to those *'dark places of the earth" which are full to this hour of "habitations of cruelty ! " ( 38 ) CHAPTER IV. THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. "Wherefore thou art without excuse, man, whosoever thou art that judgest : for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thj^self ; for thou that judgest dost practise the same things. And we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against them that practise such things. And reckonest thou this, man, who judgest them that practise such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God ? Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repent- ance ? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God ; who will render to every man according to his works : to them that by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and incorruption, eternal life : but unto them that are factious, and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that worketh evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Greek ; but glory and honour and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek : for there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law : and as many as have sinned under law shall be judged by law ; for not the hearers of a law are just before God, but the doers of a law shall be justified : for when Gentiles which have no law do by nature the things of the law, these, having no law, are a law unto themselves ; in that they shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience beai-ing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them ; in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ. But if thou bearest the name of a Jew, and restest upon the law, and gloriest in God, and knowest his will, and approvest the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the law, and art confident that thou thyself ai't a guide of the blind, a light of them that are in darkness, a correcter of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having in the law the form of knowledge and of the truth ; thou therefore that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself ? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal ? thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery ? THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 39 thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou rob temples ? thou who gloriest in the law, through thy transgression of the law dishonourest thou God ? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles, because of you, even as it is written. For circumcision indeed profiteth, if thou be a doer of the law : but if thou be a transgressor of the law, thy circumcision is become uncircum- cision. If therefore the uncircumcision keep the ordinances of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be reckoned for circumcision ? and shall not the uncir- cumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who with the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of the law ? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly ; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh : but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly ; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter ; whose praise is not of men, but of God."— Rom. ii. TN order to lay a basis for liis exliibition of the Gospel as -*- the revelation of a novel and mucH-needed way of justi- fication for sinful men, St. Paul has undertaken in this section of his letter (i. 18 to iii. 20) to show that as yet no existing faith or religion among men had succeeded in saving them from condemnation; that in truth, the previous history of religion, both among pagans and among Jews, had been a revelation only of divine anger against sin, since all the light which either the religion of Nature or the religion of revealed Law could shed upon the moral wastes of humanity, was a light that rebuked, exposed and judged, not a light that cleared or justified the sinner. So far as the heathen nations were concerned, St. Paul has traced their religious development in the latter half of the first chapter. He has taught that even pagans learned enough from the unassisted lessons of creation to have kept them in the worship of the true God had they faithfully used their light; that poly- theism and idolatry were the result of a culpable refusal to walk by the teachings of natural religion, or to honour God so far as they knew Him ; and that those unmen- tionable vices with which heathen society was stained, with the social disintegration which marked the Empire, 40 THE GOSPEL ACCOEDING TO ST. PAUL. were a natural and rigliteons retribution for such per- version of truth. Paganism therefore had run its down- ward course to the bottom. In it was to be found no salvation. Such light as it possessed served only to ^'reveal the wrath of God against the unrighteousness of men." From this melancholy sketch of the Gentile nations and their religious history, St. Paul turns his eyes to that solitary people which formed in his day an antithesis to paganism. It was the boast of the Jew that he alone lived in the light and walked in the way of righteousness. To this tribe of Hebrews, set in the focus of contend- ing