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THE SPIRITUAL ORDER 
 
 AND OTHEK PAPEES. 
 
Edinburgh : Printed by Thomas and Archibald Constable, 
 
 FOR 
 
 EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. 
 
 LONDON HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 SELECTED FEOM THE MANUSCRIPTS 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 THOMAS EESKIKE OF LINLATHEN 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 EDINBUKGH 
 EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS 
 
 1876. 
 
PEEFATOEY NOTE. 
 
 The circumstances in which this volume is 
 given to the public call for some explanation. 
 
 Under the ever increasing infirmities of 
 very advanced age, its author was unable to 
 satisfy his own demand for unity and sequence 
 in the utterance of his thoughts, and while he 
 lived it would probably never have seen the 
 light. Yet he felt he had a message for his 
 generation, and he left it as his dying charge 
 that his papers should be put into such order 
 as was possible, that what was deemed suitable 
 might be published. 
 
 Nothing more than arrangement and selec- 
 tion has been attempted. It has been regarded 
 as a sacred duty to alter nothing and to add 
 nothing. Where a few words seemed ab- 
 solutely wanting they have been put within 
 
VI PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 square brackets. The only liberty taken, be- 
 yond verbal corrections, has been the occa- 
 sional suppression of a passage which seemed 
 more in place or better expressed elsewhere. 
 Several of these abstracted paragraphs have 
 been added as Fragments. 
 
 To those who feel their need of some help 
 amidst the perplexities of the age, the book is 
 offered with the confident hope that it will be 
 found to contain much very precious guidance 
 both for the spirit and understanding. 
 
 Edinburgh, May 1871. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE SPIEITUAL OEDEE, .... 1 
 
 II. THE DIVINE SON, .... 28 
 
 III. THE PUEPOSE OF GOD, .... 47 
 
 IV. THE BIBLE IN EELATION TO FAITH, . . 76 
 
 V. THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE 
 
 EOMANS, 100 
 
 FEAGMENTS :— 
 
 I. The Claims of Jesus, 
 II. " Blessed are the Poor in Spirit. 
 
 III. What is Eighteousness ? . 
 
 IV. Justification, 
 V. Forgiveness, 
 
 VI. The Gospel no Change in the Purpose of God, 
 VII. God's Purpose for us is Eighteousness, 
 VIII. The Meaning of Salvation, 
 
 IX. The Father Eevealed in the Son, 
 X. The Trust of Christ, 
 
 XI. Christ the Head or Eepresentative of Man, 
 
 231 
 233 
 234 
 237 
 238 
 241 
 242 
 243 
 243 
 246 
 247 
 
Vlll 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 XII. The Sacrifice which puts away Sin, 
 
 XIII. Life through Death, 
 
 XIV. The Death of Christ— Judas, 
 XV. Sin, 
 
 XVI. Innate Good and Evil, 
 XVII. The True Idea of "Natural Religion 
 XVIII. " By this shall all Men know that ye are my 
 Disciples," . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 250 
 251 
 252 
 255 
 
 257. 
 258 
 
 260 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 In the introduction to his Life of Jesus 
 M. Renan gives it as his opinion that Strauss 
 has written his book on the same subject too 
 much as a theologian and too little as an his- 
 torian. He may be right in his criticism ; yet 
 I cannot conceive that the subject could be 
 properly treated without a considerable intro- 
 duction of theological thought, and accordingly 
 it appears to me that the want of such thought 
 is a radical defect in M. Renan's own work. 
 
 The avowed purpose of the appearing of 
 Jesus on earth, and of all that he said and did, 
 was to proclaim " the kingdom of heaven " — 
 the supremacy and reign of God and of His 
 holy will — to call men to come into it and to 
 submit themselves to it, as their only escape 
 from sin and misery and confusion. That 
 
 A 
 
2 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 they might understand its nature, and how 
 much it was to be longed for, he revealed the 
 Father ; that is, he taught that God, the King 
 of that kingdom, was the loving righteous 
 Father of every man. This being the purpose 
 of his appearance on the earth, his life can 
 surely never be rightly understood apart from 
 this purpose, and from the very remarkable 
 way in which he carried it out. His life can- 
 not be separated from his teaching, and when 
 we say that his life has affected the world's 
 history more than any other life that was ever 
 lived in it, we mean that in what he ivcis, 
 interpreted by what he taught, a power lay 
 which produced these results. 
 
 That teaching had in it much that com- 
 mended itself to the reason and conscience of its 
 Jewish hearers, containing as it did the highest 
 and purest morality ; but this, though superior 
 in degree, was not dissimilar in kind to what 
 they had been accustomed to hear from the 
 old teachers of their nation. The peculiarity 
 of his teaching — the startling novelty of it — 
 the dissimilarity in it to anything which they 
 had ever heard before, consisted mainly in 
 certain claims which he made for himself; 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 3 
 
 in a claim to be not a son of God but the 
 Son of God, and in a claim to be the 
 Head and Lord and Saviour of men. I say, 
 claims which he made for himself; and yet 
 his own constant explanation of them was 
 that in making them, he was not seeking his 
 own glory but revealing the Father, not only 
 His fatherly character and purpose towards 
 men but His relation to them, and this with 
 a living fulness unattainable in any other way. 
 This is what M. Eenan in the first place 
 condemns as " self-preaching," and then sum- 
 marily puts aside as incredible because super- 
 natural. He evidently considers that the moral 
 teaching of Jesus constitutes the substance and 
 essence of Christianity, and that it would have 
 been really a better and purer thing had it 
 been unmixed with those " visionary personal 
 pretensions." Though the fourth Gospel is 
 almost exclusively occupied with this self- 
 preaching, and though there are few chapters 
 in the other three in which it does not appear, 
 he yet passes over this distinguishing feature 
 of the teaching without any earnest attempt 
 to explain it ; for we cannot give such a name 
 to the mere suggestion that Jesus had in his 
 
4 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 own mind so completely identified himself with 
 his moral teaching that he felt as if he were 
 only inculcating it when he spoke of himself, 
 that he was but repeating the precepts of the 
 Sermon on the Mount, when he said i( I am 
 the true Vine," or " I am the Bread that came 
 down from heaven." This is evidently impos- 
 sible and unreasonable ; it would be more true 
 to say that he considered all his teaching as 
 summed up in the exposition of his own per- 
 sonal relation to God and man — and thus 
 that he identified his teaching with his per- 
 sonality — than that he identified his personality 
 with his teaching. He is the Vine, and it is 
 only by abiding in him that we can bring 
 forth spiritual fruit. He is the Bread that 
 came down from heaven, and it is by feeding 
 on him that the soul is nourished unto eternal 
 life. He is the Shepherd of the sheep ; he is 
 the Door through which alone they can enter 
 into the fold. 
 
 " The Father judgeth no man, but hath com- 
 mitted all judgment to the Son, that all men 
 should honour the Son even as they honour 
 the Father." "Before Abraham was, I am." 
 These are high claims ; yet, though pressed and 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 5 
 
 insisted on continually, they were always as 
 I have said accompanied with a protest that 
 in making them he was not seeking his own 
 glory but was revealing the Father — that he 
 was dependent on the Father for all things — 
 that he knew nothing and could do nothing of 
 himself — that it was the Father dwelling in 
 him who did the works — that he had not 
 come of himself, but that the Father had sent 
 him — and that no man could come to him 
 except by the drawing of the Father : thus 
 showing that his self-preaching was no self- 
 exaltation but a real revelation of the Father, 
 because holding him forth as the Author and 
 Mover of all that he, the Son, did. Moreover, 
 these claims are made in such a truthful un- 
 exaggerated unboastful tone, in a tone of 
 such entire conviction and of such perfect 
 mental soundness, that no reasonable man 
 can feel himself entitled to throw them away 
 without the deepest consideration, and in fact 
 rarely does throw them away without a lurk- 
 ing suspicion that there is something in them 
 which has as yet escaped his intelligence. 
 
 However incredible these claims might 
 appear to M. Kenan, yet surely when he 
 
6 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 undertook to write the Life of Jesus he 
 was bound to examine whether Jesus really 
 made them ; and, if he did, to consider what 
 purpose he could have had in making them. 
 But he does nothing of the kind ; he neither 
 expresses any doubts as to their having been 
 made by Jesus, nor does he attempt to give 
 any explanation of them beyond that most 
 unsatisfactory one to which I have referred 
 above. He does not accuse Jesus of being 
 either a fanatic or a deceiver ; on the contrary 
 he expresses the highest admiration for him 
 both morally and intellectually ; he thinks him 
 "the best and wisest and greatest man that 
 ever lived." Now is it not strange that he 
 does not make some serious attempt to under- 
 stand what this best and wisest and greatest 
 man could have meant when he made such 
 claims for himself? It has been said that 
 even the mistakes of great men would repay 
 examination by suggesting some truth which 
 they were aiming at but had missed. And 
 surely one would have expected from the his- 
 torian of Jesus, especially from one who ex- 
 presses such admiration of him, that he would 
 to the utmost of his ability have investigated 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 7 
 
 and analysed a mistake, if mistake it be, which 
 has had such an influence on the world, and 
 which has taken such a hold on the minds of 
 men ever since its first promulgation. 
 
 But M. Renan does not believe that there is 
 anything reasonable in theology, and therefore 
 does not give himself what he would deem the 
 fruitless labour of seeking for it. He doubtless 
 received his earlier conceptions of Christianity 
 from his Church in blind and unquestioning 
 submission, and was taught to occupy himself 
 with the detail of its observances, and the ex- 
 ternal authority on which it was founded and 
 by which it must be defended, rather than 
 with its actual spirit and meaning. And 
 when he subsequently rejected it, he probably 
 did so not because he had studied it and had 
 detected some unreasonableness or inconsis- 
 tency in the principles developed in it, but 
 simply because it pretended to be supernatural, 
 and he had laid it down as an axiom that no 
 such pretension could be admitted. In fact 
 he knew nothing of Christianity but its beauti- 
 ful morality and its miraculous pretensions. 
 The first he could and did admire, not perhaps 
 in its full sense but at least in an aesthetic 
 
8 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 fashion. The last appeared to him simply a 
 manifestation of the ignorance and prejudice 
 of the period, to which Jesus felt himself 
 obliged to yield. 
 
 If he had so studied the Christian morality 
 as to perceive that it consisted in qualities 
 which could not be called forth by any 
 amount of mere effort — in filial love and trust 
 towards God producing all other goodness — 
 he would have expected to find in Christian 
 theology (supposing it to be logically con- 
 sistent) such discoveries of the character of 
 God and of His relation to man as would, 
 when believed, naturally and without effort 
 call forth such trust and love ; and this ex- 
 pectation might have induced him to examine 
 these claims of Jesus in the hope of finding 
 such discoveries laid up in them. Had he so 
 examined them he would have found that they 
 not only make these discoveries, but also open 
 up a view of the constitution and organization 
 of that spiritual order, the existence of which 
 Christianity affirms ; a view which, however 
 wonderful, is perfectly coherent with the moral 
 system, and with all that our reason and con- 
 science recognise in God. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 9 
 
 I will venture to say that until this con- 
 sideration has been given, Christianity has not 
 really been understood. I believe that the mani- 
 festation of self-sacrificing love on the part of 
 God is its distinguishing feature, and is neces- 
 sary as the only sufficient ground of that 
 absolute trust which lies at the root of the 
 Christian character; and I believe that it is 
 only in the history of Jesus, taken in connec- 
 tion with these supernatural claims, that this 
 self-sacrificing love is fully declared. 1 If we 
 once catch a glimpse of a real meaning 
 in these claims — if we once arrive at the 
 conviction that there must be relations con- 
 tained within the Being of God which may 
 have their interpretation in them, and if we 
 see how all this subserves the revelation of the 
 Father — our confidence in the veracity of that 
 noble and reverend character will help us on- 
 ward to a firmer grasp, a fuller apprehension 
 of the mystery. 
 
 It would have been a light to M. Eenan 
 had the thought suggested itself that a 
 man would be helped in his endeavours to 
 be patient under sorrow or suffering of any 
 
 1 Appendix A. 
 
10 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 kind, if he not only saw that such patience 
 was a duty, but if he moreover accepted the 
 doctrine that it was a loving Father who had 
 appointed his lot, and who had a loving and 
 wise purpose to accomplish by it. If starting 
 with this discovery M. Kenan had looked for 
 a similar meaning in all doctrines, he might 
 have been guided to the conclusion, that 
 as a man cannot have the feelings of a good 
 citizen nor fulfil the duties of one until he is 
 in some measure acquainted with the traditions 
 and constitution of his country and his own 
 place in it ; as he cannot enter into the feelings 
 befitting the member of a family nor fulfil the 
 duties of one until he learns the composition 
 of the family, its traditions, and his own place 
 in it ; so if he belongs to a spiritual order he 
 cannot acquire the feelings and character 
 suitable to it, nor can he rightly fulfil its 
 duties, until he is instructed in its constitution 
 and history and his own position therein. 
 
 But are we really justified in assuming that 
 there is a spiritual order to which as human 
 beings we belong, and that we are capable of 
 apprehending it \ I believe that few of those 
 who are likely to look into this book will feel 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 11 
 
 any doubt as to this ; yet I think it well to 
 give the ground on which my own belief of 
 it rests, without pretending either to demon- 
 strate my view, or to refute that of others. 
 
 It seems to me then that the conscious 
 demand within us for an inward goodness — 
 for right feelings and intentions as well as 
 right actions — always implies and supposes 
 the existence of a spiritual order, or cosmos, 
 to which we ourselves belong, and of which 
 that inward goodness is the law. So far as 
 mere social order is concerned, my morality is 
 sufficient if I abstain from actions which injure 
 society, and am diligent in the performance of 
 actions which benefit it. But the conscious- 
 ness of an obligation to possess and exercise 
 moral qualities within my own secret heart, 
 such as humility, purity, sincerity, and disin- 
 terested love to all men, refers me to an entirely 
 different kind of order. These qualities do 
 not seem necessary to a mere outward order ; 
 it could go on without them. They are 
 spiritual qualities, and must belong to a 
 spiritual order ; and the consciousness that 
 they are obligatory, and essential to my well- 
 being, even more than the acts connecting 
 
12 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 me with the social order, proves both that 
 a spiritual order does exist, and that I belong 
 to it still more essentially than I do to the 
 other. I belong to both, but the spiritual is 
 the deeper ; it underlies the other, and is inde- 
 pendent of it ; yet the two are not uncon- 
 nected, for I find that I cannot perform any 
 ordinary social act in a way which satisfies my 
 conscience unless it is also done according to 
 that spiritual order. 1 
 
 Christianity assumes that this spiritual order 
 exists, and that all men belong to it ; and 
 whilst in its precepts it declares the duties 
 of its members, it gives in its theological 
 doctrines such a discovery of the nature and 
 constitution of this order as may consciously 
 and powerfully influence those who apprehend 
 
 1 The natural world is full of orders or systems composed of 
 parts which when separated from their order lose all their 
 meaning and power. Thus a tree is composed of branches and 
 twigs, which, while they continue in their proper relation to 
 it, bear leaves and flowers and fruits ; but lose this power 
 when separated from it. Their vitality does not reside in 
 themselves but must be received moment by moment from 
 the root, and thus their vital completeness depends on 
 the continuation of their healthy connection with the tree. 
 Our spiritual completeness or incompleteness depends on the 
 same principle, namely, the maintenance of relation to our 
 order. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 13 
 
 its reality, and thus qualify them for the per- 
 formance of all duty. 
 
 If we belong to an order we must, as I have 
 said, know something of its nature before we 
 can be in a position to fulfil its duties ; we can- 
 not fulfil its duties without entering into its 
 spirit, and we cannot enter into its spirit with- 
 out knowing something of its nature and of our 
 relation to it. This is, to a certain extent, true 
 of all orders, but some are more organically 
 constituted than others ; that is, more con- 
 nected with the very roots of our being, more 
 like the relation of the branch to the vine, 
 which, being absolutely essential to its life, 
 necessarily embraces all its living actions. 
 Thus, though a man cannot really fulfil the 
 higher duties required of a citizen unless he 
 is well acquainted with the constitution and 
 traditions of the state, he may still, in a retired 
 and private station, pass muster, so to speak, 
 although his knowledge be very slight. But 
 it is otherwise with the family order ; for evi- 
 dently, if he does not know his father and 
 mother or his brothers and sisters, he cannot 
 pass muster ; he will be constantly committing 
 blunders and proving himself at every turn 
 
14 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 unfit for the duties of his place. The reason 
 of this difference is that the family relation is 
 a more intimate one than the political, and 
 makes more demands on the heart and inner 
 life. But our relation to the spiritual world 
 is the most inward and intimate of all our 
 relations, and must therefore be the most 
 organic. Much of the life of a family-man 
 will be spent in pursuits of his own, uncon- 
 nected with the family and requiring none of 
 the family vitality in order to their being 
 rightly carried out. Still more is this true in 
 respect to citizenship. Whereas, as members 
 of the spiritual order, we can do absolutely 
 nothing right in thought, word, or deed, unless 
 we do it in the life of our order and under the 
 influence of our conscious relationship to it. 
 For our relation to the spiritual order means 
 in truth our relation to God, in whom and by 
 whom we live, and without whom we can 
 exercise no function of life either mental or 
 physical ; so that, not by any conventional or 
 arbitrary appointment, but in very deed and 
 in actual reality, we are dependent on Him at 
 every moment, and our relation to Him has 
 no interruption and no limits. Our con- 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 15 
 
 scious moral nature proves this relationship to 
 ns, "those thoughts which wander through 
 eternity " prove it ; and although we belong 
 also to an outward superficial order, and have 
 a life suited to it into which we can for a 
 time so entirely throw ourselves as to shut out 
 the thought of the higher order, yet we cannot 
 put it from us ; we belong to it essentially, and 
 our chief good and ill must at all times be 
 connected with it. 
 
 The theological part of a religion then only 
 really commends itself to our reason when it has 
 a true efficient correspondence with the precep- 
 tive part ; that is, when it gives such a repre- 
 sentation of the relation in which God stands 
 to us as may have a direct tendency to pro- 
 duce in us that character which the preceptive 
 teaching inculcates. When therefore we meet 
 with a distinctive peculiarity in the preceptive 
 part of a religion, we ought to expect some- 
 thing in its theological teaching which may 
 correspond to it as its living root. 
 
 The coherent relation of the doctrines of 
 Christianity to its moral precepts, and the 
 dynamic efficiency of the doctrines in produc- 
 ing sjoontaneous obedience, and thus working 
 
16 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 out the Christian character, is one of the most 
 striking evidences of the truth of Christianity. 
 In fact its philosophy — its reasonableness — 
 consists in this relation ; just as the evidence 
 of the Newtonian theory consists in the rela- 
 tion of the law of gravitation to the orbits and 
 movements of the planetary bodies. It is 
 therefore only in the light of this relation that 
 the doctrines have any true meaning, or are 
 supported by any proper evidence. 1 
 
 When we first awaken to the evil of sin, 
 it seems to us that our business is to resist it 
 in its manifestations, such as self-occupation, 
 indifference to the feelings and interests of 
 others, covetousness, etc., but we soon find 
 
 1 The idea that anything is imposed on us by Christianity 
 to be believed just for belie ving's sake, so to speak, and with- 
 out any reference to the disclosure it makes of the niind of 
 God towards us, or to its moral bearing on our character, 
 must have a tendency to produce either infidelity or supersti- 
 tion. Accordingly, I cannot but think that the time-honoured 
 use of creeds, in which all the articles of belief are crowded 
 together without the smallest indication of their purpose, must 
 have a very questionable tendency for many minds ; espe- 
 cially when the idea is suggested, as in the Athanasian Creed, 
 that there is a merit in believing that which to our reason ap- 
 pears incredible, and that our believing certain dogmas is 
 the arbitrary condition on which God will bestow on us eternal 
 life. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 17 
 
 that the effect of all direct efforts to resist 
 such tendencies is limited to the suppression 
 of their outward actings, whilst the tendencies 
 themselves remain as strong as before. The 
 preceptive teaching of the Sermon on the 
 Mount cannot be obeyed by mere effort, how- 
 ever sincere and however earnest, because it 
 requires something more than the repression of 
 evil actions aod the performance of good 
 actions ; it does not merely forbid the out- 
 break of pride and vanity and selfishness ; it 
 requires inward humility, inward purity, in- 
 ward love of God and of men, even of our 
 enemies. Now, I am quite conscious that by 
 efforts of self-restraint I can, at least to some 
 extent, prevent the expression and outcoming 
 of evil, but I am equally conscious that I 
 cannot command the presence of the opposite 
 spiritual qualities. I cannot, for example, by 
 any effort love those who are hateful and de- 
 spicable, although I may control every expres- 
 sion of dislike. I cannot make myself humble 
 in heart and pure in heart. I cannot cast out 
 the spirit of covetousness, or ambition, or 
 vanity. I may see that it would be right and 
 most desirable to do so ; but I can no more 
 
 B 
 
18 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 do it than I can command midnight to be- 
 come mid- day. 
 
 A principle of love — a living love, the 
 opposite of selfishness — is the only power which 
 can enable me to be inwardly what I feel I 
 ought to be, and to give free and spontaneous 
 submission to all the demands of my conscience ; 
 yet love is a power which I cannot create or 
 command within myself, which must come to 
 me, if at all, from some outward source. I am 
 thus brought to the conclusion that I am not 
 complete in myself — that I have not within 
 myself the means of being what I feel I ought 
 to be — that I require a help, beyond what I 
 find either in my reason or conscience, to 
 enable me to be what both reason and con- 
 science call on me to be. Surely then there 
 must exist some means of escape from this 
 incompleteness. Moreover it seems to me that 
 the self-condemnation inseparable from the 
 consciousness of incompleteness, even while 
 we feel that we have striven against it with 
 our best endeavours, is really a declaration 
 from the Author of our being that such a 
 means does exist, and that we are wrong when 
 we are not possessing and using it. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 19 
 
 It has often appeared to me remarkable that 
 we should have this self-condemnation for 
 faults and defects which belong to us, not by 
 our own choice but sometimes by the very acci- 
 dent of birth, as much as the colour of our hair 
 or any other physical peculiarity ; yet the laws 
 of our spiritual being do compel us to condemn 
 ourselves for them notwithstanding. 
 
 Is there righteousness in such compulsion ? 
 Is it reasonable that I should be self-condemned 
 for not being what with all my might I have 
 endeavoured to be ? The only way in which 
 I can justify to my own mind this instinctive 
 self-condemnation is by realising that I am a 
 creature of God, dependent on Him for my 
 existence both natural and spiritual, and that 
 He has so constituted me that the conscious 
 recognition of this dependence is absolutely 
 necessary to the rightness of all my moral 
 and spiritual doings, not by any arbitrary 
 appointment nor as a mere homage due to 
 Him, but because this dependence is a great 
 reality through the recognition of which I am 
 brought into the conscious and continual ap- 
 prehension of that love of God from which all 
 my love must be derived. 
 
20 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 Evidently this dependence, which belongs 
 to me necessarily as a creature, is no defect, 1 
 but is the real relation through which alone all 
 spiritual good can come to me; and when I 
 apprehend that through my consciousness of 
 it my Creator and loving Father calls me into 
 an uninterrupted fellowship with Himself, I 
 can realise that He does not intend that I 
 should feel it as a weakness or a bondage, but 
 on the contrary as a strength, and an honour, 
 and a joy ; indicating, as it does, the nearness 
 and dearness of my relation to Him. 2 I can 
 now acknowledge the justice of this instinctive 
 self-condemnation, because I see that I am 
 myself shutting out the love which can alone 
 fulfil the law so long as I act as if I were self- 
 
 1 I have sometimes thought that those who composed the 
 prayer of confession in the beginning of the Genevese Liturgy 
 had forgotten this great principle. In that formula the wor- 
 shippers are taught to say, — " Nous confessons, que nous sommes 
 de pauvres pecheurs, nes dans la corruption, inclins au mal, 
 incapables, par nous-mimes, de /aire du bien." The expression 
 seems to indicate that they would have thought themselves in 
 a better condition if they had been " capables par eux-m&mes 
 de faire du bien." The authors of the prayer probably meant 
 merely to express their sense of man's dependence on God for 
 the power of doing well, and had no conception that the words 
 in their natural sense seemed to express a regret that this was 
 his condition. 
 
 2 Appendix B. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 21 
 
 existing or self-sufficient, so long as I en- 
 deavour to do by the mere force of independent 
 volition, what I can only do by an influence 
 received from God moment by moment, the 
 influence, let me call it, of spiritual gravita- 
 tion. 
 
 Suppose a planet gifted with intelligence 
 and volition, on the strength of this gift 
 emancipating itself from the law of gravitation 
 — it would soon find that all its sweet order and 
 harmony were gone, and that its independent 
 efforts to perform its revolution could not do 
 the work of a centre of gravity. Its complete- 
 ness consists in the maintenance of its relation 
 to this centre, without which all goes wrong. 
 
 Man's conscience, used rightly, is the organ 
 of his relation to the great spiritual Centre, 
 and the channel through which the guiding 
 and sustaining influences of that centre are 
 communicated to him ; but when he attempts 
 to use it independently — to obey the light of 
 conscience without recognising the sun out of 
 which its light comes, and thus to sever himself 
 from his true centre — he is made to feel that 
 independent effort cannot do the work which 
 conscience requires. That work is loving spon- 
 
22 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 taneous work, and there is no love of the kind 
 to be had in the universe except in that centre. 
 There therefore he must seek and find it, for 
 love alone can give him rightness and order 
 and blessedness. 
 
 It is not a chart of its course which a planet 
 needs to keep it in its orbit, but a centre of 
 gravity and a law of gravitation. The planet 
 has its proper centre imposed on it, and is 
 kept by an irresistible necessity in its orbit, 
 without any need for its own concurrence 
 or co-operation. Man also has his proper 
 centre, but as he is a voluntary being he 
 must choose it for himself, it cannot be im- 
 posed upon him. As God is the true eternal 
 centre of his spiritual life, for whom and in 
 whom he was created, so, by the law of his 
 being, while he remains in his true relation to 
 Him every thing that he does will necessarily 
 be right, and when he separates himself from 
 Him every thing will necessarily be incomplete 
 and defective. He does need a chart of his 
 course : in the first place perhaps to teach 
 him that he cannot follow its guidance by 
 independent effort, and secondly that, by 
 comparing the course he is pursuing with his 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 23 
 
 chart, tie may be in a condition to judge 
 whether he has chosen the right centre and is 
 obeying the true law. But it is in our rela- 
 tion to God, rightly observed, that our whole 
 strength lies, so that in casting off His rule 
 we really cast off the power of being right ; 
 and thus, though endowed with will, we are, 
 in this respect, under a law of necessity. 
 
 " Our wills are ours to make them Thine." 
 
 We cannot be right by a direct effort of will, 
 but only by adhering, in the exercise of that 
 will, to our true centre ; that is, by dependence 
 on God. So that the proper action of the 
 human will is to choose the right centre. 
 
 But how are we to learn to make this right 
 choice ? By becoming acquainted with our 
 spiritual order, that is, (translating the ex- 
 pression into life) by learning to know God, 
 that so we may trust Him fully and love Him 
 fully. And we must know Him, not only as 
 One whose righteousness we can understand 
 and entirely approve, but also as One who loves 
 us and whom we can love ; for love is the only 
 completeness, and love can be called forth only 
 by a Being whom we can approach and know 
 and love. We cannot love a law or an abstrac- 
 
24 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 tion, nor can we love a Being whose mind and 
 purposes towards ourselves we cannot appre- 
 hend and trust. 1 It is only by the discovery 
 of this knowability and accessibility in God's 
 nature that we can really learn to love Him, and 
 it is only through love that the mere sense of 
 duty — the desire to be right — can be developed 
 into the spontaneous love of right ; and until 
 this development takes place, we remain in 
 our incompleteness. 
 
 In order to feel assured that we are right in 
 requiring this character in God, we have only 
 to consider what His love has to do in us. In 
 the first place, we must find in it a real joy — 
 a satisfying portion — which, by filling the de- 
 sires of our hearts, will elevate us above the 
 cravings of ambition and sensuality and covet- 
 ousness and vanity. For the seductive power 
 of these propensities lies in the assurance which 
 they offer to our imaginations of a present 
 gratification to be derived from yielding to 
 
 1 I believe that those who insist most strongly on the im- 
 portance of ascribing personality to God really mean this. The 
 term itself seems to the logical intellect to imply limitation, 
 which is perhaps the reason why some are so much opposed to 
 the use of it. I would not dispute about a word, but I am per- 
 suaded that the whole spirit and power of Christianity are 
 contained in the thing lohich is meant by the word. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 25 
 
 them ; and it is only by knowing and possess- 
 ing a purer and more abiding joy in God that 
 we can successfully resist them. We may with 
 our whole souls condemn and fight against 
 them, nay even despise them, but until that 
 place in our hearts which they seek to occupy 
 is already better filled, we are never safe from 
 their assaults. Moreover, we must find a power 
 in His love which will enable us actually to 
 love those who are unloveable — whom our 
 very consciences condemn — but who yet as 
 human beings have a claim upon our love ; 
 that is, we must find in His love a fountain 
 out of which our own hearts may be ever 
 replenished with the same love. 
 
 Now how is this to be accomplished ? Why 
 thus : We know how unworthy we ourselves 
 are of God's love, yet He loves us ; for 
 His is a love which is not repelled by un- 
 worthiness, but seeks to deliver from un- 
 worthiness, and to make all men worthy. 
 That is its nature. It is a righteous love 
 which ever seeks to communicate itself. Well, 
 He loves me in my unworthiness, and He 
 loves my hostile brother as He loves me, 
 both of us in our unworthiness ; and His pur- 
 
26 THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 
 
 pose is to make us worthy of His love and of 
 each other's love ; and His will for both is that 
 we should know this as His purpose and co- 
 operate with Him in carrying it out. He 
 invites me to ascend by that ray of love which 
 comes to me from His heart, and from that 
 central heart, in the light of its love, to see 
 and to appreciate and to love my brother. 
 
 Evidently, such love as this can only be 
 called forth by a personal Being; that is to 
 say, we cannot so love a law or an abstraction. 1 
 For surely the satisfying object of man's 
 conscience can never be a mere rule or standard 
 of right which only shows him his duty, but 
 must be a living power which will enable him 
 to reach that standard. 
 
 1 It may at first sight appear that a love possessing this per- 
 sonal character, though it may be more powerful and efficient 
 than the simple and unmixed choice of abstract right, is for that 
 very reason necessarily less pure, but I believe that there can 
 be no such thing as an abstract righteousness, that it is really 
 impossible to separate the idea of righteousness, from the idea of 
 a living will ; and that, therefore, God — the living righteousness, 
 and not any such abstraction — is the true object of man's con- 
 science. God is not merely a Being who is righteous, but the 
 very being — the living and personal fountain — of righteousness. 
 The Greek teachers speak of to dUaiop, " righteousness," but 
 the Hebrew Scriptures always speak of "the righteous One." 
 This last, I believe, is the truest philosophy as well as the only 
 religion. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ORDER. 27 
 
 Thus man never finds his right place in the 
 spiritual world until he not only sees and 
 approves the way of righteousness, but until 
 the object of his conscience becomes also the 
 object of his trust and love ; in a word, until 
 he finds God, and discovers that the kingdom 
 of heaven is the kingdom of his Father. 
 
 Li by*- j^iAxW,-- 
 
 !; 
 
II. 
 
 THE DIVINE SON. 
 
 Man being the chief work of God with 
 which we are acquainted, his education — his 
 moral and rational development — is the highest 
 purpose of God that we can conceive. But 
 the existence of such a purpose implies the 
 existence of that in the nature of God which 
 is necessary to its accomplishment, for we 
 cannot suppose that if it exists it will remain 
 unaccomplished. Yet it must remain for ever 
 unaccomplished, unless God is a Being who 
 may be known, One who attracts and draws 
 forth the trust and sympathy and love of the 
 creature made in His image. 
 
 And if this knowledge of the divine nature 
 is necessary to the education of man, we are 
 prepared to find that it has been communi- 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 29 
 
 cated to him in such a way as to distinguish 
 it from the products of his own mind, and 
 mark it as coming direct from God. If a man 
 felt that he had wrought out the true idea of 
 God and of the spiritual order by his own 
 faculties, it would be to him a philosophy in 
 which he took an intellectual interest rather 
 than a religion which dominated his spirit. 
 Abstract thoughts can never sink into the 
 heart of humanity, and can give rise only to 
 the dogmas of a school, not to a religion for 
 the race. 
 
 Evidently such a revelation, being thus es- 
 sential to God's chief purpose, is not merely 
 not incredible, but on the contrary is in the 
 highest reason to be looked for ; and whatever 
 its form may be, it must in its substance be 
 supernatural, being a revelation of God ; and 
 yet it ought not to be considered preterna- 
 tural, being only the coming forth of a higher 
 nature. 
 
 Any one who really apprehends the superi- 
 ority of the spiritual over the material is pre- 
 pared to believe that the natural laws which 
 reign in the world of matter, such as gravi- 
 tation, electricity, and chemical affinities, 
 
30 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 belong to a lower order; and that underlying 
 and overruling these are the true eternal laws, 
 which can be nothing else than God's own 
 mind and character, — His wisdom, love, and 
 righteousness. There is therefore no reason 
 to be astonished if, in that greatest work of 
 educating spiritual intelligences, those outward 
 laws give place to the deeper, especially when 
 the object to be attained is the communica- 
 tion of the knowledge of Himself. 
 
 Christianity, though a divine revelation, did 
 not profess to reveal — and did not in point of 
 fact reveal — anything which has not a response 
 in man's spiritual intelligence, and of the truth 
 of which his reason and conscience cannot 
 judge ; so that we are never left entirely de- 
 pendent on external authority for any of its 
 statements. These statements refer to relations 
 in which we actually stand to God and to the 
 spiritual world. It does not make the relations, 
 it only calls our attention to them ; we are 
 created in them, they enter into the very sub- 
 stance of our spiritual organisation, so that 
 there must be a consciousness of them within 
 us, dormant and torpid perhaps, but capable 
 of being awakened and quickened by the pro- 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 31 
 
 per application. In fact, these communications 
 could never enter into us nor influence us, 
 unless there were in our original constitution 
 a capacity for apprehending them, through 
 the possession of faculties and instincts cor- 
 responding to the relations to which they 
 refer. 
 
 This principle will be readily admitted in 
 reference to the doctrine of the existence of 
 God, and of His relation to men as a loving 
 righteous Father, by many who would yet 
 hesitate to admit that they have actual grounds 
 in reason and conscience, apart from all autho- 
 rity, for believing in the claims of Jesus to be 
 the Son of God, and to be the Head and 
 Lord and Saviour of men. 1 
 
 I believe that the fatherly relation and pur- 
 
 1 Those of my readers who know the essay on the Incarnation 
 in the series of Tracts for Priests and People are already ac- 
 quainted with the tram of thought here developed. As I read 
 that essay, it commended itself to my mind as one of the most 
 important contributions to theological science which had been 
 made in our day. And if I may "Judge of its author's feelings 
 by my own, I believe that he will be gratified by finding that 
 any other person had independently been led to the same con- 
 clusions. I had from an early period learned to see how the 
 character and mission of Christ met the needs of men, but I 
 always felt the just demands of my reason unsatisfied until 
 I saw how that character and mission were really implied in 
 the Divine Nature itself. 
 
32 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 pose of God towards men is the fundamental 
 revelation of Christianity, and that all other 
 true doctrines can only be explanatory and 
 illustrative, or corroborative of it. The loving 
 purpose of God to educate men into a moral 
 sympathy with Himself and with one another, 
 is the light which I require to see in a religious 
 doctrine, in order that I should believe it. I 
 must see a reasonableness in it, that is, I must 
 see that it harmonises both with the nature 
 and character of God, and with man's spiritual 
 needs and instincts. Now, do I see such a 
 reasonableness in the doctrine of the divinity 
 of Jesus Christ ? I think I do, to this extent, 
 that I am sure there must be a distinction in 
 the Divine nature analogous to that of Father 
 and Son, whether Jesus be that Son or not, 
 and I shall endeavour to explain my concep- 
 tion, praying the reader to give me his calm 
 and unprejudiced attention. 
 
 What, then, is Jesus Christ 1 We have been 
 taught to answer, He is the eternal Son of the 
 Father. But what do these words mean % 
 What is the meaning of the eternal Son of the 
 Father f We ought surely to ask this ques- 
 tion, for we must be sure that if Christianity 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 33 
 
 is a revelation of God, every part of it, espe- 
 cially so marked a feature in it as this, must 
 have a meaning most important for us to under- 
 stand, because it is connected with the character 
 of God and our relation to Him. 
 
 Jesus himself proposed the question, What 
 think ye of the Christ ; whose son is he ? 
 The hearers did not seem to understand its 
 importance, and he did not press it ; but by 
 putting the question he has left it as a legacy 
 to all generations, and we are not justified 
 in passing it by or remaining satisfied with a 
 merely formal answer. Christ preached him- 
 self even more than he preached duties, as 
 if the knowledge of him were really the effi- 
 cient power by which alone duties could be 
 performed. 
 
 But is there anything, apart from this self- 
 preaching, which could guide us to the idea of 
 there being a Father and a Son in the Divine 
 nature ? I would answer : Amongst the 
 thoughts concerning God which necessarily 
 present themselves to our minds, a very promi- 
 nent one is that He is the living Fountain of 
 goodness — that all goodness is in Him, and 
 that there is no goodness which is not in Him. 
 
 c 
 
34 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 If we take the word, " None is good, save One, 
 that is God," as the declaration of an absolute 
 truth, then wherever we see goodness we ought 
 to consider it as belonging to Him and flowing 
 from Him, and as a manifestation of His 
 presence. 
 
 But in following out this principle, we are 
 conducted to consequences which we may at 
 first feel some hesitation in admitting. There 
 is a goodness in trust, as there is a goodness in 
 trustworthiness ; there is a goodness in receiv- 
 ing, as there is a goodness in giving ; there is a 
 goodness in obeying rightly, as there is a good- 
 ness in ruling rightly. Most assuredly these 
 are both forms of goodness, but shall we say 
 that they both exist in God ? Shall we say 
 that obedience and submission and gratitude 
 and trustful dependence can be predicated of 
 Him, or shall we say that though these quali- 
 ties are good in the creature they are incon- 
 sistent with the sovereignty of the Creator ? 
 If we come to the latter decision, we at once 
 admit that there may be goodness which has 
 not its source in God. I am persuaded that 
 the highest and truest reason will adhere to 
 the principle that there can be no goodness of 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 35; 
 
 which God is not the proper fountain. And 
 if so, we must also admit that for every active 
 form of goodness in God there is a correspond- 
 ing recipient form ; consequently that there 
 must be in the divine nature distinct person- 
 alities representing these two forms, otherwise 
 there could be no possibility either of their 
 exercise or of their manifestation in Himself 
 apart from the creature. 
 