empires and divinely guarded through two thousand years of noble ancestry, God had given what to the rest of the earth had been denied, the aid of supernatural teach- ing. To them God had discovered Himself, not by obscure inference from the visible creation, but by plain speech and miraculous acts and a whole economy of elaborate instruction. The unity, the spirituality, the justice, the holiness, the glory of the Divine Being had been burnt into the faith of Israel by many a fiery lesson. They knew His will. He had set before them a way of life. He had given them His " Law." For He had not only summed up all ethical duties in the Ten Words — that was but the kernel of the Law given by Moses — He had minutely prescribed every religious and social obligation, whether of a personal or of a national character. The due observ- ance of these was believed to commend each Israelite to Jehovah's favour, and to constitute his passport into the everlasting kingdom of the just. The Temple ritual might be cumbrous and costly. The Levitical rules might interfere in a multitude of vexatious ways with the free- dom of private life. The singularity of his manners might expose every travelled Jew to perpetual remark and not a THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 4 1 little derision. No matter ; these things were his pride ; because they marked his selection by Jehovah for excep- tional honour. They sealed him as a favourite of Heaven. They were the path which led him to the paradise of saints, to the life everlasting. Himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews, St. Paul's early training had made him the last man to underprize the privileges of his race. His conversion to Christianity had not abated by one jot the grateful pride with which he looked back upon the ancient glories of his nation. But one thing he had discovered at his conversion. His eyes had been opened to see — and the sight made the whole world new to him — that " the Law " was not, and never could be to any Hebrew, a way to righteousness. In the possession of that Law, and in the keeping of it, he saw his fellow-countrymen pursuing, as they fancied, after righteousness with God, acceptance in His sight, and a life of glory and reward at last. They were doing with infinite zeal, and some of them with unsuspecting assurance, precisely what he himself had done before God opened his own eyes — building their hope of everlasting life on their Jewish birth and on a punctilious attention to the formalities of Jewish law. If they were right in that, then his Gospel of gratuitous acceptance through trust in Christ was a superfluity and a mistake. But the test of the Jews' pretensions lay to hand, in the facts of Jewish life. Did the morals of his countrymen, then, fit them to stand before the righteous tribunal of eternal justice? Had they so kept their boasted Law as to attain by it to practical righteousness ? Let the observa- tion of the Roman world reply. The appeal is a rough and ready one — fit for the occasion. In his own case, to be sure, Paul's Hebrew life had been outwardly pure. Like a good many of his nobler contemporaries, especially 42 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. among the Palestine scHools, lie could accuse himself of no patent vices. If he had learnt how impotent was an external law to secure inward purity, it had only been through the hidden working of evil desire within his soul. Here, however, he is writing to a community familiar with foreign Jews resident in a heathen city — resident in that city where of all others upon earth the basest elements from every land flowed together to make one another worse : and he could appeal to the observation of Eoman Christians whether the Jews of Rome were not as bad in morals as any pagan — nay, whether the very name of Jew had not come to be on Gentile lips a word of opprobrium and reproach. I proceed to analyse with a little more detail this care- ful and remarkable piece of reasoning, by which, through a whole chapter, St. Paul labours to convict his country- men of lying under the same righteous judgment for sin as the heathen, in spite of their boasted possession of the Law. It takes the form throughout of an argumentative address directed against an imaginary opponent. The inspired advocate for the Gospel has before him an ideal or typical Jew, who concentrates in himself the most characteristic features of Jewish life as they presented themselves in the Apostolic age. This typical Jew is a confident, conceited and censorious bigot, who makes a great deal of his superior enlightenment as one of the instructed nation. On the strength of his knowing what is right so much better than the heathen, he sets himself up as the judge of his heathen neighbours. He is severe on their profligacy, idolatry and dishonesty. He clearly sees that over Gentile sinners there impends a fearful doom for their evil lives. But though not a whit purer THE PEACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 43 in morals than they, it never occurs to him to apprehend any real or impartial judgment of God on his own evil life. From that he deems himself secure on the ground of his national privileges, as a pure-blooded, circumcised