 It is true that both these classes of qualities 
 may and often do exist in one and the same 
 person : thus the most generous giver will often 
 be the most grateful receiver ; but they cannot 
 be in correlative activity in one person : a man 
 cannot be grateful or obedient or trustful to 
 himself ; above all, he cannot have sympathy 
 with himself. Now if it be granted that the 
 very nature of God is Love, and that love 
 necessarily seeks sympathy, shall we not feel 
 that it is even absurd to suppose that, in conse- 
 quence of His unity, God should not have that 
 sympathy within His own nature, and that He 
 should be, as it were, compelled to create in 
 order to have it? And is there not a real 
 relief in the doctrine of the Eternal Sonship as 
 a deliverance from the thought of a God whose 
 
36 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 very nature is love dwelling in absolute soli- 
 tude from all eternity without an object of 
 love ? I am aware that the answer to this 
 suggestion will be that we make a God after our 
 own image, and then reason on our own crea- 
 tion. But if we were intended to know God 
 and to live in relations with Him (and that 
 we are, the history of the race, as well as each 
 man's consciousness, abundantly testifies), it is 
 impossible to arrive otherwise at any idea what- 
 ever of God. The only goodness and the only 
 intelligence that we can conceive of are human 
 goodness and intelligence, and we are obliged 
 just to expand these into infinity when we 
 would form to ourselves an idea of God. 1 And 
 seeing that we are constrained by reason to 
 acknowledge that all goodness must be in 
 God, we ought not to refuse the suggestion 
 that there must be, as it were, two hemispheres 
 in the Divine nature, — upper and under, active 
 and passive, Giver and Eeceiver, Father and 
 Son. Unity is not singleness but rather com- 
 pleteness, and love can only, by minds like 
 
 1 But when we have done this, is it possible for us to believe 
 that this idea is merely the creation of our own minds, and not 
 an eternal reality that has revealed itself to us ? It is assuredly 
 an eternal reality. 
 
THE DIVINE S0NSHIP. 37 
 
 ours, be considered complete when it has 
 sympathy. 
 
 This idea of God as comprehending both the 
 active and the passive of all goodness, dis- 
 tinguished by the personalities of Father and 
 Son but united in one common Spirit, seems 
 to me to give the perfect conception of love 
 and of blessedness in love ; and when we add 
 the idea that the spiritual creation stands in 
 the Son, we have the assurance that it also is 
 intended to be included in that fellowship of 
 love. 
 
 This conception of the eternal relation of the 
 Son to the Father has a remarkable agreement 
 with the language of our Lord, which indeed 
 is otherwise scarcely intelligible ; for he not 
 only says, 'il and my Father are one," but 
 also. "My Father is greater than I," which 
 last cannot mean merely that though as God 
 he was equal with the Father yet as man he 
 was inferior, for of this inferiority there could 
 be no possible doubt ; it required no messen- 
 ger from above to tell us this. But we did 
 need a Divine teacher to help us to look into 
 the very nature of God, and there to see an 
 eternal Giver and an eternal Eeceiver of all 
 
38 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 the fulness of God. "When St. John wrote 
 " God is Love," he was no doubt contemplat- 
 ing the Divine Father pouring out the eternal 
 treasures of His love and wisdom into the all- 
 embracing and all-sympathising capacity of 
 the Divine Son, who receives it not for himself 
 alone, but as the Head and First-Begotten of 
 the whole creation. 
 
 The idea of the Fatherhood of God was pre- 
 sent in most of the ethnic religions, and is im- 
 plied in all the Old Testament Scriptures ; yet 
 it is clear that even the Jewish people regarded 
 God rather as a Sovereign — a Lawgiver and 
 Judge — than as a Father. It remained for the 
 gospel of Jesus Christ to make this revelation. 1 
 There can be no full and perfect revelation of 
 Fatherhood but in and through Sonship, and 
 thus the revelation of an eternal Son in the 
 Divine Nature itself, — a Son in whom the 
 whole spiritual family has its root and stand- 
 ing, — gives an assurance of the unchangeable 
 fatherly relation of God to man which nothing 
 
 1 In fact, the universal Fatherhood of God is the real scope of 
 the gospel ; but this Fatherhood will be a mere honorary title 
 till we realise that we are created in the Son, that so we may 
 be actual partakers with him in the filial relation to his and our 
 Father. 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 39 
 
 else could have given. And the appearance 
 on earth of this eternal Son — one with the 
 Father and the express image of his person — 
 in our nature, bearing all our burdens with a 
 love which tasted death for every man, and 
 with a filial confidence in the love of Him 
 who imposed the burdens which never failed, 
 this was the highest conceivable manifesta- 
 tion of the trustworthiness of the Father. 
 When we think of this Bemg as possessing 
 all wisdom and all power, we can rejoice to 
 know that He is our God, the Maker, the 
 Sustainer, the Appointer of all things. We 
 can feel assured that He must create only for 
 good, and that especially when He creates 
 moral intelligences, it must be with the pur- 
 pose of bringing them into a participation of 
 that same eternal sympathy. 
 
 Now let us think what the right place must 
 be for such moral intelligences to occupy. If 
 they are created to be good, and if there is no 
 goodness but of God, surely their goodness 
 must be that of the Son, — loving and sym- 
 pathising obedience, trustful dependence, a filial 
 will entering into and adopting the purpose 
 of the Father ; and their capacity of goodness 
 
40 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 must consist in the indwelling of the Son, 
 whose presence in them both confers on them 
 his own filial relation to the Father and con- 
 muni cates to them the character of his own 
 goodness. Thus we see how Christian morality 
 rises out of and is dependent on Christian theo- 
 logy ; and how those precepts which direct the 
 doing of the most ordinary actions of humanity 
 have, according to the Christian theory, their 
 root in these claims of Jesus. 1 
 
 There seems to have been a preparation in 
 the Jewish mind for the idea of a Son of God ; 
 that is, they seem to have believed that there 
 is such a being, although their conceptions on 
 the subject were extremely vague. What are 
 ours? 
 
 It has been my purpose all along to show 
 that any doctrine which is received simply on 
 authority and not because we see its truth, is 
 not rightly received ; and I have maintained 
 this, not with the desire of elevating man's 
 confidence in his own understanding, but be- 
 cause it seems evident that until the truth of 
 a doctrine is apprehended by, and actually 
 comes in contact with, the spiritual under- 
 
 1 Appendix B. 
 
THE DIVINE S0NSH1P. 41 
 
 standing, it cannot with propriety be said to 
 be believed, and cannot rightly influence the 
 character. Does this principle hold good in 
 reference to our belief of the Divine nature or 
 proper Deity of Christ, or must this doctrine 
 at all events be received simply on the authority 
 of an external revelation \ I have often won- 
 dered at the large and general acceptance 
 which it has met with ; and I have asked my- 
 self whether this acceptance was due to a blind 
 and unreflecting following of authority or 
 whether there is some deep principle in our 
 nature which responds to it and welcomes it 
 as that which satisfies its craving. I am per- 
 suaded that the last explanation is true ; for 
 assuredly there is a demand within us to see 
 on the throne of the universe a Being who can 
 sympathise with us, and with whom we can 
 sympathise ; assuredly the consciousness of 
 sin makes us welcome a Mediator — a " Days- 
 man" — seated there, partaking both of the 
 nature of Him from whom we have been alien- 
 ating ourselves, and of our own, and in whom — 
 the true Son of Man — we may draw near to the 
 Father. I am also persuaded that those who 
 have profitably received this doctrine have 
 
42 THE DIVINE S0NSHIP. 
 
 always seen some light in it, even when they 
 could not have said very distinctly what that 
 light was, and that none have ever really be- 
 lieved in the Divine nature of Jesus and in 
 his relation to men, who have not first seen 
 there that which has helped them to know and 
 trust and love the Father. 
 
 Moreover, they have felt that men are not 
 intended to be mere separate units but to form 
 an organised body, and that they must have 
 a Head uniting them both to God and to each 
 other, and therefore partaking of both natures. 
 This seems indeed to be an instinctive convic- 
 tion of the human mind, manifesting itself in 
 the hero-worship which has kept its ground 
 amidst all the risings and fallings of religious 
 opinion. Men feel that they need one in 
 whom they can glory, and to whose guidance 
 they can trust themselves — one who has known 
 their wants and weaknesses and transgressions, 
 and is able and willing to sympathise with 
 them. In all ages these needs have been felt, 
 and it seems as if this sense of need had pre- 
 pared men to welcome one who should appear 
 with such pretensions. We may venture then 
 to say, that, even apart from all authority, we 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 43 
 
 have reason to believe that there exist in the 
 Divine nature these personalities of Father and 
 Son ; and the light which this fact throws on 
 the whole conception of the spiritual world, 
 and of man's place in it, and relation to it, 
 shows us that the revelation of it is no super- 
 fluous information, but is of the highest im- 
 portance in the moral and spiritual education 
 of man. For this discovery of the Son seems 
 to open to us the structure of the spiritual 
 world ; it helps us to understand its organisa- 
 tion, and to see that its unity arises out 
 of the principle of trust or recipiency, — the 
 loving, dependent recipiency of the Son. 
 
 The almighty and all-wise Father is the 
 ocean-fountain in which all goodness is trea- 
 sured up, that goodness being a righteous 
 love which ever seeks to communicate itself ; 
 the Son receives out of the fulness of the Father, 
 and communicates of that fulness to the whole 
 spiritual creation. The spiritual creation con- 
 stitutes the body of the Son, its countless 
 individualities going to make up the organs 
 and members of that body in all its fair pro- 
 portions. For he is "the beginning of the 
 creation of God," the point, so to speak, in the 
 
44 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 Divine nature from which the creation pro- 
 ceeds. And as he is himself essentially the 
 Truster, the Believer, the Eeceiver from his 
 Father, so he is on that account the fit channel 
 of the life and Spirit of God to the whole 
 spiritual order ; his presence in each individual 
 of that order giving it its filial relation to the 
 Father, and its consequent capacity of receiv- 
 ing out of the fulness of God. 
 
 It appears to me that the chief difficulty 
 in the way of admitting the claim of Jesus 
 of Nazareth to be the Son of God is sur- 
 mounted when we have arrived at these con- 
 clusions. For surely if this revelation was to 
 be made on earth at all, the place for it was 
 the land of Judea, the land where dwelt that 
 old Semitic tribe to which the true idea of God 
 as a teaching Father had been given as an in- 
 heritance from the beginning. Where could 
 that idea receive so fitly its culminating per- 
 sonal development as in the land where it had 
 been so long guarded as a sacred deposit, and 
 where, as it passed along the glorious line of 
 patriarchs and lawgivers and psalmists and 
 prophets, it was always associated with the 
 prediction and expectation of One who was to 
 
THE DIVINE SONSHLP. 45 
 
 be the seed of the woman, despised and rejected 
 of men, but who nevertheless should finish 
 transgression and make an end of sin, and 
 bring in an everlasting righteousness, and be 
 called the Mighty God, the Father of the Ever- 
 lasting Age, the Prince of Peace ? 
 
 Unquestionably also the personal character 
 of Jesus gives a great support to the truth of 
 the claim which he makes for himself. As we 
 read these simple biographies of him, we in- 
 stinctively feel that he was God-like, and when 
 he makes it, we are certain he has no selfish 
 end in view ; the revelation of the Father and 
 the accomplishment of his will in the salvation 
 of men are his sole objects, so that there is 
 absolutely nothing in him to turn him aside 
 from truth. He is indeed so wise, so good, so 
 pure, so holy, so perfectly calm and unexcited, 
 at once so human and so free from every 
 human frailty, so clothed moreover with that 
 mysterious majesty which impressed all who 
 came in contact with him — and which continues 
 to impress ourselves — as the seal of God authen- 
 ticating all that he said and did, that we seem 
 to be shut in, by reason and conscience, by 
 reverence and highest instinct, to accept the 
 
46 THE DIVINE SONSHIP. 
 
 claim which he makes for himself to be the 
 Son of God — the Lord and Saviour and Head 
 of man. And it is indeed a claim which we 
 may well accept with thankful joy ; for though 
 at first sight it appears to be for himself alone, 
 yet on examination it proves to be a claim on 
 behalf of every human being to be the child 
 of God. 
 
III. 
 
 THE PUKPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 When I endeavour to conceive what a true 
 religion ought to be, it seems to me that it 
 must consist mainly in an explanation of my 
 own conscience and my own life : for it is 
 through my conscience or spiritual sense that 
 any intimations come to me that I have rela- 
 tions and duties and interests beyond this 
 visible world ; and it is in my life that I feel 
 the continual battle going on between the 
 claims of that higher order of things and the 
 pressing demands of sense and selfishness. 
 Now, when I attentively consider what is 
 going on in my conscience, the chief thing 
 forced on my notice is that I find myself 
 face to face with a purpose — not my own, 
 for I am often conscious of resisting it — but 
 
48 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 which dominates me, and makes itself felt as 
 ever present, as the very root and reason of 
 my being. If it be objected that this con- 
 sciousness is a mere result of education and 
 that the uneducated man has it not, I answer, 
 Education, it is true, is required to develop or 
 educe it, but does not implant it any more 
 than it implants a capacity for music. Had I 
 grown up without mental culture the thought 
 might not have suggested itself to me, but 
 when it is suggested, I recognise it at once as 
 a true description of the history of my highest 
 being. 
 
 This consciousness of a purpose concerning 
 me that I should be a good man — right, true, 
 and unselfish — is the first firm footing I have 
 in the region of religious thought ; for I cannot 
 dissociate the idea of a purpose from the idea 
 of a Purposer, and I cannot but identify this 
 Purposer with the Author of my being and 
 the being of all things, and further, I cannot 
 but regard His purpose towards me as the 
 unmistakable indication of His own character. 
 I am sure that He must be Himself what He 
 calls on me to be ; and if He is really good, I 
 can trust myself and the universe in His hands. 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 49 
 
 This is my first true conception of God. So 
 long as I draw my conception of Him from 
 the works of creation alone, I think of Him 
 as a Being of infinite power and skill, but I do 
 not get near to Him ; I do not apprehend the 
 object He is aiming at in myself and in my 
 race by placing us in this strange conflict, 
 and surrounding us by all these wonderful 
 works ; I do not understand the meaning of 
 human life, so full of varied interest, so full 
 withal of apparent failure and real suffering. 
 But when once I come to feel that God has a 
 purpose to make me good, I can also appre- 
 hend that the events of life may be the 
 education which He uses for this end ; and 
 the conviction that this is His desire is pressed 
 on me through the action of my conscience, 
 for I find Him there at every moment insist- 
 ing that I should conform my will to His in 
 thought, word, and deed. 
 
 In this endeavour to confirm my hold of a 
 personal relation between God and man and 
 of His personal dealings with man, I find 
 myself helped by realising my own personal 
 individuality. I belong to a race and nature 
 comprehending all human beings, yet I feel 
 
 D 
 
50 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 myself to be different from them all, and to 
 require a treatment and guidance special to 
 myself. God sees and knows me as a work 
 of His own hands, altogether distinct from 
 all His other works. He intends me to fill 
 a place which no other creature can fill, and 
 is dealing with me in accordance with this 
 special individuality. Thus I feel myself, as it 
 were, alone with God. He only fully under- 
 stands me, and He meets my need, according 
 to His full understanding of me, by a course 
 of circumstances chosen for my own personal 
 education by His fatherly love and wisdom. 
 It seems to me that He meets my actual con- 
 dition at each successive moment, so that I do 
 not feel as though I were put under a law in 
 order to undergo a certain process, but as 
 face to face continually with One who is 
 watching every change that comes over my 
 spirit as much as if He had nothing else to 
 care for in the universe, and who varies His 
 dealings with me in accordance with these 
 changes. He is thus my God and Father as 
 well as our God and Father ; and the con- 
 sciousness of my own personality seems neces- 
 sarily to involve belief of His personality. 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 51 
 
 In saying I believe that God has created 
 me with the purpose of training me into the 
 participation of His own righteousness, I only- 
 say what I am sure every one who atten- 
 tively considers the meaning of the voice of 
 conscience within him must agree with. Evi- 
 dently He whose presence that voice indicates 
 is most earnest that we should be righteous. 
 I am sure of this, notwithstanding all the diffi- 
 culties arising out of the actual circumstances 
 of life. 
 
 The fact also that man possesses capacities 
 both moral and intellectual which require de- 
 velopment seems to suggest that education must 
 have been the purpose of his creation, however 
 much there may be in the spectacle of the world 
 around us making this very difficult of belief. 
 There is indeed but small appearance there of 
 anything like a divine purpose of education. 
 The capacities of human beings can only be 
 rightly or fully developed in what may be 
 called fortunate or favourable circumstances, 
 yet when we look around we see many — indeed, 
 the majority of human beings — placed in 
 circumstances which appear most adverse to 
 anything like moral culture. "What can we 
 
52 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 say of the educational prospects of the popula- 
 tions outside of the Christian pale, or even 
 of the greater number of those within it ! 
 What can be said of the lanes and closes of 
 our own large towns, but that they seem fitter 
 to train men in vice and profligacy than in 
 spiritual goodness ! The great masses of the 
 population appear to have their mental and 
 moral capacities overpowered by the pressure 
 of physical want or the craving for sensual 
 gratification, and of those who are raised 
 above this abject condition how many are 
 taken up with merely selfish pursuits, with 
 the desire to procure wealth or power or 
 pleasure or ease ! 
 
 Such facts are strange enough, and in 
 the face of them I could hardly adhere 
 to the belief that there is really a divine 
 purpose of love brooding over these strange 
 scenes, did I not also believe that there is 
 no haste with God. The fact moreover of 
 the existence of a moral sense within man, 
 which makes him always feel that he ought 
 to be better than he is, outweighs to my 
 reason all these difficulties. This moral sense 
 is certainly the distinguishing and character- 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 53 
 
 istic feature of humanity, clearly indicating 
 the purpose of the Creator that it should finally 
 modify and control the whole man. And 
 surely we ought not to judge of God's purposes 
 by what we actually see accomplished in man, 
 so much as by the indications given in the 
 potentialities and capacities which have been 
 bestowed on him, and which in their develop- 
 ment may change the whole state of things. 
 We are evidently in the midst of a process, 
 and the slowness of God's processes in the 
 material world prepares us, or ought to prepare 
 us, for something analogous in the moral world ; 
 so that at least we may be allowed to trust 
 that He who has taken untold ages for the 
 formation of a bit of old red sandstone may 
 not be limited to threescore years and ten for 
 the perfecting of a human spirit. 
 
 I am satisfied that the moral sense which 
 my Creator has placed within me must indicate 
 His own character. He must Himself possess 
 that righteousness which He calls for in me. 
 And if so, is He not calling for sympathy when 
 He calls for righteousness 1 And may I not 
 therefore feel assured that it is Love which 
 has given me my being, and that the purpose 
 
54 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 of my loving Creator must be to make me 
 capable of knowing His love and of return- 
 ing it 1 
 
 I feel that I am continually thwarting His 
 purpose concerning me, and yet that he never 
 ceases urging it. What is the meaning of 
 this urgency ? It is evidently the urgency 
 of One who desires that I should sym- 
 pathise with Him, — that I should think and 
 feel as He does ; and what can it be but love 
 that thus desires sympathy 1 The God who is 
 Love cannot allow me to separate myself from 
 Him. He is a jealous God, marking and con- 
 demning every obliquity but only with the 
 purpose of delivering from it ; and when I 
 understand his meaning my desire will always 
 be according to that right prayer, " Search 
 me, Lord, and know my heart, try me and 
 know my thoughts, and see if there be any 
 wicked way in me, and lead me in the way 
 everlasting." 
 
 The assurance that the righteous Creator 
 can never cease to desire and urge the righteous- 
 ness of His creature is the eternal hope for 
 man, and the secure rest for the soul that ap- 
 prehends it. For if this be His purpose for 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 55 
 
 one, it must be His purpose for all. I believe 
 that it is His purpose for all, and that He 
 will persevere in it until it is accomplished 
 in all. 
 
 When I speak of education, let me not 
 be supposed to mean merely the progres- 
 sive development of the race through suc- 
 cessive generations. I mean the education of 
 every individual of the race. Historically it 
 is not always true that successive generations 
 improve upon each other. We often find them 
 not only stationary but retrogressive. If we 
 regard God as caring only for the progress of 
 the race, and not also and primarily for the 
 progress and perfecting of the individuals who 
 compose it, we lose the idea of His fatherly 
 relation to man. Such an interest would be 
 the aesthetic interest of an artist in his work, 
 not that of a father in his children. Unless 
 the individual be immortal there can be no 
 religion for man. On this condition alone can 
 we believe in God's fatherly love, or even — if 
 it be possible to distinguish between them — in 
 His righteousness. I shrink from the argument 
 that, because on a fair calculation of the com- 
 parative good and evil of our brief span here 
 
56 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 the good is found rather to preponderate, we 
 are therefore bound in reason to be thankful 
 for the gift of life, even on the supposition 
 that there is no hereafter for us. The capacity 
 of discerning the excellency of goodness, and 
 of apprehending that there must be an infi- 
 nitely good and blessed God, gives a hope, 
 which we are justified in interpreting as a 
 promise from God, of a life that shall not end 
 for every human being. 
 
 Yet neither in this state nor in any other 
 are men intended to be a mere mass of units ; 
 distinct as is the idiosyncrasy of each and 
 individual as is the training required by each, 
 they are intended to constitute an infinitely 
 varied and complicated, yet orderly, whole ; 
 that is, to be members of a body in which each 
 may fill a place for which he is specially fitted, 
 and to supply a want which could not other- 
 wise be supplied. And therefore, although I 
 believe that the education of the individual is 
 God's primary purpose for him, yet I also 
 believe that the ultimate object of education 
 is to fit him for his place in the spiritual society. 
 With the human body as our type, we perceive 
 how varied are the uses for which the different 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 57 
 
 members are intended, and consequently how 
 varied must be the training necessary for their 
 development. And when along with this 
 almost infinite diversity of training we take 
 into account the power of resistance which the 
 human will may oppose to any process of dis- 
 cipline, we see how the period of training may 
 be indefinitely lengthened out. 
 
 If this be so, is it a correct description of 
 man's state in this world to call it a state of 
 Probation ? Are we placed here only to be tested 
 and proved whether we will walk in God's 
 ways or in our own ways % Has God created 
 us merely that He might see what we would 
 do — how we would use the talents and oppor- 
 tunities given to us ? Does he say, " I have 
 given you a certain amount of light and certain 
 powers of using that light, and I will see 
 whether you are faithful to this trust, and 
 if not I will cast you off ; " and does He 
 conclude this warning by saying, " Be diligent, 
 for the time of probation is limited to the 
 present life ; at its close the judgment will 
 take place, and the everlasting award will be 
 given ,; ? * Is this, I repeat, a full account of 
 
 1 See Ps. lxxvii. 7-10 : " WiU the Lord cast off for ever ? 
 
58 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 our condition here ? Most assuredly our lives 
 are composed of trials, at every step good 
 and evil are set before us and we are called 
 to choose between them, and we are conscious 
 that a judgment is passed upon us in every 
 case according as our choice is right or wrong. 
 It would be folly to deny this, or even to ques- 
 tion it. I do neither, but I ask whether God has 
 not a purpose to serve by all this trial beyond 
 that of merely testing us ? And if He has, 
 ought not the whole process to take its name 
 from that purpose rather than from the means 
 by which it is attained ? 
 
 What then can we suppose His purpose to 
 be ? Is it not the development of all our capa- 
 cities ? Is it not, in a word, education ? Is 
 He not saying to us, I have created you 
 to be My children — partakers of My own 
 spirit — of My own righteousness — of My own 
 blessedness, — and I have given you capacities 
 conformable to this high calling, capacities of 
 apprehending Me and My purposes, and of 
 
 Will He be favourable no more ? Is His mercy clean gone for 
 ever ? Dotli His promise "fail for evermore ? Hath God for- 
 gotten to be gracious ? hath He in anger shut up His tender 
 mercies ? And I said, This is my infirmity : but I will remem- 
 ber the years of the right hand of the Most High." 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 59 
 
 becoming fellow-workers with Me in carrying 
 them out ? 1 
 
 I contend that the revelation of God as the 
 Father necessarily involves the belief that edu- 
 cation is the purpose with which He created 
 us, and that probation must always be sub- 
 servient to that end, and can never be itself 
 the end. No education can go on without 
 trial ; but we are tried that ive may be edu- 
 cated, not educated that we may be tried. 
 
 It is manifest that these two views of human 
 life are in principle opposed to each other, and 
 lead to opposing conceptions of the character 
 of God and of the relation in which we stand 
 to Him. The essential characteristic of a 
 father's love is that it is inextinguishable. 
 If I believe in God as the righteous Father, 
 whose one purpose in all His dealings with 
 man is to train him into a participation of His 
 own righteousness that he may thus be a par- 
 taker in His blessedness, I cannot but trust 
 
 1 See Deuteronomy xxx. 14, 15, 20 : " The word is very nigh 
 unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do 
 it. See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death 
 and evil ; . . . that thou mayest love the Lord thy God, that 
 thou mayest obey His voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto 
 Him ; for He is thy life." 
 
60 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 Him, and feel myself safe in His hands, eter- 
 nally safe; and this trust opens my whole 
 being to Him, and is thus essentially the only 
 righteousness which a creature can have. 
 
 On the other hand, if the paramount relation 
 of God towards us be that of a Judge — I 
 should say that trust in Him becomes impos- 
 sible. The justice of a judge consists in the 
 unswerving integrity with which he discharges 
 the duties of his office, uncorrupted by bribes 
 and unmoved by either threats or entreaties. 
 He must take part neither with nor against 
 the offender; he must silence any feeling 
 either of love or enmity and simply desire 
 that the law may have its course. He has 
 not to consider what effect the execution of 
 the sentence may have upon the character of 
 the accused ; all he has to do is to take care 
 that it is the sentence decreed by the law. 
 Any confidence therefore that I can have in 
 the award of a righteous judge is in fact a 
 confidence in myself — a confidence that I have 
 right on my side, and that it would be un- 
 righteous to condemn me. But in very truth 
 I have no such confidence. I am conscious of 
 many sins and shortcomings. I know that I 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 61 
 
 have not right on my side, and that an impar- 
 tial award on the merits of my case must be 
 condemnatory. If therefore I come to the 
 conclusion that I am here simply on trial, if I 
 regard God as One who is keeping, as it were, 
 a debtor and creditor account with me, and 
 who will deal with me according to that 
 account, I may in word call Him Father and 
 in word ascribe love to Him, but I cannot 
 really regard Him as a Father, nor trust in His 
 love, nor feel myself safe in His hands. 
 
 This idea of probation corresponds exactly 
 to the idea of Law which occupies so large 
 a space in the epistles of St. Paul, and 
 which is by him contrasted with the idea 
 of Gospel. It narrows our conception of all 
 we have to look for from God to strict impar- 
 tiality ; so that any hope of a favourable 
 judgment from Him must necessarily rest on 
 the estimate we form of our own obedience — 
 our own conformity to the standard of the 
 law. And when the truth is at last forced 
 upon us that the law requires nothing short of 
 unselfish love to God and man, in thought 
 word and deed, all hope founded on obedience 
 is utterly swept away, because we discover 
 
62 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 that we have not only in time past been living 
 in neglect of this great commandment but 
 that we never can obey it by any efforts in 
 our power. We are thus shut up into hope- 
 less condemnation both as regards the past 
 and the future. Evidently in such circum- 
 stances we can find no help from the character 
 of God ; it is a mere terror to us, making 
 filial trust absolutely impossible. On the 
 principle of Law there is no place for for- 
 giveness, and when we become conscious 
 of having sinned we see no outlet from con- 
 demnation. This is our inevitable condition 
 so lon^ as we believe ourselves to be in " a 
 state of probation." We have no hope in 
 ourselves for we feel that we are sinners ; 
 and we have no hope in God for we see in 
 Him only an impartial retributive justice. 
 
 " But," it will be said, " you are leaving out 
 of sight the Gospel. The supreme Judge de- 
 sires mercy if it can be reconciled with justice, 
 and He himself has devised the means. His 
 Son has taken on Him the nature of the sinful 
 race, and consents to undergo the penalty due 
 to sinners ; they are forgiven on the condition 
 of believing in their Kedeemer, and thus 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 63 
 
 mercy has its free course, and yet justice is 
 inviolate." 
 
 The errors which I conceive to be involved 
 in this statement have been elsewhere dealt 
 with. 1 Here I would only say that so long as 
 the idea of probation is retained, it robs 
 even the Gospel of its healing virtue, sug- 
 gesting, as it does, that this revelation brings 
 no unconditional blessing but only varies 
 the form of our trial, — the final award being 
 now suspended, not indeed on perfect obedi- 
 ence, but on the answer to the question, 
 Are you a believer ? thus forcing us to seek 
 our confidence, not in the Father's forgiv- 
 ing love revealed in the gift of His Son, but 
 in our performance of the task of believing ; 
 an undefinable task which no man, whilst thus 
 contemplating it, ever knows whether he has 
 accomplished or not. 
 
 Other evils of no small moment result from 
 this view. Among the most perilous are these : 
 that it almost necessitates a self-justifying spirit, 
 and that it suggests the wish that the standard 
 of righteousness were lowered. Then again, 
 it tends to make us more occupied with the 
 
 1 See the Chapter which treats of Propitiation, et passim. 
 
64 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 consequences of sin than with its moral evil — 
 with the thought how we may escape punish- 
 ment, rather than with the hope of becoming 
 righteous. Hence also the life and death of 
 Christ have come to be regarded rather as a 
 propitiation to Divine justice through which 
 mercy may be extended to the guilty, than as 
 a manifestation of that righteousness which 
 God desires to see in us, and of His own 
 righteous love, which, whilst it never ceases to 
 condemn our sin, can never cease to seek our 
 deliverance from sin. 
 
 We may conclude then that the conception 
 of our relation to God, as interpreted by the 
 idea of probation, is actually opposed to the 
 spirit of Christianity ; for there is nothing in it 
 which answers to the announcement that God 
 is the loving Father of all men ; nothing there- 
 fore which can help us to flee to Him and to 
 trust Him under a sense of weariness and 
 weakness, of sorrow and suffering ; nothing 
 which can really help us to be righteous with 
 the righteousness of filial trust. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we consider ourselves 
 as created for the purpose of being educated 
 into fellowship with God, and as ever living 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD, 65 
 
 under the action of this purpose, the darkness 
 passes away and all becomes light. We are 
 no longer under the cold eye of a Judge, but 
 unoterThe loving and encouraging eye of a 
 Father, who " willeth not the death of a 
 sinner, but that he should turn from his 
 wickedness and live;" and the assurance of 
 daily forgiveness, as well as the blotting out 
 of all past offences, imparts its own loving 
 character to all the circumstances of our lot, 
 and even to the punishments and sufferings 
 which our Father sees fit to send. " He 
 afflicteth not willingly, but for our profit ; that 
 we may be partakers of His holiness." The 
 belief that this is indeed God's purpose is a 
 continual call and help towards growth in 
 righteousness, because it is fitted to inspire that 
 inextinguishable trust in Him which is itself the 
 right state of the creature. I would say, then, 
 that this idea of the purpose of our Creator is 
 the very basis of all true thoughts of Him and 
 of our relation to Him. Without it Christianity 
 ceases to be a gospel ; it loses its fundamental 
 meaning : for the Gospel of Christ is in very 
 deed the manifestation of this purpose and of 
 the way in which it is to be accomplished. 
 
66 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 But whilst we reject this false conception of 
 the Divine purpose, do we mean to say that 
 man can ever over-estimate God's hatred of 
 evil ? Assuredly not. The error consists, not 
 in exaggerating His condemnation of sin, but 
 in not perceiving that under this condemnation 
 lies an unchanging purpose to deliver us from 
 it. I would even say that the man who re- 
 gards God simply as a just judge, and who is 
 by that consideration urged to a continual effort 
 after righteousness (though it is certain that 
 whilst ignoring God's fatherly relation to him 
 he never can attain to righteousness and must 
 be always in unrest) is doubtless in a higher 
 moral condition than the man who allows his 
 idea of God's fatherly love to lower his idea 
 of God's holiness and abhorrence of sin. 
 Moreover in the former case an experience of 
 the futility of mere effort to fulfil the law of 
 love may lead to the discovery that filial trust 
 is the only spirit in which the fulfilment of 
 that law is possible. In this way the law may 
 be a schoolmaster to lead him to Christ, by 
 shutting up every other path and showing him 
 that it can only be fulfilled in the heart which 
 regards God as a loving and forgiving Father. 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 67 
 
 Self-trust is manifestly the principle inherent 
 in that false conception of the law, according 
 to which our hope before God depends on our 
 obedience to its requirements ; and self-trust is 
 the root of all sin, being the substitution of 
 self for God. The belief that we are under a 
 process of education, through which it is God's 
 purpose to train us into righteousness, at once 
 sets us free from this bondage, by leading us 
 to cast ourselves upon that loving purpose as a 
 refuge from all the evils which we feel within 
 us, and to see in its unchangeableness a secu- 
 rity for its ultimate triumph over everything 
 which opposes it. 
 
 It is a memorable moment in the history of 
 a man's spirit when the righteousness of God 
 ceases to be a ground of anxiety or apprehen- 
 sion and becomes a ground of assured hope and 
 confidence, — when he perceives that it cannot 
 be satisfied with punishment but must always 
 desire to communicate itself. As soon as he 
 discovers that the purpose of God in giving 
 him a law is to train him into a participation 
 of His own righteousness and blessedness, that 
 very moment the Law becomes Gospel and 
 his Judge becomes his Father. The revelation 
 
68 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 of this purpose then is the Gospel, and it is 
 virtually made to every man, for the light in 
 his conscience which condemns his sin ought 
 to be understood as " the goodness of God 
 leading him to repentance." What means God 
 may use for this end we cannot tell, but when 
 we see what His fatherly purpose is we are 
 enabled to trust ourselves in His hands and to 
 look without fear into an unending futurity. 
 We can rest in the assurance that the only 
 power in the universe — the power by which 
 all other things exist — seeks and must ever 
 seek for us that righteousness which is our 
 only possible blessedness. 
 
 But, it may be asked, is it possible to recon- 
 cile the aspect of the world with the existence 
 of such a purpose 1 How are we to judge of 
 the purpose of God but by what we actually 
 see taking place under His government ? When 
 we see the evil everywhere so far exceeding 
 the good, are we justified in believing that He 
 really condemns and abhors evil, or that He 
 really has the purpose of educating all men 
 into fellowship with Himself? 
 
 There is an answer to these questions which 
 fully satisfies my reason, and it is this : — I am 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 69 
 
 conscious in my own inner man of an over- 
 shadowing of evil, just as I see it in the outer 
 world ; but I am also most distinctly conscious 
 of the Divine condemnation resting upon it all, 
 and of a call on me to take part with God in 
 His condemnation of it and His conflict with 
 it. I am sure that this is the true account of 
 the world within me, and I am constrained by 
 reason and conscience to interpret by it the 
 state of the world without me. I am sure 
 that the condemnation of God rests on all sin 
 there too, however unchecked it may seem to 
 be, and I am also sure that this same witness 
 of God against all evil, which I feel within 
 myself, is really in the heart of every human 
 being, unheard and unattended to though it 
 may be ; and I cannot otherwise interpret this 
 witness than as the expression of God's purpose 
 of unchanging love, which will never cease its 
 striving till it has engaged every child of man 
 to take part with Him in this contest. 
 
 In coming to this conclusion, it is manifest 
 that I am constrained to adopt the assurance 
 that this purpose follows man out from his 
 present life, through all stages of being that lie 
 before him, unto its full accomplishment. And 
 
70 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 indeed unless we accept this assurance, we 
 must give up the idea that the purpose of 
 God in creating man was to educate him, 
 for no otherwise can it be maintained. But 
 verily it seems to me that in giving up this 
 idea we are actually giving up the idea of 
 God altogether, and surrendering ourselves to 
 atheism as well as despair. For what is true 
 theism but the belief that the ruling Power 
 in the universe, the only absolute Power that 
 exists or can exist in space or in duration, is 
 a Being whose nature is righteous love, who is 
 therefore the enemy of all sin, and who will 
 never cease His endeavours to extinguish it, 
 and to establish righteousness throughout His 
 moral creation ? 
 
 To me it appears that there can be no real 
 gospel, no real good news for man, which does 
 not involve this assurance. In point of fact, 
 no one who believes in a righteous God at all 
 can conceive the possibility of His ever ceas- 
 ing to condemn sin ; and surely His condem- 
 nation of our sin necessarily implies His 
 demand for our righteousness, just as the 
 condemnation of darkness necessarily implies 
 a demand for light. This has not been suffi- 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 71 
 
 ciently considered by theologians, who have 
 generally represented the holiness of God as 
 an attribute rather fitted to quench the hopes 
 of a sinner than to encourage them ;* although 
 it is the very attribute in which the old 
 prophet Habakkuk first seems to have found 
 a light and a power, enabling him to realise 
 for himself and his countrymen that the pur- 
 pose of God in sending affliction is not to 
 destroy but to correct, — that is, to educate. 
 "Art thou not from everlasting, Lord my 
 God, mine Holy One \ we shall not die. 
 Lord, thou hast ordained them for judgment ; 
 and, mighty God, thou hast established them 
 for correction " (Hab. i. 12). 
 
 Those who conceive of justice as opposed to 
 mercy must regard the Psalmist's utterance, 
 " Also unto Thee, Lord, belongeth mercy,/or 
 Thou renderest to every man according to his 
 works " (Ps. lxii. 12), as a complete subver- 
 sion of the meaning of words, and I have 
 sometimes thought they must be tempted to 
 conjecture that the copyist has by mistake 
 substituted the word mercy for justice. They 
 
 1 " Sing unto the Lord, ye saints of His, and give thanks 
 at the remembrance of His holiness." — Ps. xxx. 4. 
 
72 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 have been accustomed to suppose that nothing 
 worse could befall them than that God should 
 render unto them according to their works, 
 and their hope in His mercy has just been the 
 hope that He would not so deal with them; 
 the idea therefore that mercy itself will render 
 unto them according to their works seems to 
 be the annihilation of all hope. 
 
 I believe that all this is founded on mis- 
 apprehension, and that in God mercy and 
 justice are one and the same thing, — that His 
 justice never demands punishment for its own 
 sake, and can be satisfied with nothing but 
 righteousness, and that His mercy seeks the 
 highest good of man which certainly is 
 righteousness, and will therefore use any 
 means, however painful, to produce it in him. 
 If men could understand that God's purpose 
 in rendering to them according to their works 
 is to instruct them in the true nature and 
 character of their works, that so they may 
 apprehend the eternal connection between sin 
 and misery, between righteousness and blessed- 
 ness, and thus be led to flee from sin and take 
 hold of righteousness, they would also under- 
 stand that it is in mercy that He deals thus 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 73 
 
 with them, and that in fact the purposes of 
 mercy can in no other way be accomplished. 
 