child of the covenant. He bears on his flesh, as he thinks, a seal or pledge of his own hereditary exemption from that strict reckoning and appalling retribution at the hands of eternal justice, which he is not slow to predict against the uncircumcised nations of the outside world. At the root of such a state of mind as this, there must always lie, though it may be unconsciously, a feel- ing that God is partial in His judgments. The first thing, accordingly, on which St. Paul lays anxious stress is this : — (l.) The judgment of God according to men's works is just, inevitable and impartial (verses 2-1 1). It is a judg- ment according to works which the Jew ought, on theory, to challenge. For he seeks to be saved by a " law " — that is, by a thing to be done. If he is to be justified at all, it must be through the coincidence of his life with that rule of living which God gave to his nation and on which he plumes himself. That very sign of the covenant in his flesh in which he trusts, is a pledge on his part that he will keep the Law. His reliance, therefore, is not on divine mercy, but on divine justice. Yet he forgets that the same justice which he invokes or denounces against the heathen sinner must, to be justice at all, smite him equally who is an equal sinner (ver. 3). Every one knows, even without any special help from revelation, that the judgment of God against the evil-doer is " according to truth," true to the facts (ver. 2) ; and His judgment is inescapable and uni- versal. It is true that it is a deferred judgment. We do not yet see, in this present life, nor so long as this present 44 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. era runs shall we ever see, the return which the tremen- dous Judge and Vindicator of all is to render to the actions of men. That dies irce, which is to reveal God's righteous judgment, is meanwhile held back, impendent over the forgetful and unheeding earth. But it is surely putting a miserable misconstruction upon this delay, to think that delay means final escape ! This is to misread and to abuse the generosity of the Judge. Delay means forbearance and longsuffering. It comes of the rich goodness of His heart who would have no man to be lost, but would hold out to every one of us a place and a season for repentance. Each day the golden sun arises on this foul earth to look afresh upon its knavery and cruelty and profanity, and reaches its western bed without being blotted out of heaven by the no longer patient cloud of the Almighty's anger, is a fresh angel of goodness, summoning the spared race to repent, with the old urgent cry of divine solicitude and inextinguishable pity: "Why will ye die?" To harden one's soul in guilty impenitence just because God prolongs one's opportunity of repenting, or dream that judgment, long escaped, may be escaped for ever, is not only to "despise" the goodness of God, it is positively to turn it into a curse. It is to pile up against one- self huger and huger stores of wrath afc the back of that forbearance which now indeed banks them up in re- serve and holds them back from overflow, but which, once the day has come, will let them go, to repay with "tribulation and anguish" every soul of man that doeth evil (verses 4-9). This delay on God's part to judge is itself a hint that by his deeds no man can be saved. Its tendency and design are to lead towards repentance ; towards a con- sciousness of guilt, or even an evangelical despair of being justified by law, and a resort in consequence to that mercy THE PEACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 45 of God whicli justifies us through faith in Him. But if, encouraged by delay, a man continues impenitent, he pro- vokes or challenges the judgment according to his deeds. This judgment according to his deeds he shall have ; and it will be " without respect of persons." Impenitent men who have been alike in their deeds must be alike at last in their condemnation. (2.) So far St. Paul has merely been laying down an abstract theory of the divine impartiality in retribution. He has not yet spoken of the Hebrew " Law." He does not at first name Jew or Gentile.* He addresses his antagonist simply as a man who presumes to judge others for sins of which he himself is no less guilty. At this point, however, he begins to regard his reader as a Jew, separated from the unclean and ignorant heathen by his privileged standing under the Mosaic Law ; only, instead of recognising the difierence which this creates as telling in the Jew's favour, he unexpectedly turns it against him. It gives him nothing but a fatal pre-eminence in guilt and judgment. The Jew is right in believing that he and the pagan do not occupy one level. He is right when he claims priority over his heathen neighbours. Even when a Jew and a Gentile sin the same sins, they still hold a very different position in God's eye ; they stand under distinct categories. The Gentile sins " without law," as St. Paul puts it ; and the Jew " in the Law." f That is, every sin of the latter was committed within the sacred bounded circle of privi- leged Hebrew life, whose characteristic was that it was encompassed and overshadowed by divine legislation ; all, to its very details, cared for, prescribed, and hallowed by the express orders of Jehovah. In full knowledge of what * This is not done till ver. 9. f See ver. 12. dj'6/xws and iv vofiu). 