 I know that I should be a minister of good 
 to many if I could help them to apprehend 
 that this is the meaning of God's justice, and 
 therefore that it is to be as much trusted in as 
 His mercy. They have been accustomed to 
 look upon Christ as their Saviour because he 
 has delivered them from justice by suffering 
 the penalty which it denounced against them, 
 whilst in truth he is their Saviour by reveal- 
 ing to them that justice is their friend, being 
 only the enemy of their enemy. 
 
 The purpose of God, whether He punishes 
 the sinner or remits the punishment, is always 
 the merciful one of delivering him from sin, 
 not that of carrying out the principle of re- 
 tribution. The awful amount of misery which 
 we see in this world proves that He will not 
 shrink through false tenderness from inflicting 
 any suffering which He knows to be need- 
 ful, but the conviction that His one purpose 
 through it all is to draw the sinner out of sin 
 into righteousness, enables us to contemplate 
 Him through it all as the righteous Father. 
 
 We are by virtue of God's will and purpose 
 
74 THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 in the relation of children, and are therefore 
 not called on to make ourselves children, but, 
 in the knowledge of a relationship which 
 already exists, to yield ourselves to our Father's 
 instruction that we may become His righteous 
 children. The sonship is not a new relation 
 communicated through faith [or any other 
 subjective means], but is itself coeval with 
 man's creation ; and although those on whom 
 it was bestowed have forgotten it and have 
 wandered from their Father's house into a far 
 country, yet when they there learn to know 
 the evil of their ways and remember that they 
 have a Father, because they are sons God 
 sends forth the Spirit of the Son into their 
 hearts, crying, "Abba, Father." The same 
 thing is taught by our Lord when, after ex- 
 horting his disciples to love their enemies and 
 to do good to them that hate them, he uses 
 this argument : " that ye may be — that is, be- 
 come (yev7]a0e) — the children of your Father 
 which is in heaven." He assumes that God is 
 their Father, and calls on them, not to make 
 themselves His children, but to be His chil- 
 dren ; in other words, to walk worthy of their 
 high relationship, as we say to the degenerate 
 
THE PURPOSE OF GOD. 75 
 
 son of a good human father — Be your father's 
 son. 
 
 The belief that we have been created for 
 education affords, I am convinced, the only- 
 explanation of the endless varieties of human 
 life — the only approach to the solution of its 
 mystery. This principle I regard as the very 
 basis of the Gospel ; proclaiming, as it does, 
 God's eternal and unchanging purpose for 
 man, to raise him by education into fellow- 
 ship with Himself, to make him a partaker 
 in His own righteousness and His own blessed- 
 ness. 
 
IV. 
 THE BIBLE IN RELATION TO FAITH. 
 
 "When we contemplate the attitude which 
 criticism, historical and scientific, has now as- 
 sumed in relation to the books of Scripture, 
 we must feel that it is the duty of all who have 
 been accustomed to regard the doctrine con- 
 tained in these books as a reality of inestimable 
 value, to consider whether in the face of this 
 criticism, and allowing it everything which it 
 may justly claim, they can yet hold Chris- 
 tianity in its entireness, and feel justified both 
 in reason and conscience whilst they do so. 
 
 We know well that there are many truly 
 good people who think that they hold their 
 religion simply and in the last resort on the 
 authority of the Bible, and that anything 
 which weakens that authority, even on matters 
 
THE BIBLE. 77 
 
 which have nothing to do with doctrine — such 
 for example as natural history — must therefore 
 be an evil thing, tending to rob men of all hope 
 in God. They have accepted it as a principle, 
 that the importance of every word of the Scrip- 
 tures rests on the same ground, namely that the 
 book is divinely and supernaturally inspired ; 
 any doubt therefore cast on the accuracy of 
 its statements, in any matter whatsoever, seems 
 to shake the whole of their religious faith ; for 
 they imagine that if that ground were to give 
 way in the smallest matter it would really give 
 way entirely. 
 
 It is misapprehension like this that has 
 given so terrible an interest to ' Essays and 
 Reviews and to Bishop Colenso's - Critical In- 
 quiries into the Structure of the Pentateuch;' 
 and, so far as it prevails, every one, who feels 
 the value of the truths contained in the Bible, 
 must look on all such works with trembling 
 jealousy and horror. Is there any valid and 
 unshakeable protection against the fears thus 
 stirred up % and if there be, what is it ? This 
 seems to me to be the great question for our 
 time, which must be answered before there can 
 be, for a large portion of our people, any true 
 
78 THE BIBLE 
 
 peace, or any firm standing ground for their 
 faith. 
 
 We all feel the immense difference that there 
 is between believing a principle of reason or 
 morals because we apprehend its necessary- 
 truth, and accepting it because some person in 
 whose veracity and intelligence we have con- 
 fidence has announced it. In the first case we 
 are actually believing in the principle, in the 
 second our faith is only in the veracity of 
 our informant. The importance of this dis- 
 tinction is thoroughly recognised in every 
 other department of knowledge. In that of 
 religion it certainly is not generally recognised, 
 and that for various causes. In the first 
 place it seems more reverent to receive Divine 
 truth simply on authority. The authority 
 which Protestants acknowledge is that of a 
 book which they regard as divinely inspired 
 for the very purpose of communicating to men 
 information as to the things of God which 
 they could not otherwise possess. To use their 
 finite reason therefore in judging of the con- 
 tents of the book they are disposed to consider 
 a presumptuous and irreverent denial of the 
 necessity of such a revelation. 
 
IN EELATION TO FAITH. 79 
 
 A second cause is to be found in misconcep- 
 tion as to the nature of faith, which has been in 
 some quarters strangely enough imagined to be 
 opposed to knowledge, and has thus been lowered 
 into a test and exercise of blind unquestioning 
 obedience, instead of being regarded as the 
 spiritual faculty which may perceive and receive 
 Divine truth, from whatever source it comes. 
 This may in some measure account for the idea 
 that there is irreverence in presuming to ex- 
 pect to know anything of God except on out- 
 ward authority. The expectation seems like un- 
 dervaluing, if not setting aside, the Bible. Now 
 I do not say that man could, without an external 
 revelation, have arrived at that knowledge of 
 God which is communicated in the Scriptures, 
 — for indeed the history of the efforts of the 
 human mind contradicts such a thought — but 
 that after the communication has been made 
 he can perceive its coherency and reasonable- 
 ness, even to the length of seeing that it must be 
 so and could not be otherwise, and that though 
 he owes his first sight of Divine truth to the 
 outward authority he may come to hold it as 
 a possession of which no questioning or shaking 
 of the outward authority can rob him. 
 
80 THE BIBLE 
 
 I have often imagined to myself the large 
 joy which must have filled the mind of an 
 Aristarchus of Samos when the true concep- 
 tion of the solar system first dawned upon 
 him, unsupported though it was by any of 
 the mathematical demonstrations which have 
 since convinced all educated men of its truth, 
 and constraining belief solely on the ground of 
 its own simple and beautiful order. I could 
 suppose such a belief very strong and almost 
 taking such a form as this ; — It is so harmoni- 
 ous, so self-consistent, that it ought to be so, 
 therefore it must be so. And surely this is no- 
 thing more than might be looked for in regard 
 to spiritual realities. If man is created for fel- 
 lowship with God there must exist within him, 
 notwithstanding all the ravages of sin, capaci- 
 ties which will recognise the light and life of 
 the eternal truth when brought close to him. 
 Without such capacities revelation would in 
 fact be impossible. Where a Divine communi- 
 cation is bestowed, a fitness to receive it must 
 exist, otherwise it could be of no use. Just as 
 the eye can discern — though it cannot create 
 — light, and without the eye light would be 
 useless. I am not more sure of my own ex- 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH, 81 
 
 istence than I am of being under the eye and 
 guidance of a Being who desires to train and 
 educate me to be a good man ; and yet I know 
 that beyond the pale of the Bible's influence 
 this conviction has rarely been fully felt, and 
 I well believe that without that influence I 
 should not have had such a conviction. But 
 now that by the help of the Bible I have 
 arrived at it, I feel that no demolition of out- 
 ward authority even if such demolition were 
 possible could deprive me of it. Indeed that 
 agreement between the Bible and my spiritual 
 organisation strengthens my faith in the 
 Divine origin of the Bible more than any 
 other argument could. 
 
 When I ask myself what reason or right 
 I have to believe that the great Being who 
 made and orders all things really cares for 
 men and has a purpose of good for them 
 in all the circumstances of their lot, it is not 
 enough to answer that I have read this in a 
 very ancient book, or been taught it by a 
 venerable Church. There are objections to 
 such belief which require a more thorough 
 answer; I must myself see and handle its 
 truth. And when I carry my questioning 
 
 F 
 
82 THE BIBLE 
 
 a little further, and ask myself what reason or 
 right I have to believe that a man who lived 
 in Palestine 1860 years ago was the Son of 
 God, in order to be certain that in this belief 
 I have hold of a substance and not of a mere 
 shadow, I must discern in the history itself a 
 light and truth which will meet the demands 
 both of my reason and conscience. In fact, 
 however true the history may be, it cannot be 
 of any moral or spiritual benefit to me until I 
 apprehend its truth and meaning. This and 
 nothing less than this is what I require, not 
 only in this great concern but in all others ; 
 for the only real instruction is that which 
 helps us to perceive the truth and meaning of 
 things, not that which merely asserts that 
 such and such things are true and insists on 
 our accepting them as such. 
 
 It has been the chief aim of my life to pos- 
 sess such an apprehension of the truth of 
 Christianity as this ; and it is now forty-five 
 years since I ventured to give through the 
 press an utterance to this desire, and to 
 accompany it with a sketch of the meagre 
 progress I had then made in realising it. 
 I was brought up from my childhood in the 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 83 
 
 belief of the supernatural and miraculous in 
 connection with religion, especially in con- 
 nection with the person and life and teaching 
 of Jesus Christ ; and like many in the present 
 day I came, in after life, to have misgivings as 
 to the credibility of this wonderful history. 
 But the patient study of the narrative and of 
 its place in the history of the world, and the 
 perception of a light in it which entirely satis- 
 fied my reason and conscience, finally overcame 
 these misgivings and forced on me the convic- 
 tion of its truth. A good deal of this cannot 
 perhaps be fully communicated to others, but, 
 of that which can, I wish to record as distinctly 
 as I am able what, having found helpful to 
 myself, I think may perhaps be helpful to 
 them. 
 
 The Bible assumes that we have some innate 
 original capacity of apprehending spiritual 
 truths when revealed, and to this capacity it 
 addresses itself, that we may find God and 
 know Him for ourselves; and until we do 
 thus know Him it has not for us accom- 
 plished the only object for which it can have 
 been given. It addresses the spiritual capa- 
 city, just as Kepler and Newton in their 
 
84 THE BIBLE 
 
 exposition of the laws of the material world 
 addressed the intellectual capacity. And as 
 the discoveries of these philosophers are now 
 accepted, not on the personal authority of the 
 discoverers but on the ground of their own 
 discerned truth, so no man who has dis- 
 cerned the truth of the spiritual discoveries 
 contained in the Bible continues to rest his faith 
 on the outward authority of the book, but has 
 an assurance of them — grounded on his own 
 discernment of their truth, that is, their agree- 
 ment with the inward facts of his spiritual 
 consciousness and with the outward facts of 
 his life — as firm as he has of his own exist- 
 ence. Although he would never have come 
 to know them without this communica- 
 tion from without and from above himself, 
 yet when he does know them it is their own 
 discerned truth, and not the authority of their 
 vehicle, which makes them objects of faith to 
 him. 
 
 If we cannot have a firm apprehension and 
 conviction of God's character and of His re- 
 lation to ourselves in His Son, except in so 
 far as we are assured that the book which 
 contains a declaration of these eternal facts is 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 85 
 
 directly and supematurally inspired, I can 
 see no hope of any satisfactory escape from the 
 perplexities into which we have fallen ; for on 
 this supposition I cannot see how any indis- 
 putable evidence of such inspiration is attain- 
 able. But I believe that we may have such 
 an apprehension, because the intrinsic neces- 
 sary truth of these facts may be discerned, and 
 I also believe that on this discernment our 
 faith in the authority of the Bible must ulti- 
 mately rest. 1 
 
 It may be asked, " Are you giving to God 
 the honour due to Him when you insist on 
 seeing the rightness and reasonableness of a 
 doctrine before you consent to receive it? 
 Would it not be more reverential, more in 
 accordance with the modesty becoming a crea- 
 
 1 The most zealous defenders of the verbal inspiration of the 
 Bible admit that there are parts of it of less importance than 
 others. This is a great admission because another is involved 
 in it, namely that we ourselves must be judges of the com- 
 parative importance of these different parts. We cannot escape 
 this responsibility and we cannot define or limit it. The 13th 
 chapter of Deuteronomy contains a remarkable acknowledg- 
 ment of, and appeal to, the spiritual apprehension of the Jewish 
 people. It supposes that a prophet is proclaiming a false reli- 
 gion, and that a miracle has been wrought in support of it, and 
 it holds the people responsible for discerning and detecting the 
 false religion, and rejecting the sign or wonder. There are 
 many such appeals to our spiritual discernment in the Bible. 
 
86 THE BIBLE 
 
 ture, to accept it without question on His bare 
 word V I know that many earnest Christians 
 will make this objection ; and I should wish 
 to let them understand that I most heartily 
 sympathise with the feeling which leads them 
 to make it, although I think the feeling mis- 
 placed. If an earthly father desired to have 
 his son's co-operation in some matter involving 
 his own character, and had taken pains to 
 explain to him the principles on which he had 
 undertaken it, would he not feel disappointed 
 were the son to say, " You need not explain 
 your motives and the reasonableness of your 
 conduct, your bare authority is sufficient for 
 me " 1 I have supposed that the father wished 
 his son's sympathy as well as his co-operation, 
 and as he could not give sympathy without 
 understanding his father's motives, would he 
 not be actually frustrating his father's whole 
 purpose by this misplaced obsequiousness ? It 
 is evident that no principles whatever, whether 
 religious, moral or social, can really be believed 
 unless their truth is apprehended. Could any 
 one, for instance, be said to believe in the 
 doctrine of Butler's Analogy if he did not 
 himself apprehend the truth of its principles ? 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 87 
 
 I do not then say that a man ought to claim 
 for himself the right of rejecting Christianity 
 until he discerns its truth, but that he can and 
 actually does only believe it in so far as his 
 spiritual understanding apprehends its truth. 
 
 I would say also that the very form and 
 character of the Bible show that it is intended 
 to be used rather as an instrument of educa- 
 tion than to be quoted as an authority, and that 
 it is given, not that we should be satisfied with 
 a knowledge of its words as if its authority 
 were an ultimate ground of belief, but in order 
 that through it we may become acquainted 
 with God Himself and with our own actual 
 relations with Him as a living Being. So long 
 as our faith in God rests solely on our belief 
 that the Bible is inspired we have no real faith 
 in Him at all. We do not know Him, we only 
 know the Bible's account of Him. 
 
 But the capacities of the mass of mankind 
 are as yet but little developed in this region of 
 thought ; — they must be educated for it, and it 
 is evident that all education must at least begin 
 with authority. Children cannot be taught 
 without it, and ninety-nine out of every hun- 
 dred are children in understanding. So after 
 
88 THE BIBLE 
 
 all, and notwithstanding all that has been said, 
 the world must be taught on the principle of 
 authority. What use is there then, it may 
 be asked, for insisting on the danger of sub- 
 stituting authority for light, when so small 
 a fraction of the race are capable of distin- 
 guishing the one from the other ? 
 
 The use is this — that education will be a 
 very different thing if, instead of regarding 
 authority as the normal and permanent condi- 
 tion of knowledge and belief, the teacher uses it 
 as only a stepping-stone to real knowledge, and 
 constantly endeavours to induce his disciples to 
 use the eyes of their own understanding and to 
 draw them into what light they are capable of 
 receiving. According to military discipline a 
 soldier has nothing to do with the purpose of 
 the orders he receives, nor with their wisdom : 
 he has merely to understand what they are 
 and to execute them. The light he has to look 
 for is not in the nature of the command but in 
 the authority of the officer who gives it. But 
 if instead of a commander I have a teacher 
 whose object is not so much that things may 
 be done, as that I may become wiser and 
 better by doing them, then the light I have to 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 89 
 
 look for is not in the authority of my teacher, 
 but in the meaning of that which he enjoins. 
 His business is to help me to understand the 
 principles which he sets before me and to dis- 
 cern for myself their truth ; it is in this re- 
 spect quite different from that of the officer, 
 whose duty is not to explain his orders but 
 to enforce obedience to them. The soldier 
 who questions or judges his commander's 
 orders is guilty of a breach of duty ; the dis- 
 ciple of Christianity would be defeating the 
 whole object of his teacher, if he did not ques- 
 tion and j udge ; that is, if he did not seek to 
 apprehend for himself the light and truth con- 
 tained in the teaching. The officer and the 
 teacher must not exchange parts, neither must 
 the soldier and the disciple. If they do, it 
 will be under penalty of confusion and defeat. 
 A teacher who supposes that doctrines are 
 presented as exercises of submissive obedience^, 
 not to be understood but blindly reverenced, 
 will consider it his duty to root and strengthen 
 in the mind of the learner the idea that the 
 essence of faith is humble acknowledgment of 
 authority ; and men trained in such a school can 
 scarcely be expected to distinguish between 
 
90 THE BIBLE 
 
 God's character and His institutions, between 
 the spirit and the letter of the Bible. The 
 true teacher on the contrary will always re- 
 member that his business is to awaken the 
 reason and conscience, and to make his dis- 
 ciple feel that, until apprehended there, the 
 truth is neither known nor believed. 
 
 In the foregoing observations I have made 
 frequent appeals to the testimony of con- 
 science, assuming that it is a guidance to 
 us, both in forming our ideas of what the 
 character of God is, and what the duties of men 
 are. To such appeals I believe that many will 
 answer : The value of conscience depends on 
 circumstances, a wrong education necessarily 
 conducts to erroneous judgments, and there- 
 fore the only safety is in an infallible guide. 
 But how, I ask, are we, apart from conscience, 
 to ascertain the infallibility of any guidance ? 
 And if we could, how are we to be sure that 
 we have really apprehended its meaning ? 
 
 It is in vain that we attempt to evade 
 responsibility by casting ourselves upon 
 authority ; we must at any rate choose our 
 authority, and be responsible for that choice. 
 If I take a church as my guide, I must be pre- 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 91 
 
 pared to answer to God and to my own con- 
 science for doing so ; if I take the Bible as my 
 guide, I must in like manner be prepared to 
 give a reason for this. Moreover I must re- 
 member that any guidance which does not 
 quicken and strengthen my own personal con- 
 scious intercourse and sympathy with God is 
 false and hurtful, seeing that this conscious 
 spiritual sympathy with God in purpose and 
 action is the sum and substance of all true 
 religion. A guide who does not help me to see 
 light for myself, either in a doctrine or in a 
 course of action, and who offers his own guid- 
 ance instead of light, is turning me away from 
 God, whatever that guidance may be ; for no 
 outward conduct can in itself be righteous apart 
 from the spiritual principle which inspires it. 
 So long as a man receives his Christianity 
 merely on the authority of a church or a book 
 — so long as it has not commended itself to 
 his higher reason and moral sense, or reached 
 his inner consciousness — he has no real hold of 
 Christianity, he is believing only in his church 
 or his book. There may be the most absolute 
 belief in the infallibilitv of a church or in the 
 inspiration of the Bible, along with the most 
 
92 THE BIBLE 
 
 absolute unbelief in the doctrine taught by 
 them, because the truth of the doctrine may be 
 altogether undiscerned. 
 