46 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. Jehovali commanded and in defiance of every obligation to obey, the Jewish sinner sinned his sin. Whereas when a pagan sinner did the very same act, he did it outside of the Law, as a stranger to the light which God had cast on conduct and to the ties by which He had bound His people to duty. There was unquestionably a mighty difference between the same act done by these two men ; and to be impartial, judgment must take notice of that difference. So indeed it will. Judgment when it comes will respect the priority of the Jew. It will begin with him first. The higher platform on which he sinned will be the higher platform on which he shall be judged. The unhappy pagan offender had j ust enough of the rudiments of ethical duty written in his heart and attested by the accusations of his own conscience to leave him' indeed without excuse (verse 15). Condemned by that law which his own nature furnished to him,* he shall perish "without Law" of Moses. But the privileged citizen of that favoured polity, whose fence and boast was the divine Law given to Moses, must (to be fairly judged) be judged " hy that Law ; " by its clearer light, by its loftier morality, by its stricter requirements, by its more sacred and more awful sanctions. It is a miserable delusion, therefore, to fancy that the privilege of hearing God tell us our duty, lifts us above responsibility for doing it, or sets us beyond the reach of judgment for not doing it. Nay : it only confers on us, if we sin, a shameful pre- eminence in sinfulness, and, when we are judged, a fatal priority of condemnation. (3.) All through the present discussion, St. Paul has taken it for granted that the essence of criminality lies in unfaithfulness to known duty. Again and again he * Ver. 1 2 : iavTo7s halv vbjxo^. THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 47 lias let it appear tliat the divine judgments on human transgression repose on this principle that (as St. James puts it) : '' To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." On this principle he has explained the guilt of heathenism. It lay here, that when men " knew God, they glorified Him not," but " held down the truth in unrighteousness." On this principle he has described the aggravated criminality of those later pagans of the debased classical period, who, " knowing the ordin- ance of God, that they which practise " social enormities "are worthy of death, not only do the same but also consent with them that practise them." On the same principle, he now (ver. 17 ff.) turns that very knowledge of the Law on which his Jewish countryman relied, into a weapon against him : " Wherein thou judgest another thou condemnest thyself." We who look on the outside of human life, and see how unequal is the knowledge of duty possessed by different classes in society, but cannot see how far in any given case sin is the result of knowledge withstood and inward light quenched or refused, do not attempt to apply this rule to one another. So far as we are concerned, its true application as a test by which to measure the moral guilt of men must for the most part be left to that tremendous " day of revelation," when " God shall judge the secrets of men " by that accurate Searcher of motives and impartial Weigher of actions — Jesus Christ. It was otherwise with such persons as St. Paul had here in his eye, the typical Jews of his own age. For one thing, their sins were patent enough. That dispersion of the Hebrew race which was finally consummated at the fall of Jerusalem a few years after St. Paul wrote this letter, had begun as early as their captivity. It had been furthered by the conquests of Alexander and the wars of his successors. 48 THE GOSPEL ACCOEDING TO ST. PAUL. When Paul wrote it had made the Jew as familiar a figure in every great city of the empire as in Tiberias or Cesarea. Perhaps they were not the worst of the nation who migrated to foreign cities ; but they soon sank as a class to the lowest level. A vagrant life, association with the servile population of great towns, an equivocal position in the eye of Roman law, social exclusion from intercourse with Gentiles, the necessity of living by their wits and amassing bullion instead of stable property, these causes were already at work, creating that deteriorated type of Hebrew character which has long been fixed in Europe. From independent witnesses we know that the Jew was at that day the gipsy, the usurer, the fortune- teller, the pander, and the slave agent of the Roman world ; everywhere living on the vices of the heathen whom he despised ; one of the most restless, turbulent and despicable elements in that corrupt society. In the pages of Latin satirists and historians the Jew figures just as he does on this page of St. Paul. A thief, an adulterer, a trafficker in idolatrous gains, bringing Jehovah's name into contempt throughout heathendom ; the picture is dark enough (verses 21-24). This is what had come of Israel's religious privileges and ancestral glories. This was the upshot of its national attempt to