 Two principles are involved in this view of 
 Christianity : first, that it is not a creation of 
 the human mind, as some have asserted, but an 
 eternal reality — an actual existence in the spiri- 
 tual world — as real as the physical facts revealed 
 by Galileo or Newton ; and secondly, that we 
 have faculties capable of discerning this spiri- 
 tual reality, ivhen revealed to us, in the same 
 way as we have faculties capable of apprehend- 
 ing physical realities. The Bible presents to 
 our spiritual capacities their proper objects — 
 the character of God, His relation to men, and 
 His purposes towards them — and we then only 
 receive the blessing which God intends for 
 us in giving it to us when we apprehend 
 those great things of which it speaks and dis- 
 cern their eternal necessary truth ; in other 
 words, when our spirit actually meets God 
 and we find that He is indeed a Father. 
 
 I am sure that the Bible was not given to me 
 that my knowledge of it might stand instead of 
 my knowledge of God, nor was it given merely 
 to help me to form an opinion about Him or to 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 93 
 
 stimulate my imagination to form a picture of 
 Him ; it was given to help me to find Himself, 
 and to know Him as a reality altogether inde- 
 pendent of the book ; as a man whom I have 
 been seeking after is independent of the direc- 
 tory which guides me to his house. I do not 
 perceive the real value of the Bible until I 
 in this way become independent of it. I now 
 know its truth, because I have been able to 
 verify its exposition of God from what I have 
 myself found in Him, and I can now understand 
 it better, because I can compare its statements 
 with the living original of which it is the copy ; 
 now also I am in a condition to hear discus- 
 sions on the nature of its claims with perfect 
 calmness, because I know that it reveals the 
 living God, and am therefore certain that its 
 intrinsic value can be but little affected by any 
 decision that is come to on that subject. It 
 is the truth of the revelation contained in the 
 Bible which I must be assured of, and the 
 assurance of its inspiration in the sense of 
 verbal infallibility (in which sense the word is 
 most generally understood) is not necessary 
 for this, and would even be prejudicial were it 
 to become the ground of my faith and so to 
 
94 THE BIBLE 
 
 stand between me and the actual personal 
 discernment of its truth. 
 
 At the same time in arriving at the assur- 
 ance of its truth, I have got hold of an argu- 
 ment in favour of its Divine origin, which will 
 not allow itself to be easily set aside. How is 
 it that when Greeks and Eomans, besides the 
 less endowed and enlightened races, failed so 
 much in their endeavours to know God and His 
 relation to men, a small despised tribe of the old 
 Semitic race did even from their very starting- 
 point attain to a considerable measure of this 
 knowledge \ It is surely a remarkable fact, 
 that the true idea of God's nature and character 
 and relation to men, as accepted by all earnest 
 thinkers who have believed in a personal God at 
 all, has never been truly arrived at (at least on 
 any large scale) except through that teaching 
 which from the earliest time prevailed in the 
 Jewish race, and which, having passed on 
 through a long succession of lawgivers judges 
 psalmists and prophets, ever advancing into 
 greater fulness and clearness of light, finally 
 expanded into Christianity, receiving its perfect 
 development in Jesus Christ. 
 
 However ignorant the authors of the sacred 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 95 
 
 books may have been of natural science, 
 and however tinctured by the peculiarities of 
 their age and country, still, in all that they 
 say, they hold forth the conception of a God 
 loving righteousness and hating wickedness, 
 and seeking to induce men to do the same. I 
 cannot regard this as accidental. Greeks and 
 Eomans, Egyptians, Persians and Hindoos had 
 exercised their minds in the search after God 
 with very questionable success ; whilst this de- 
 spised unphilosophical tribe seem from the first 
 to have possessed this knowledge, not as a 
 secret confined to the learned class but as the 
 common inheritance of the nation, not as a 
 discovery of their wise men but as a communi- 
 cation of God Himself to their fathers. When 
 we meet with any gleams of divine light in the 
 writings of other nations of antiquity, they seem 
 to be the peculiar property of certain gifted 
 individuals — a Socrates, a Plato, a Seneca ; but 
 the Hebrew knowledge was a national posses- 
 sion which belonged to their race, and which 
 they traced up to the patriarchs of the human 
 family. No doubt such men as Moses, David, 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah might by their personal 
 genius give a special illustration to the well- 
 
96 THE BIBLE 
 
 known truth, as their natural endowments 
 might give them a special fitness to deliver 
 some message of threatening or exhortation or 
 consolation in the ears of their fellow-country- 
 men ; but still it was a message from the God 
 whose name had come down to them from 
 their remotest ancestors. In all their writings 
 there is nothing like an idea thought out and 
 elaborated by the human intellect ; there is 
 everywhere the recognition of a divine com- 
 munication. 
 
 I feel it impossible to doubt that this re- 
 markable history was the result of a special 
 direction and purpose of God ; and that He 
 gave the Jewish nation that peculiar light and 
 guidance, not for their own sakes merely or 
 chiefly, but that through them light and spiri- 
 tual guidance might be given to the world. 1 
 I cannot but believe that the instruction is in- 
 spired, and as for the history I do not feel that 
 there is any vital difference between a true 
 
 1 I am quite aware that many expressions might be quoted 
 from the Bible which seem to limit and nationalise, so to 
 speak, the character of God, but to those who are seeking to 
 learn its real meaning, there will be no difficulty in explain- 
 ing these expressions in perfect consistency with, and in sub- 
 ordination to, the great idea of the God and Father of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 97 
 
 history of a Heaven-enlightened and Heaven- 
 guided nation and an inspired history. The 
 presence of a special divine care and direction 
 in the progress and life of the nation is the 
 great fact which forces itself upon my belief 
 when I compare their knowledge of spiritual 
 things with that of the other nations. I do 
 not therefore believe the things contained in 
 the book because I know it to be inspired, but 
 I believe in its inspiration, because I have 
 proved the truth of the great things revealed 
 in it, namely, the character of God and His 
 relation to men, and because I have not found 
 that true conceptions of these great realities 
 have been attained by any of the human race 
 without its help. 
 
 I have never met with any argument against 
 the inspiration of the Bible which seemed to 
 me of convincing weight ; but whether it is 
 inspired or not it certainly contains a revela- 
 tion which no other book does, a history of 
 God's direct and special dealings with a nation 
 and the individuals of that nation, which has 
 no parallel in the world. The belief of its in- 
 spiration, and the belief of the special Divine 
 guidance that presided over the whole history 
 
 G 
 
98 THE BIBLE 
 
 of the race from the call of Abraham to the 
 destruction of Jerusalem are apt to melt into 
 each other and appear like one belief, but they 
 are two distinct beliefs and the second appears 
 to me to be by far the most important. 
 
 The whole literature of the country as con- 
 nected with and influencing the spiritual 
 education of the people was under this Divine 
 guidance. In all the heathen religions the 
 only unvarying attribute of God is power. 
 In the Bible He is always the righteous 
 Father, whose purpose is to educate men 
 into a conformity with His own will, through 
 a knowledge of Himself. To carry out this 
 purpose He is represented as choosing a par- 
 ticular people, that in them He might ex- 
 hibit the universal principles of His dealing 
 with men. The form in which those principles 
 are exhibited is exceptional, but the principles 
 themselves are not exceptional. Our attention 
 is attracted by the exceptional form, but the 
 form is not itself the important thing ; its 
 use lies in revealing and drawing attention to 
 principles which are quietly doing their work 
 through the whole sphere of human nature. 
 
 As it seems to be God's purpose to educate 
 
IN RELATION TO FAITH. 99 
 
 the individual through the conscience, so it 
 seems His purpose to educate the conscience 
 through this revelation. The conscience or 
 moral reason, although it accepts the true idea 
 of God, does not seem capable of originating 
 it ; revelation therefore is the needful comple- 
 ment of conscience, without which conscience is 
 incomplete. Can we conceive that this incom- 
 pleteness would be left unremedied ? Ought 
 we not rather to believe that He who has put 
 His own light within ever) r man has also, in 
 this historic and living course of instruction, 
 given a guidance by which that light may be 
 rightly used 1 
 
V. 
 
 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE 
 TO THE EOMANS. 
 
 It is scarcely conceivable that any one can 
 be acquainted with the character of St. Paul, 
 as delineated in the record of his life and in his 
 own epistles, without loving and admiring him. 
 He evidently belonged by his natural gifts 
 and capacities to the highest type of man. 
 He was a real hero, full of nobleness and yet 
 full of tenderness — most impulsive and im- 
 petuous, yet reasonable and self-controlled — 
 thoroughly and enthusiastically imbued with 
 the old feelings and traditions of his nation, 
 yet the loving brother of the whole human 
 family. 
 
 " Spirits are not finely touched but for fine 
 issues," and as He who made him destined 
 
EPISTLE TO THE KOMANS. 101 
 
 him to be His chief instrument in carrying 
 out the greatest issue that was ever committed 
 to the hand of man, He gave him a cor- 
 responding mental endowment. 
 
 It seems generally agreed by the students 
 of St. Paul, that the Epistle to the Eomans is 
 in some respects the most important of all 
 his writings. It refers less than his other 
 epistles to the passing circumstances of any 
 church or individual, and more exclusively to 
 the fundamental and permanent principles of 
 Christianity. It has also more of the character 
 of a sustained logical argument, setting out, as 
 it appears to do, with the avowed purpose of 
 explaining the nature of righteousness and its 
 connection with or dependence on faith, and 
 in some sort carrying out that purpose even to 
 the end. Yet notwithstanding this appearance 
 of logical reasoning, which naturally gives the 
 expectation of great clearness, there can be no 
 doubt that considerable indistinctness of appre- 
 hension as to its meaning has prevailed, and 
 that great variety of opinion has existed and 
 continues to exist through all branches of the 
 Christian Church, both as to the main drift of 
 
102 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 its argument and also as to the connection of 
 that argument with the subordinate topics and 
 discussions introduced into it. Thus although 
 justification by faith is admitted to be the 
 great subject of the epistle, yet men are not 
 agreed as to the meaning of the phrase. 
 Whilst some have supposed that justification 
 means the rectification of a man's spiritual 
 and moral nature in relation to God and man, 
 produced by a belief of God's fatherly purposes 
 concerning all men, others have held that it 
 does not refer to character at all but to 
 position, and that the justified man is a man 
 to whom righteousness is imputed in virtue 
 of his connection with Christ to whom he 
 becomes united by faith, and who therefore, 
 though not himself righteous, is treated by 
 God as if he were so, for Christ's sake. We 
 may say the same as to predestination and 
 election, with this addition, that these sub- 
 jects are not only felt to be in themselves in- 
 scrutably mysterious, but the place which 
 they hold in the epistle, and their connection 
 with the rest of the argument, and the reason 
 of their introduction there at all, are diffi- 
 culties generally regarded as most perplexing. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 103 
 
 Further, the ultimate triumph of good over 
 evil in the case of every individual, which to 
 some thinkers appears to be prominently in- 
 culcated in this epistle as a doctrine of the first 
 magnitude and most conducive to righteous- 
 ness, is yet regarded, probably by a majority 
 of earnest Christians, as not only unsupported 
 by the apostle's language but as actually 
 immoral in its tendency and entirely opposed 
 to the whole teaching of Christianity. 
 
 Doubtless the epistle is difficult, and no one 
 who has endeavoured to follow out the con- 
 nection, or even to find a grammatical and 
 logical sequence in many of its passages, such 
 as those in chapters i. 16, 17, and iii. 21-27, 
 will deny the difficulty ; and, as these passages 
 are evidently the texts to the rest of the 
 epistle, any uncertainty as to them must neces- 
 sarily affect the meaning of the whole. Many 
 commentators have taken in hand to explain 
 it ; and no doubt some light, though not an 
 entirely satisfying light, has thus been thrown 
 upon it, but even this has not penetrated the 
 mass of readers, so that there is still ample 
 room for endeavours to help them. 
 
 It is easier to conceive, than to adopt and to 
 
104 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 hold, the proper attitude of mind in which to 
 attempt the illustration of such a book. There 
 are opposite dangers to be avoided : there is 
 the danger of coming to the task with a mind 
 stiffened by dogmatic theology and afraid of 
 allowing the human reason to judge of divinely 
 inspired thoughts and words, yet any one 
 entering on it without great reverence and 
 without feeling the moral obligation of keeping 
 his interpretations within the limits of his 
 author's language and in harmony with the 
 general teaching of his other writings, would 
 be manifestly unfit for the undertaking. The 
 student ought ever to remember that his great 
 business is to apprehend and follow out the 
 apostle's thought, and not merely to give a 
 plausible explanation of his words. He ought 
 to bring with him principles and convictions 
 with which to compare his author's state- 
 ments, that he may be able to judge reason- 
 ably and logically between the different mean- 
 ings which the text will bear, and at the same 
 time he must have habits of free thought, 
 and be willing to keep his mind open to 
 receive any new ray of light, even although 
 that light may discover mistakes in his own 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 105 
 
 cherished bygone conclusions. Neither the 
 commentator nor the student must forget that 
 the materials of all religious thought and feeling 
 lie in our own consciousness and moral reason, 
 and that we are not warranted in adopting any 
 theory of religion until we have succeeded in 
 reconciling it with that light which God has 
 placed within us. 
 
 The Apostle knew that the gospel which he 
 preached was true, not merely because it had 
 been communicated to him by direct revelation 
 from above, but because it had commended it- 
 self to the light within him, and had helped 
 him to understand the contradictions and con- 
 flicts of his own inner being, and the relation 
 in which he stood to God and to all outward 
 events and things ; it could have had no 
 meaning for him apart from that inner being 
 of his and those relations. In like manner the 
 expounder of St. Paul, nay even his ordinary 
 readers are then only qualified for their work 
 when they also make use of their moral con- 
 sciousness, and persevere in requiring its con- 
 currence, whilst endeavouring to follow out and 
 unfold the Apostle's teaching. We have the 
 same spiritual needs and instincts as he, and the 
 
106 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL ? S 
 
 same faculties, in kind if not in degree, and 
 also the same materials from which to satisfy 
 those needs and on which to exercise those 
 faculties ; and we cannot really benefit by his 
 thoughts nor even understand them, unless we 
 ourselves think them, and apprehend how our 
 own spiritual necessities are met by them ; that 
 is, in fact, unless we take our stand upon his 
 stand-point, and see how far our own faculties, 
 acting on the same materials and in the same 
 direction, can honestly go along with him to 
 his conclusions. 
 
 "When we ask ourselves what righteousness 
 is, we have some difficulty in giving an answer. 1 
 Our moral sense apprehends it, but when we 
 attempt a definition we find that we are only 
 using synonymous words. And yet we feel 
 that our capacity of apprehending and possess- 
 ing righteousness is the highest thing within us, 
 connecting us with a spiritual order infinitely 
 transcending the material universe and its laws. 
 We feel that it stands above any idea of mere 
 utility, taken even in its largest sense, 
 although all true utility must depend upon it. 
 We feel that what Hooker has so eloquently 
 
 1 See Appendix C. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 107 
 
 said of Law in general — " that her seat is the 
 bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the 
 universe" — is essentially true of the law of 
 righteousness, and that in leaving its guidance 
 we separate ourselves from the bosom of God 
 and from the fellowship of the spiritual order, 
 and inflict on ourselves a greater evil than the 
 utmost amount of either physical or mental 
 suffering, unconnected with sin, can bring 
 upon us. 
 
 In the material world we see beautiful order 
 maintained by the operation of the law of 
 gravitation. Do we know of anything analo- 
 gous to this in the world of mind ? Our inner 
 consciousness reveals to us the existence of a 
 spiritual order to which we belong and of a 
 spiritual law to which we owe obedience ; 
 a law which though it does not necessitate our 
 conformity to it, fails not to reproach us for 
 every transgression and makes us well aware 
 that we are continually diverging from it. 
 Conflicting attractions act upon us. distracting 
 our own spirit and bringing us into collision 
 with our fellow-creatures. We need a supreme 
 gravitation which shall subdue all inferior 
 attractions and enable us to keep our right 
 
108 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 place in relation to the whole system. The 
 planet, as I have said, has no choice in the 
 matter ; its proper centre of attraction and its 
 law of gravitation are irresistibly and unchange- 
 ably imposed upon it, whereas each one of us 
 must choose his centre and cannot but be rest- 
 less and miserable until he has made the right 
 choice. 
 
 When we behold the beautiful order of 
 the heavenly bodies we could almost envy 
 their unbroken peace, and wish that we like 
 them had a law imposed on us which would 
 make aberrations impossible. But spiritual 
 beings must arrive at rest by another way. 
 We too must have a centre, but it cannot be 
 imposed upon us as it is on the material crea- 
 tion ; we must learn to discern it and choose 
 it for ourselves. God is the true centre of the 
 spiritual world ; and as the relation of the 
 planet to the sun may be said to embrace 
 and govern its relations to all the subordinate 
 parts of the system, so our relation to God 
 embraces and governs all our other relations, 
 aod our rightness with Him insures our Tight- 
 ness with them, as our unrightness with Him 
 insures our universal unrightness. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 109 
 
 In what then does Tightness with God con- 
 sist ? We may confidently say that the great 
 object of St. Paul in his epistle to the Eomans 
 is to answer this question, — to explain the 
 nature of true righteousness and the way of 
 attaining it. We ought not therefore to sup- 
 pose that when he speaks of righteousness — or 
 justification — by faith, he means to set forth 
 any special technical doctrine, but rather that 
 he means generally to teach that a man's true 
 righteousness must commence with and pro- 
 ceed from a just apprehension of the character 
 of God and of the relation in which he stands 
 to God, so that he is then, and then only, truly 
 righteous when he is right in this relation. 
 
 Moreover St. Paul believed that man was 
 created in Christ Jesus, and that his Tightness 
 therefore in relation to God can be nothing 
 else than the rightness of the Son, that is, a 
 filial trustfulness which accepts the whole will 
 of God as the will of a loving Father ; and 
 consequently he teaches that the basis and root 
 of all human righteousness must be the assur- 
 ance that God is indeed our Father and can 
 never cease to be so, that He loves us not 
 because we are worthy of His love but because 
 
110 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 He is our Father, and that His eternal purpose 
 towards us is a purpose of infinite love, to draw 
 us out of all our unworthiness into perfect 
 filial trust and so into perfect participation of 
 His own righteousness and blessedness. We 
 cannot have rightness with God unless we 
 trust in Him, and we cannot have filial trust 
 unless we have the assurance of his paternal 
 love, that is, of an inextinguishable love which 
 will not indeed withhold any needed punish- 
 ment, but which no sin of ours can ever weary- 
 out or weaken, a love which seeks our righteous- 
 ness, and which will persevere until its object 
 is attained. 
 
 St. Paul starts with the purpose of explain- 
 ing these principles, and this purpose will be 
 found to reappear throughout the whole epistle, 
 subordinating to itself even those passages 
 which seem to be most excursive and digressive. 
 And if this be so we are warranted in looking 
 on the epistle as substantially and essentially 
 a treatise on ethics, that is, an exposition of 
 the principles which lead to a right moral 
 state in man. 
 
 The belief that it is the purpose of God to 
 draw all men to true righteousness, and that 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. Ill 
 
 this purpose will most surely be accomplished 
 in the case of every individual, was in the 
 mind of St. Paul a most important help to- 
 wards possessing the faith which justifies or 
 makes a man righteous, and this for an obvious 
 reason. He believed that man's righteousness 
 consists in, or at least is produced by, 
 absolute filial trust in the fatherly love of God, 
 and he saw in this purpose the strongest 
 demonstration of that love ; he probably also 
 thought that no one in whose mind there lurks 
 even the shadow of a suspicion that he may 
 some day, by the force of temptation, so separ- 
 ate himself from God as to be finally lost, 
 can possibly maintain this perfect filial trust 
 in Him. 
 