attain to the righteousness of God by the works of " the Law." Ignorant of God's righteousness, or of any other way to justification but through their own merits, their religious history had worked itself out and the end wag this! An open rupture betwixt profession and per- formance, betwixt religion and morals ; on one side, a faith which was mocked by their life ; on the other, a life which was condemned by their faith. For while in morals they were a byword even to heathens, these same Jews of thd Dispersion were eaten up with religious self-importancej THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 49 and looked down upon heathens as outcasts and unclean. Your Jew considered all men who worshipped idols as " foolish " and " blind," mere " babes " in religious know- ledge, whom it was his mission to lead, to teach and to enlighten (verses 19, 20). Arrogant and bigoted zeal for proselytizing went hand in hand, therefore, with personal profligacy. It was nothing to be a cheat or a procurer to the basest passions ; it was everything to know the true God whom Gentiles did not know, to be circumcised into His covenant and instructed carefully in His Law in the Sabbath synagogue (verses 17, 18). Hearing the Law had parted company with the doing of it. Israel's glory had become the witness to Israel's disgrace. It would be a grave mistake to say that as Christians we hold in the modern world a parallel place to that of Israel in the world which Paul knew. St. Paul's contention is that the position of Christians is in some sense precisely the reverse. The Jew failed as egregiously as the pagan to attain to a justifying righteousness before God, because he possessed only a Law which gave him the knowledge of sin without giving any power to vanquish sin. Just b?cause the Law thus failed to justify or to regenerate mankind, does St. Paul produce, as with blast of a herald's trumpet, his Gospel of free acquittal by faith, a Gospel with a divine power in it to do what neither paganism nor Judaism did to save sinful men. It is when he has cleared the ground of earlier systems by demonstrating their prac- tical failure on the stage of history, that St. Paul intro- duces the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ. Christianity is something else than a new code of morals, replacing the old one. Kather, viewed as a mes- sage of salvation, Christianity is the antithesis of Judaism — ^the superseder and the substitute of its " Law." Having D 50 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. tried both the light of Nature and the better light of revealed Law, and proved itself incompetent to walk in its own strength, mankind is shut up to this humiliating result, that, unless we are saved by another strength and justified by another righteousness than our own, we can neither be saved nor justified at all, but must meet the day of judgment in our guilt. By grace, if at all, must men be saved ; and the salvation which is by grace is the discovery of Paul's Gospel. Yet it is possible for Christians so far to mistake the nature of their own Gospel as to take it, after all, for just another law of righteousness, like the Mosaic system. Christianity has its moral precepts too. It has its guarded circle of outward privilege. It has in the room of circum- cisioD, baptism, and for the Passover, the Eucharist, and for the synagogue, the Church. So that it is perfectly possible for us to pride ourselves on our exceptionally enlightened and privileged position as Christians, or to trust for acceptance before God to our Christian position, as the Jew trusted to his. But by the deeds of Christian law can a man be as little justified as by the deeds of Moses' law ; by baptism and the church as little saved as by circumcision and the synagogue. The Gospel is not a "law*' of life, but a message of pardon; not a thing to be done, but a word to be believed ; not salvation by privilege, but salvation by grace. It is Christ who saves, not our Christianity. Christ saves by what He does for us and in us, not by what He bids us do. And he is as little a Christian, as a Jew, who is one "out- wardly, in the flesh," in the word or names of things ; but he is a Christian who is one " inwardly," by the renewing grace of the Holy Ghost and that penitent trust for mercy to the meritorious passion of the Son of God by which we are made partakers in His resurrection life. Only THE PRACTICAL OUTCOME OF JUDAISM. 5 I when it is thus embraced and allowed full scope, can the Gospel be fairly tested by its results. Then it proves itself to be the "power of God unto salvation," by doing what no law of conduct taken by itself can do. "The ordinances of the Law are fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." ( 52 ) CHAPTER V. JEWISH OBJECTIONS REPELLED. "What advantage then hath the Jew? or what is the profit of circum- cision? Much every way: first of all, that they were intrusted with the oracles of God. For what if some were without faith ? shall their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God ? God forbid : yea, let God be found true, but every man a liar ; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy words, and mightest prevail when thou comest into judg- ment. But if