 Such a fear, if realised, would it is mani- 
 fest effectually preclude trust, and therefore I 
 believe that all who have attained to any 
 degree of real righteousness, are, in fact, what- 
 ever their professed creed in this respect may 
 be, virtually delivered from its bondage. 
 " There is no fear in love, but perfect love 
 casteth out fear, because fear hath torment ; 
 he that feareth is not made perfect in love." 1 
 
 1 See also Rom. viii. 15-17, and Gal. iv. 6, 7. 
 
112 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 Whilst a son believes that by his own mis- 
 conduct he has alienated his father 's heart and 
 converted him into an enemy, he cannot be 
 right with his father, — that is, he cannot pos- 
 sibly love him or trust himself in his hands, 
 or have any of those feelings which it becomes 
 a son to have. But if he discovers that he 
 has been entirely misjudging his father and 
 putting a wrong construction on his conduct, 
 and that those acts which had appeared to 
 him stern and unforgiving, were really dic- 
 tated by wise fatherly love, and if he comes at 
 last to the full conviction that his true welfare 
 and happiness are, as they had been all along 
 and ever must be, his fathers chief objects, 
 then all is changed, his mistrust passes away, 
 and he becomes right with his father. He is 
 justified or set right with him through faith in 
 his fatherly purpose. This I believe to be the 
 meaning of justification by faith, and that it 
 has been altogether misapprehended by those 
 who have converted it into an artificial and 
 very conventional dogma, according to which 
 the holding of a creed gives a man a favour- 
 able standing with God. I believe that St. 
 Paul really meant to express this judgment 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 113 
 
 concerning it when he said that he was not 
 ashamed of the gospel of Christ, because it 
 was the power of God unto salvation to every- 
 one who believed it. It has this "power 
 in virtue of the revelation it makes of this 
 righteousness ; that is, in virtue of the reve- 
 lation which it makes of the fatherly purpose 
 of God towards mankind which, whenever 
 it is believed, will set men right with 
 Him and make them His trustful obedient 
 children. 
 
 The English word "j mth," like its Greek 
 equivalent (ttI<jti$), has two meanings, belief 
 and ^ trust. St. Paul teaches that filiaTTrust 
 is itself righteousness, i.e. the right state of man 
 in relation to God, but that he can only get 
 into that right state by believing in the 
 fatherly relation and fatherly trustworthiness 
 of God. The value of the gospel consists in 
 its containiDg — in the person and work of the 
 Son — the revelation and the evidence of this 
 fatherly relation and trustworthiness ; and 
 the importance of believing it arises out of its 
 fitness to produce filial trust in those who do 
 believe ; for if what I believe does not pro- 
 duce in me filial trust, it does not work right- 
 
 H 
 
114 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 eousness, and therefore is not the power of 
 God unto salvation. 
 
 There are many educated men who, if they 
 spoke out their real sentiments, would acknow- 
 ledge that when they hear the phrase " justifica- 
 tion by faith " they are conscious of a mingled 
 feeling of repugnance and contempt. They 
 consider it as conventional cant, as the mere 
 pass-word of a religious sect, which substitutes 
 a belief of certain empty dogmas in the place 
 of true moral worth. And yet these same 
 men, if they would devote a little earnest 
 thought to the subject, might find that this 
 despised phrase really indicates the foundation 
 of all morality. If they would read the Acts 
 of the Apostles so as to become acquainted 
 with the history and character of Paul, the 
 heroic apostle of the Gentiles and the great 
 teacher of this doctrine, they would feel that 
 what he so earnestly preached cannot possibly 
 be conventional cant, but must be connected 
 with some deep root of reason and truth in 
 human nature. But they have made up their 
 minds that Christianity with all its doctrines 
 rests solely on divine authority, that faith only 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 115 
 
 means implicit acknowledgment of that autho- 
 rity, and therefore that a man who insists on 
 trying principles by reason and conscience 
 must necessarily set aside both. 
 
 It might be somewhat startling to such per- 
 sons to hear any one say that the first clear 
 conception he had come to of this doctrine of 
 justification by faith, was derived from the 
 reported conversations of another heroic apostle 
 to the Gentiles, whose name has escaped all 
 suspicion of cant or conventionality amongst 
 succeeding generations, although like Paul he 
 was condemned by his contemporaries as a 
 setter forth of strange gods. In the dialogue 
 concerning Rhetoric Socrates is represented 
 by Plato as discussing with Gorgias the mean- 
 ing and value of his art. Gorgias explains 
 that it consisted in such a knowledge of the 
 use of words as would enable those who 
 possessed it to secure to themselves a favour- 
 able judgment from any tribunal before which 
 they might have to appear. Socrates puts the 
 question whether the guilt or innocence of the 
 party was a circumstance of any importance 
 in the matter, to which Gorgias answers, that 
 without art on either side the right would 
 
116 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 probably prevail, but that the excellence of 
 his teaching lay in this, that even the sup- 
 porter of a wrong cause — the criminal who 
 deserved punishment — if he used that teaching 
 skilfully, would come off victorious. Socrates 
 then suggests the inquiry whether it is really 
 for the advantage of a man who is guilty that 
 he should escape unpunished, — whether, on 
 the supposition that the laws are really good, 
 that is, wisely framed for the right education 
 of the people, it can possibly be profitable for 
 any one to evade their proper operation, and 
 whether it would not on the whole be the best 
 course for a man to pursue when he felt 
 himself guilty, to present himself to the judge 
 and crave punishment ; and further when 
 he knew any of his friends to be in this 
 position, whether it would not be the truest 
 friendship to urge or even to constrain them 
 to do the same. 
 
 There is exquisite humour in the proposal, 
 but there is a deep principle contained in it 
 which is at the root of all righteousness. To 
 pursue such a course would be possible only 
 on the condition of absolute faith in the ri^ht- 
 ness of the laws and in the beneficial working 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 117 
 
 of the punishments awarded by them ; but it 
 is evident that no man could be in perfect 
 accord with the laws of his country who was 
 not prepared to follow out the proposal. 
 
 The absolute wisdom of any human govern- 
 ment, either in the enactment of laws or in 
 their execution, must always be doubtful ; and 
 therefore an undoubting acceptance of them 
 and submission to them, as an education in 
 righteousness, is not to be expected and might 
 not always be profitable. But if there be a God, 
 if there be an infinitely wise Governor of the 
 universe, His dealings with men must always 
 be intended to constitute such an education, and 
 any one who really believes in God and who 
 at the same time really desires righteousness, 
 is then only acting in consistency with this 
 desire and also with the highest reason, when 
 he commits himself in entire confidence to His 
 guidance and fully accepts all His providential 
 dealings. This confiding state is the right 
 state for a man to be in, and the entire and 
 detailed righteousness necessarily resulting 
 from it would be most properly named " the 
 righteousness of faith." 
 
 Certainly Socrates meant to teach that 
 
118 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 man's truest wisdom was to commit himself 
 unflinchingly, and without regard to present 
 ease and comfort, to the instruction and guid- 
 ance of a divine wisdom, if such could be 
 found, which would never cease its endeavour 
 to conduct him into true and permanent 
 righteousness, that being the only possible 
 true and permanent blessedness. He was 
 well aware of the faults of Athenian laws and 
 judges, but he accepted them as representa- 
 tives and types of a more excellent way. He 
 had within himself the consciousness of an 
 infallible guidance, and knew that it was only 
 by entire subjection of himself and all his 
 selfish imaginations to it, that he could profit 
 by its instructions. All must be right with 
 him who can identify this guidance with the 
 Kuler of the Universe. Doubtless Socrates 
 made this identification, and found in it the 
 assurance that the Euler of the Universe was 
 occupied with the purpose of making him 
 righteous, an assurance which enabled him to 
 welcome everything which befell him, and to 
 look for divine light and instruction in all ; 
 and thus he was justified or set right by that 
 same faith which put St. Paul right also. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 119 
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 If we apprehend that without filial trust 
 our moral capacities can never be fully de- 
 veloped, we shall understand how St. Paul in 
 writing to the converts at Rome at once seizes 
 on this as the chief characteristic of Christian- 
 ity ; " I am not ashamed of the gospel concern- 
 ing Christ, for it is the power of God unto 
 Salvation" that is, unto spiritual life — unto the 
 highest and deepest morality— for in him is 
 revealed this all-important filial trust as ac- 
 cessible to all men. 
 
 He is addressing persons who in that city 
 which was then the world's centre of political 
 power and moral influence, had been drawn 
 together by the sound of the gospel, and desiring 
 to communicate to them his own convictions 
 of the evil of sin and the mighty efficacy of 
 the spiritual leaven contained in the gospel 
 which he anticipated would yet leaven the 
 whole of humanity. It is " the poiver of God" 
 he says, "unto salvation to every one who 
 believeth," — it contains the divine dynamics — 
 it is the spiritual lever whereby men may be 
 
120 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAULAS 
 
 lifted out of sin into righteousness. It is clear 
 that this lifting out of sin into righteousness is 
 the chief meaning here of the term " salvation/' 
 although deliverance from the results of sin 
 is also included. He takes for granted that 
 God is righteous, and starting from this ground 
 he proceeds through the course of the epistle 
 to teach that faith or filial trust in God — the 
 faith of Jesus himself — is the right or righteous 
 state for man. And if we consider that man's 
 righteousness must be determined by the rela- 
 tions in which he stands to that spiritual 
 cosmos or order to which he belongs, and 
 moreover that God is not only the Head and 
 Author of that cosmos, but also the one Foun- 
 tain out of which all righteousness must flow, 
 we shall be convinced that this is the truest 
 description that could be given of human 
 righteousness : first because trust in the right- 
 eous God must itself be righteous, and secondly 
 because it puts man in a condition to receive 
 the inflow of God s righteousness. 
 
 It was the purpose of God that as men are 
 sons — in virtue of having been created in the 
 Son — they should also be partakers of the 
 Son s love and holiness and blessedness by be- 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 121 
 
 coming partakers in his " faith," that is, in his 
 dependent recipient filial trust in the Father. 
 This filial trust is the special attribute of the 
 Son, and the call on us for such trust contains 
 in it the assurance that we are sons, as we 
 could not otherwise answer the call. 1 Our 
 participation in this trust is our righteousness, 
 being that which keeps us right with God and 
 His order, maintaining spiritual life within us 
 and holding the lower nature in due subordi- 
 nation to the higher. And as this trust is 
 man's righteousness, when he ceases to exercise 
 it he loses his righteousness and necessarily 
 falls into disorder and anarchy. 
 
 It was in this fallen condition that Paul 
 contemplated men, and the glory of the 
 gospel in his eyes was that it contained a 
 fitting remedy. They had lost trust in 
 God, and in order to have it restored they 
 
 1 We are not to make ourselves sons by exercising the trust, 
 but to exercise it in the belief that we are already sons. The 
 thought that we are to entitle ourselves to trust in God by any 
 doings or efforts of our own is a deceiving thought which, 
 though it may commend itself to the unaistructed conscience, 
 can never produce real righteousness, being opposed to any true 
 self-appreciation and to that spirit of dependence which is the 
 filial spirit. In fact it is of the nature of sin, which consists 
 essentially in that self -trust which separates the creature from 
 its Creator. 
 
122 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 needed to have an assurance that although 
 they had destroyed themselves God had not 
 abandoned them, but still looked on them 
 as His children, and still retained His ori- 
 ginal purpose of making them partakers of 
 His own righteousness and blessedness. The 
 gospel of Jesus Christ was the declaration of 
 that purpose in a form suited to their present 
 circumstances. They were conscious that they 
 were sinners, and this consciousness made 
 the thought of God a terror to them ; they 
 knew they had deserved His wrath, and they 
 knew not — or believed not — that in wrath He 
 remembers mercy ; hence they could not trust 
 Him. Yet nothing but filial trust could pro- 
 duce righteousness ; therefore unless it could 
 be made plain both to their reason and to 
 their conscience that there did exist in God a 
 fatherly love which no amount of sin could 
 extinguish, there was no righteousness pos- 
 sible for them. To make this demonstration 
 — to prove that God's fatherly relation was 
 not broken off by their transgressions — the 
 well-beloved Son came forth from the bosom 
 of the Father. 
 
 St. Paul begins the epistle by declaring his 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 123 
 
 own official separation to the service of the 
 gospel, which he calls "the gospel of God 
 concerning His Son, who was made of the seed 
 of David according to the flesh, and declared 
 to be the Son of God with power, according 
 to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection 
 from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, by whom 
 we have received grace and apostleship, for 
 obedience to the faith," or, in order to bring 
 men under the obedience of faith. He thus 
 appears to assume that the purpose of the 
 gospel was to bring man into a state of trust- 
 ful obedience, or under the influence of trust 
 in God ; and that the preaching of it 
 consisted in the setting forth of Jesus Christ, 
 as the Son of God who had taken man's 
 nature and had in that nature been raised 
 from the dead, and had thus been declared 
 to be the Son of God according to the spirit 
 of holiness, by the resurrection from the 
 dead. 
 
 He makes no comment od this statement 
 concerning " the Son of God." He apparently 
 takes it for granted that the Eoman disciples 
 had learnt its meaning, for he expresses his 
 thankfulness that their " faith was spoken of 
 
124 THOUGHTS OX ST. PAULS 
 
 throughout the whole world ; " but we are 
 entitled to infer that the coming of Christ into 
 our nature, and his victory over death, and his 
 resurrection from the grave as our Head, form 
 the substance of that gospel which he had 
 been set apart to proclaim, and of which in the 
 16th verse he declares, I am not ashamed of 
 it, "for it is the power of God unto salvation, 
 to the Jew first, and also to the Greek ; for 
 therein is the righteousness of God by faith " 
 — that is, by trust — revealed for our belief 
 (hiKaioavvr) jap Qeov ev avra> airoKaXvirrerai €/c 
 Trio-Tews eU irlorw), " as it is written, The just 
 shall live by faith." 
 
 When we first come upon this passage we 
 naturally expect to find in it light as to the 
 meaning of the gospel, but when we have 
 studied it carefully most of us will confess that 
 it has not fulfilled our expectations. We 
 might have expected St. Paul to enlarge on 
 the love of God who had thus revealed Him- 
 self to us in the eternal Son, and who had by 
 sending that Son into our nature, after we had 
 destroyed ourselves by sin, given us the assur- 
 ance that He not merely forgives us but that 
 He still regards us as beloved children. We 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 125 
 
 might have expected him to dwell on the 
 resurrection of Christ — the Head of humanity 
 — as the pledge of a triumph over death and 
 " him who has the power of death, that is, the 
 devil," in which all the race shall ultimately 
 participate. This would have been intelligibly 
 a gospel. Instead of this we only find words 
 about the "righteousness of God" somewhat 
 difficult to put a meaning on. The English 
 rendering affords no help ; the translators 
 appear to have given up hope of finding any 
 meaning whatever in it, and to have satisfied 
 themselves with setting down English words 
 which might in some sort correspond with the 
 original. And even in doing this they have 
 been careless, for they have rendered the same 
 Greek preposition (e/e) in two different ways 
 in the same verse — from faith in the one 
 clause, and by faith in the other — when mani- 
 festly its use in the second instance was in- 
 tended to govern and to explain its use in the 
 first. It ought to have been rendered " The 
 righteousness of God by faith is revealed to 
 faith" — or, for belief — "as it is written, The just 
 shall live by faith," or perhaps better thus — 
 "The just by-faith shall live." The man, i.e. 
 
126 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 who has been Tightened or set right by faith 
 
 shall live (o Se hUaio^ Ik TTLO-reco^ ^iqaeTai). As 
 the words stand in our translation they give 
 no indication of the connection between that 
 " righteousness by," that is, proceeding out of 
 "faith" which gives the gospel its dynamic 
 power, and the words quoted from Habakkuk ; 
 although the whole force of the passage lies 
 in this connection. The glory of the gospel, 
 the apostle tells us, consists in its full revela- 
 tion of that "righteousness by faith" which, 
 the old prophet declared, is life to the man 
 who possesses it. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the great diffi- 
 culty of the passage lies in this very expression, 
 " the righteousness of God by faith" Does it 
 mean the righteousness of God in Himself — 
 that is, as manifested in His own character and 
 actings % — and if so, how can it be by faith 1 or 
 does it mean a righteousness in man produced 
 by faith ? and if this is the meaning, why is it 
 called the righteousness of God? and how 
 can it be the distinguishing feature of the 
 gospel \ 
 
 The quotation from Habakkuk, rightly trans- 
 lated, throws light upon this difficulty ; as it 
 
EPISTLE TO THE JIOMANS. 127 
 
 shows that the " righteousness of God " 1 in the 
 first clause of the 16th verse cannot here mean 
 God's own righteousness, i.e. righteousness in 
 God Himself or in His own actings, but must 
 mean the righteousness of a man who is put 
 right with God by faith in God's righteousness. 
 To understand the passage we must turn to 
 the prophecy from which the quotation is 
 taken, and to which the apostle evidently 
 points as the key to his discourse. 
 
 Habakkuk had been commissioned to an- 
 nounce to his countrymen a terrible chastise- 
 ment, in the form of a Chaldean invasion. He 
 felt the grievousness of his country's sin and 
 the righteousness of the divine indignation 
 against it ; but his knowledge of the true 
 character of God soon enabled him, even in 
 the full vision of the impending calamity, to 
 take hold of the assurance that He would use 
 punishment not for the destruction of the sin- 
 ners but for their deliverance from the sin. "0 
 Lord," he exclaims, " Thou hast ordained them 
 
 1 The Scriptures afford other instances of this subjective form 
 of expression, e.g. " Is there yet any of the house of Saul that 
 I may show the kindness of God to him ? " (2 Sam. ix. 3.) " The 
 peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your 
 hearts " (Phil. iv. 7). 
 
128 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 for judgment, and, mighty God, Thou hast 
 established them for correction. " The prophet 
 was put right with God by faith in this fatherly 
 purpose ; he looked forward to the blessed re- 
 sult, and that enabled him to accept with 
 thankful submission the process, however pain- 
 ful, by which it was to be brought about. 
 
 He found the blessing of faith in its exercise ; 
 it was a deliverance, a redemption from fear 
 and mistrust of God, and from the alienation 
 consequent on such a state of mind. He was 
 not rewarded for his faith in any other way 
 than as a hungry man is rewarded for eating. 
 His faith simply laid hold of God's purpose, 
 and he was justified or made right with God 
 by doing so. He thus possessed the righteous- 
 ness of faith. Eemark also that he made the 
 first step towards it, before the vision of the 
 final triumph of good was granted to him, by 
 the simple exercise of his spiritual understand- 
 ing. His own account of the way by which 
 he arrived at peace is very instructive. He 
 describes himself, when the announcement of 
 the coming calamity is first made to him, as 
 looking up to God and thus addressing Him — 
 " Art Thou not from everlasting, Lord my 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 129 
 
 God, my holy One V And from the remem- 
 brance that God was the holy One he springs 
 at once to this conclusion — "We shall not 
 die." 
 
 It was after he had gained this sure stand- 
 ing-ground for himself and his own nation, 
 that the further intimation was given to him 
 that the ultimate result of all God's dealings 
 with man would be the entire destruction of all 
 evil. " The earth shall be full of the know- 
 ledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters 
 cover the sea." This blessed consummation 
 might be long of coming, but he is encouraged 
 to " wait for it " by the assurance that " though 
 it tarry it will surely come, it will not tarry." 
 The conviction that this was God's purpose 
 enabled Habakkuk to welcome even the Chal- 
 dean invasion, and in the prospect of its near 
 approach to sing that triumphant song with 
 which his prophecy concludes, "Though the 
 fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be 
 in the vines ; the labour of the olive shall fail, 
 and the fields shall yield no meat ; the flock 
 shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall 
 be no herd in the stalls : yet I will rejoice in the 
 Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." 
 