our unrighteousness commendeth the righteousness of God, what shall we say ? Is God unrighteous who visiteth with wrath ? (I speak after the manner of men.) God forbid : for then how shall God judge the world ? But if the truth of God through my lie abounded unto his glory, why am I also still judged as a sinner ? and why not (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say), Let us do evil, that good may come? whose condemnation is just." — EOM. iii. i-8. T ET us remind ourselves how this passage enters into St. ^ Paul's reasoning. It has been seen in former chapters that he is engaged in paving the way for that method of acquitting and saving sinful men which God has re- vealed to us by His Gospel. In order to do this, he has undertaken to prove that the world needed a new path to righteousness, that all sorts of men are in point of fact condemned, and that no previous religion had availed to justify or save them. On the contrary, the practical outcome of existing religions had been a condition of excessive demoralisation all over the world ; and whatever religious light men possessed had done little else but expose and judge and sentence them for their practical abuses. That this was true of the pagan world he showed JEWISH OBJECTIONS REPELLED. 53 in the latter part of the first chapter. The second chapter has shown it to be no less true of the Hebrew nation. Against the favoured Jew he has made good this terrible indictment, that so far from his possession of God's revealed Law saving him from sin and judgment, that very Law only made his fall the more conspicuous, because it branded with deeper guilt those vices which had made the name of Jew a byword of opprobrium even on Gentile lips. Circumcision — the boasted badge of his nation — was no license to crime, neither could it justify a man whose life was evil. It rather bound him over the more to keep the law of virtue, and condemned him the more when he broke it. At this point, therefore, St. Paul seems to have estab- lished his case. He has " already proved both Jews and Gentiles to be under sin," and he might pass at once, one thinks, to his conclusion at chapter iii. 20 : " By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in God's sight." But no. Before he can proceed to that con- clusion there are two supplementary pieces of work to be done, (i.) His indictment against the Jew as a man still under condemnation for his sin, like any Gentile, lay open to an objection : that objection has to be repelled. (2.) It has also to be shown consistent with their own Hebrew Scriptures: that Scripture proof has to be adduced. These therefore form a couple of supple- ments or appendices to the argument of the second chapter. At present we have to deal only with the first of them : The objection repelled. The objection is this : " If it be true as you say that the outward badge of circumcision and the possession of the Mosaic Law do not really constitute a man a true 54 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. Jew, or give him any better standing before God than a Gentile — if, on the contrary, the Jew is to be tried for his faults and condemned for them just as though he were an uncircumcised heathen — then* what advantage has the Jew over a Gentile at all ? He has none." Or, to put the question still more sharply : " What is the good of being circumcised ? There is no good in it." f Such an objection as this was likely to arise in the mind of a Hebrew reader of this letter. It implied that St. Paul was proving too much. His argument appeared to place God's favoured people on a level no higher than other men occupied. Such disparagement of the chosen race was not only, in Paul's mouth, unpatriotic and unseemly, but in point of fact untrue. It was impossible to leave an objection like this in his rear, unsilenced. St. Paul replies to it. Before we proceed, however, to hear his reply, notice for an instant the fallacy which underlies all objections of this sort. It is a fallacy of the human heart. Men are always prone to fancy that any favour which God shows them must render it harder for Him to be quite strict or even impartial when He comes to judge them for their faults. People who are exceptionally favoured involuntarily feel as if their need for implicit obedience to God's law were rather less urgent and His judgments not so very much to be dreaded by them ; as if, in fact, God's goodness meant indulgence, and His selection of any one for special privilege meant favouritism. Here was the way in which that fallacy worked in the case of the Jew : " God has selected me and my fathers to be His peculiar, favoured, honoured people upon earth. He has worked wonders for us, spoken to us with His voice, * In iii. I, the ovv refers to ii. 28, 29, t tI implies a negative answer. JEWISH OBJECTIONS REPELLED. 5 5 shone among us by His presence, given us His Law, and fenced us about with a thousand promises of exceptional protection and love. We are His favourites, then, and He never surely can mean to call us to so rigorous a reckoning, or cast us off at last into the very same doom, as await the uncircumcised pagans who know Him not." One cannot be surprised that the Jew felt so, when one sees how people argue among ourselves. One says : "I don't think God can mean to be hard on me, or let me perish ; else why did He spare me to this age, pre- serve me wonderfully amid dangers, and fill my days with so much kindness ? " Another imagines that the elect who have gone through a proper conversion and become regenerate can hardly sin as other men do. Some have even fancied themselves such favourites of heaven that whatever they chose to do in the cause of God was above being censured like the acts of other men by a vulgar standard. There is in truth scarcely any limit to the distorting of the moral judgment, the infla- tion of religious conceit, the pharisaism and the Jesuitry of which men are capable when once you admit this fallacy, that the kindness of God to us gives us any claim upon His indulgence, or implies any willingness on His part to be a " respecter of persons." The answer of St. Paul to the objection of a Hebrew reader virtually exposes this fallacy. That objection was: "If being a Jew does not shield a man from the penalties of sin, of what advantage is it to him ? " Paul answers : Of much advantage, notwithstanding, in every point of view. Certainly it does not shield the Jew from the consequences of sin. But to be shielded from the consequences of one's sin is not the only benefit God can confer on a man. That might even be no benefit at all. Look at the position of a Jew as compared with a Gentile 56 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL. how you will, and it is one of vast and manifest supe- riority in respect of privilege, of opportunity, and of blessing from God. Only, when God confers such supe- riority on one sinful man over another. He is so far from exempting that man from responsibility for his sins, that He immensely increases his responsibility. The favours of God have the opposite effect precisely from that which the human heart fallaciously ascribes to them. Instead of entitling the select or favoured sinner to a less rigorous judgment or a more lenient sentence, they rather impose on him a weightier duty and deepen his condemnation if he prove unfaithful to it. Look, for example, at the superiority which God was pleased to confer on the Hebrew people. In what did that consist? Let us descend to particulars. It con- sisted, first of all, in this — that to them God entrusted His supernatural revelation, or holy oracles. While to the rest of mankind He spoke rarely, if at all, save in the indirect, obscure accents of reason and conscience or by the voice of Nature, to this one small select tribe in a corner of Syria God for centuries was sending by inspired prophets the fullest, plainest, most unambiguous and lumi- nous teaching about Himself, His will. His worship. His character, His merciful purposes, His destined redemption and the future of His kingdom. Why did God give all that wealth of revelation to the Hebrews ? Because He had a private partiality for them ? That they might plume themselves on being favourites and despise others? Or to encourage them to think He cared for no one but them- selves, and cared for them so much that they might act as they pleased ? Certainly not. Such egotistic, narrow pride in God's revelations as a compliment to their superior merit, or as a private boon to be kept to themselves, was always the weakness of the baser part in Hebrew society. JEWISH OBJECTIOXS REPELLED. 57 But larger and nobler Hebrews, like Paul himself, never forgot that tlie Jew had received the Scriptures, not for himself, but ultimately for the human race ; that the divine oracles were not a Jewish possession so much as a trust held by Jewish hands for the world's good ; and that the promises given to their fathers were to be fulfilled in One Who should be a ^' Light to lighten the Gentiles," as well as the '^ glory of His people Israel." To be thus the first receivers and the custodians for after time of so precious a deposit as the revealed Word of God, was surely something not to be vain of indeed, yet to profit by; one advantage which the Jew possessed over every Gentile. In any case it was a huge advantage. For even suppose (Paul goes on to argue) that Israel, or a good part of it, failed to profit by this possession of God's Word, did not understand it or believe it or use it aright, was in fact not at all the better for having it, did that make it no privilege to have received it ? Was it no kind- ness to have got it straight from heaven ? Or were the oracles themselves false and worthless simply because the men who held them in trust for the rest of the world chose to make a bad use of them ? Certainly not. God's oracles are true, whether you believe them or not. He is faith- ful if you are not.* Your incredulity cannot undo the credibility of a divine message, or hiuder it from being fulfilled, or make it a word of no value which it was of no consequence for you to hear. Nay. The privilege of receiving divine truth through divine oracles is a real privilege and a great privilege, and one to be accounted for, whether you use that truth well or use it ill. There was some profit in being outwardly a Jew, then, although, so far from relieving a man from blame if he rejected Jehovah's word, it rather added to his guilt. There is * Cf. dTL