 I 
 
130 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 The apostle saw still more clearly than 
 Habakkuk did " that bow made quite naked " 
 in heaven which, in spite of the present vio- 
 lence of the storm, gives the assurance of a 
 coming blessing ; he also saw, under the wrath, 
 an omnipotent righteous love which uses that 
 wrath for its own purposes, and of which it is 
 only the needful expression. 
 
 This gospel is indeed a blessed one, giving 
 us the assurance that forgiveness in its deepest 
 meaning is a permanent element in God's rela- 
 tion to us ; inasmuch as it declares that good 
 shall ultimately triumph over evil, blessing 
 over cursing, life over death. If we can adopt 
 this hope and make it our own, if we can but 
 see that God's holiness — His abhorrence, i.e. 
 of all iniquity — is really a pledge that He will 
 seek not to destroy us but it, in other words, 
 to deliver us from it, we have our feet upon a 
 rock, we have hold of a hope which cannot be 
 taken from us. As soon as we distinctly see 
 that it is more to the glory of God's holiness to 
 turn us from sin than to punish us without 
 reference to that as the object and result of 
 the punishment, we are within sight of that 
 peace which passeth all understanding; for 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 131 
 
 then the loudest thunders of conscience, in- 
 stead of being prophetic of endless misery, 
 become to us the sure witnesses of an untiring 
 love which will never cease its efforts to sepa- 
 rate us from all evil. 
 
 Faith in God as having this purpose is the 
 spiritua] condition which Habakkuk considers 
 to be the only right condition for a man to be in ; 
 and the apostle adopts the idea, and boasts of 
 the gospel concerning Christ as " the power of 
 God unto Salvation," "because therein," or, 
 perhaps better, "in him" (that is, in Christ 
 the subject of the Gospel) is contained the reve- 
 lation both of this righteous faith, and of that 
 Divine love which is the full and sufficient 
 foundation for all righteous faith or filial trust 
 in man. 
 
 This then is the simple meaning of what 
 has been called the Pauline doctrine of justifi- 
 cation by faith, though other meanings have 
 been given which have bewildered the minds of 
 men and led them away from the simplicity of 
 truth. But there can be no reason for calling 
 it by his name, as all our Lord's personal teach- 
 ing, and indeed all the teaching of the Old as 
 well as of the New Testament, rests upon it. 
 
132 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 It was even taught, as we have seen, implicitly 
 by Socrates who had never heard of either, 
 and who yet was, like Paul himself, a real 
 apostle of the Gentiles though preceding him 
 by some centuries. I believe that it is special 
 neither to Judaism nor to Christianity, that it 
 is in fact no peculiar doctrine, separable from 
 others, but rather the intelligible sum and sub- 
 stance of all doctrine, and that the value of 
 the special revelations of Christianity really 
 consists in the illustration and corroboration 
 which they give to it. For no one can doubt 
 that faith or filial trust in Cod, as the Almighty 
 Father who orders all events for the spiritual 
 education and eternal good of His children, 
 is the right condition of mind for spiritual 
 beings, the condition which will best fit them 
 for walking with God, and doing and ac- 
 cepting His will in the duties and events of 
 life ; in other words, that such faith is their 
 righteousness. 
 
 Such an assurance as this I would call true 
 natural religion, and I would even say that 
 this naturalness is the test by which the truth 
 of any revelation, claiming to be from God, 
 must in the last resort be judged. I know that 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 133 
 
 in speaking thus I run the risk of offending 
 those who have been accustomed to think of 
 natural religion as the mere product of man's 
 own imagination and reasoning, and who there- 
 fore condemn it as the presumptuous rival and 
 enemy of revealed religion ; but I would ex- 
 plain that the religion which I call natural is 
 not the production of man's reasoning or 
 imagination, nor at all opposed to supernatural 
 or revealed religion, but is itself a supernatural 
 revelation to the heart of every individual 
 testifying there to what is righteous, and 
 proving itself, by the response of conscience, 
 to be of God. 
 
 We are not therefore to imagine that when 
 Paul preached the righteousness of faith, he 
 thought he was announcing an altogether new 
 principle, or that no such righteousness had 
 been known till he preached it. He only 
 assumed that whenever or wherever righteous- 
 ness had appeared in man, its root was, and 
 must have been, trust in a sovereign righteous- 
 ness, because real righteousness always implies 
 a sacrifice of self which nothing but trust can 
 call forth. In his preaching of Christ crucified 
 Paul showed the deepest ground of that prin- 
 
134 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 ciple, and thus gave it distinctness and promi- 
 nence, but it was a principle on which, however 
 dimly discerned, men must at all times have 
 acted whenever they have in any measure 
 attained to righteousness. The Eternal Son is 
 the model of trust. In other words, self- 
 sacrifice, which is necessarily implied in filial 
 trust and obedience, is his eternal and essential 
 characteristic, justifying the title given to him 
 " the Lamb slain before the foundation of the 
 world. " The sacrifice on Calvary was the 
 manifestation in time of this eternal reality. 
 
 But can we really believe that Paul meant 
 to represent the revelation of this righteous 
 faith — this human righteousness (for though 
 received out of God assuredly it is righteous- 
 ness in man that is here spoken of) as that 
 which made the gospel the power of God unto 
 salvation ? Is he not in so doing putting the 
 effect for the cause ? Is not the revelation of 
 God's fatherly purpose the real cause — the real 
 power — of which man s righteousness is only 
 the result ? It may be said doubtless that 
 the revelation of a righteousness in man 
 springing out of faith implies a character in 
 God as the ground of such faith, without 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 135 
 
 which the faith could not exist ; but, though 
 this be so, we must still ask what reason the 
 apostle could have had for expressing himself 
 in such an indirect and apparently illogical 
 manner. 
 
 Two reasons may be suggested. In the 
 first place, although the character and purpose 
 of God were really occupying the Apostle's 
 mind, yet the occurrence to him of the passage 
 from Habakkuk might naturally have led him 
 to express himself as he does, because that 
 quotation directly refers not to the character 
 of God which calls forth the faith of man but 
 to the human character arising out of (etc) that 
 faith. Moreover it is not an abstract principle 
 but a living man that is there presented to us, 
 ' ' The man made right by faith shall live." It 
 is natural for Paul to identify this " righteous 
 man" with Jesus, and in his resurrection to 
 see the literal fulfilment of the declaration " he 
 shall live," that is he shall overcome death ; 
 especially as he had before said that Jesus 
 was "declared to be the Son of God with 
 power, by the resurrection from the dead." 
 
 But there is another reason connected with 
 the mode in which the Christian revelation 
 
136 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAULS 
 
 was made which doubtless decided him to use 
 this phraseology. That revelation was made 
 in the person of Jesus Christ. It has been 
 said that there is in the eastern mind less 
 demand for the accurate observance of dis- 
 tinction between the object and subject in re- 
 ligious thought than in ours ; and it sometimes 
 almost seems as if in Paul's hand the righteous- 
 ness of faith becomes itself the gospel. This 
 however is quite natural. Christ is himself 
 both object and subject in Christianity. He 
 both shows forth the Father's loving purpose 
 which is the ground of all faith, and he lives 
 by the faith which rests on that purpose. He 
 is thus both the gospel itself, and in him is 
 shown forth that righteousness by faith which 
 is its most precious product. Thus whilst he 
 is the object of faith as the Eevealer of the 
 Father, he is also the exerciser of faith as the 
 Truster in the Father. 
 
 This seems to me not only to explain the 
 apostle's reason for choosing this way of ex- 
 pressing himself but to confirm the suggestion 
 that the words (eV avrw) in ver. 17, rendered in 
 the English version " therein," ought to be ren- 
 dered "in him," i.e. in Christ. It may indeed 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 137 
 
 be said that the gospel, not Christ, is the sub- 
 ject of the argument. St. Paul seems to be 
 explaining how the gospel is "the power of 
 God unto salvation," and this explanation, it 
 may be contended, must consist in telling us 
 what is contained therein; but let it be re- 
 membered that it is the gospel concerning 
 Christ, and that assuredly all its virtue — all its 
 " power " — must lie in what it tells us of him, 
 that is in what it reveals as existing " in him." 1 
 This life-giving righteousness by faith is 
 revealed in the history of Christ, and it is re- 
 vealed for, or with a view to faith (eU it'kjtiv) ; 
 that is, to bring all men under the influence of 
 the same faith. Thus it is Christ's own faith 
 that we are called to enter into — the faith of 
 Habakkuk fully developed into the faith of 
 the Son. Our faith in Christ — our belief, i.e. 
 that he is the eternal Son, that he is our 
 Head, and that as our Head he lived and died 
 for us — is not in itself the faith of Christ, it is 
 
 1 The three great and most ancient mss. (S. V. and A.) omit 
 tov Xptarov in ver. 16, but if we look back to the 3d and 4th 
 verses where the description is expanded, of what in the 16th 
 verse is simply called the Gospel, we shall see that the latter is 
 in fact merely an abbreviation of the former, and if we substi- 
 tute the longer for the shorter statement, we shall find that the 
 sense not only admits of the change but requires it. 
 
138 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 only a belief concerning him which enables us 
 to enter into and adopt his faith, the faith, 
 i.e. by which he himself lived. 
 
 I know that many will feel as if it were a 
 lowering of Christ's position in relation to man 
 to hold forth his faith in the Father as a model 
 for us to follow, and that they will also feel it 
 to be a misuse of terms to call this a gospel. 
 They will say that it would be as reasonable 
 to give such a name to the first commandment 
 of the law as to give it to a call to follow the 
 example of Christ. But if Jesus, being very 
 man, tempted like as we are, subjected to all 
 conditions of humanity, even to death, was 
 enabled by the Eternal Spirit to offer himself 
 in the self-sacrifice of filial confidence without 
 spot of sin to his Father, there is certainly a 
 great gospel in his being set forth to us as an 
 example, because it contains the assurance 
 that God is as truly our Father as He is his 
 Father, and that consequently we have the 
 same right to trust our Father and the same 
 capacity of trust as he had. He could not 
 otherwise be righteously set forth as an ex- 
 ample at all. The proposal would become a 
 cruel mockery. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 139 
 
 Many may also shrink from this way of dis- 
 tinguishing between faith in the Father — that 
 filial trust which was Christ's own faith — and 
 belief in the Divine nature and work of Christ, 
 and from looking on this last as only a step- 
 ping-stone to the former. It is however a dis- 
 tinction entirely recognised in the New Testa- 
 ment. Let me cite especially 1 Peter i. 18-21, 
 where the apostle says — "Ye were not re- 
 deemed with corruptible things . . . but with 
 the precious blood of Christ . . . who verily 
 was foreordained before the foundation of the 
 world, but was manifest in these last times for 
 you, who by him do believe in God, that raised 
 him up from the dead, and gave him glory ; that 
 your faith and hope might be in God!' The 
 fundamental and ultimate faith here spoken of 
 is trust in God ; and the appearance of the Son 
 in our nature and all that he did and suffered 
 for us are discoveries to us of the deep grounds 
 of that trust. In Jesus Christ — in his life, 
 death, and resurrection — that righteousness of 
 faith (of which Habakkuk speaks) is set forth 
 in its true development of filial trust. 
 
 Faith in its deepest sense is not a belief in 
 doctrines, although the belief of all true doctrines 
 
140 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 is helpful to our having faith. Whilst however I 
 make this distinction between the faith which 
 is the participation of Christ's own trust in the 
 Father and that belief in himself — as the Son 
 of God and Head of humanity — through which 
 we may rise up into that ultimate faith, I also 
 feel assured that St. Paul so apprehended the 
 connection between faith in Christ and trust in 
 the Father that he is not always careful to 
 distinguish between them, conceiving that the 
 one is involved in the other. 
 
 It will be observed that though there is no 
 mention of forgiveness in this passage, yet the 
 fullest forgiveness is implied in it. As sinners 
 we cannot have filial trust in God, unless we 
 believe that He forgives our sins ; and as we 
 are called to exercise this trust, we have in 
 this call the assurance that he does forgive 
 them. But forgiveness in its deepest sense 
 does not mean deliverance from a penalty or 
 the reversal of a sentence, it means the con- 
 tinuance of a fatherly purpose of final good, 
 even through the infliction of the penalty and 
 the execution of the sentence. 
 
 Jesus is set forth, suffering death as the 
 penalty of sin in unswerving filial trust, as a 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 141 
 
 manifestation to us of that righteousness which 
 God desires to see in us. But surely this in- 
 structs us that under that same sentence of 
 death, with all its precursors and concomitants, 
 even when aggravated by the personal con- 
 sciousness of sin, we are entitled and com- 
 manded to look to God as a loving Father who 
 can make even these things work together for 
 our progress in righteousness. In the truest 
 theology forgiveness (taken in the sense of re- 
 mission of penalty) is never considered as an 
 ultimate blessing, but only as means to an end. 
 That end is righteousness. It is always God's 
 end in all His dealings with us, and he desires 
 that it should be ours. He sent His Son, not to 
 save us from punishment, but to save us from 
 sin, to restore us to the paths of righteousness. 
 This is His unchangeable purpose, and for- 
 giveness, taken as an affirmation that it is so, 
 is absolutely necessary as the foundation of all 
 faith and consequently of all righteousness in 
 man. 
 
 Christ did not come either to obtain the 
 Father's forgiveness, or to justify him in be- 
 stowing it. It was the Father's spontaneous 
 forgiving love which sent him into the world 
 
142 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 to accomplish His purpose of educating man 
 into righteousness. The language of Scripture 
 is most decided on this point ; it never repre- 
 sents Christ as reconciling God to man, but 
 always as reconciling man to God. 1 
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 The Jewish Scriptures from first to last had 
 declared that it was not the purpose of God 
 to restrict the knowledge of himself to the 
 Jewish family, but that from the beginning 
 He had intended to bring the whole human 
 race within the embrace of His love. In 
 putting that family under his more immediate 
 and palpable government He was setting up 
 in them not only a type and witness of the un- 
 changeable and permanent principles of His rule 
 over all nations, but also a living channel by 
 means of which these principles might be dis- 
 seminated throughout the earth. It is worthy 
 of remark that this large purpose of blessing 
 for the whole race of man is repeated on every 
 occasion when the special promise to Abraham 
 
 1 See 2 Cor. v. 18-20 and Col. i. 20. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 143 
 
 is given, so that it was really in contradiction 
 to their most venerated oracles that the Jews 
 were so slow to admit that the favour of God 
 could rest on any who were not of their blood. 
 " In thy seed shall all nations of the earth be 
 blessed" is the unlimited announcement made 
 to Abraham, which surely in its natural inter- 
 pretation gives the expectation of eventual 
 blessedness for every child of man, and which 
 at least ought to have prepared the Jews to 
 welcome all the other races to a share in their 
 privileges. The rite of circumcision and the 
 law of Moses distinguished and separated them 
 from other nations. The promise of the seed 
 united them to all. But they preferred dis- 
 tinction to union; they could not or they 
 would not understand that they and those other 
 nations stood on the same level before God ; 
 they did not see that true blessedness consists 
 in righteousness, and that righteousness con- 
 sists in the unselfish love of God and man, 
 independent of caste or creed, of rite or cere- 
 mony. 
 
 Thus the question of Jewish superiority 
 entered necessarily into the apostle's discussion 
 concerning the nature of righteousness and the 
 
144 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 way of attaining it. The Jew thought that there 
 was a righteousness in being of the holy seed 
 and in possessing a divinely constituted law. 1 
 Paul meets this thought by the self-evident 
 proposition that righteousness cannot consist 
 in having a law but in obeying it, and by 
 maintaining that wherever the spiritual re- 
 quirements of the law are complied with, there 
 and there only righteousness is to be acknow- 
 ledged, whether in Jew or Gentile. In his 
 large thought he refused to limit righteousness 
 to the profession of either Christianity or Juda- 
 ism ; he believed that amongst Gentiles as well 
 as Jews there had always been individuals 
 who " by patient continuance in well-doing 
 had sought for glory, honour and immortality," 
 and that to all such God communicates eternal 
 life. At the same time he believed that those 
 well-doers must have become what they are 
 by trust in a supreme good — a perfect right- 
 eousness — by trust in One who desires their 
 
 1 This was not true Judaism, but the corruption into which 
 Judaism had fallen. The true Jew trusted in the God of his 
 fathers, because He was the only and righteous One who would 
 therefore seek to make him holy and righteous. " I will 
 direct my prayer unto thee and will look up, for thou art not 
 a God that hath pleasure in wickedness, neither shall evil dwell 
 with thee." — Ps, v. 3, 4. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 145 
 
 righteousness, and that such trust was most 
 rare and exceptional, because almost univer- 
 sally men had formed for themselves a false 
 conception of God, which made trust in Him 
 as a righteous Father absolutely impossible. 
 
 "Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the 
 righteousness of the law, shall not his uncir- 
 cumcision be counted for circumcision ? For 
 he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, neither 
 is that circumcision which is outward in the 
 flesh, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and 
 circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit 
 and not in the letter, whose praise is not of 
 men but of God." 
 
 The apostle then supposes the Jew to reason 
 thus, — " But surely our nation must have some 
 advantage over others." " The real advantage," 
 Paul replies, "consists not in any immunity 
 saving the Jew from the necessity of right- 
 eousness, but in the access which his Jewish 
 circumstances give him to those oracles of 
 God of which his nation is the keeper, and in 
 the help which he may derive from these 
 oracles in his spiritual education." This ad- 
 vantage a carnal mind craving only ease and 
 security could not appreciate. The Jew de T 
 
 K 
 
146 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 sired an imputed righteousness which cost him 
 nothing, not considering that an imputed 
 righteousness could only prove an imputed 
 blessedness. He thought that the promises of 
 God were made to Abraham and his seed 
 according to the flesh, whereas they were 
 really made to those who were not of the 
 circumcision only, but who also walked in the 
 steps of that faith of our father Abraham 
 which he had yet being uncircumcised. The 
 limitation of the blessing to the spiritual seed 
 was not created by an arbitrary decree but 
 existed in the nature of things ; righteousness 
 and spiritual blessedness being one and the 
 same thing. 
 
 What then ? Are we (the Jews) better than 
 the Gentiles % No, in no wise, for we have 
 before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that 
 they are all under sin. St. Paul follows this 
 up by quotations from the Psalms, which 
 declare in the strongest terms the universal 
 corruption which prevailed. " As it is written, 
 There is none righteous, no not one, there is 
 none that understandeth, there is none that 
 seeketh after God ;" winding them up with 
 this comment, "Now we know that whatso- 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 147 
 
 ever things the law saith, it saith to them who 
 are under the law, that every mouth may be 
 stopped, and all the world may become guilty 
 before God. Therefore by the deeds of the 
 law shall no flesh be justified in His sight, for 
 by the law is the knowledge of sin." He 
 certainly seems here to assume that the law 
 itself taken merely as law or commandment, 
 does not contain an antidote to this evil state 
 of things ; it commands righteousness, but it 
 does not disclose the principle or influence 
 which may produce righteousness in the 
 sinner. 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 Much of the first and second chapters and 
 a great part of the third are filled with terrible 
 proofs of the evil consequences of departure 
 from God through the want of faith both 
 in Jews and Gentiles. The depravity was 
 universal, not only amongst the ignorant but 
 amongst the enlightened and cultivated, not 
 only amongst the Gentiles, but amongst the 
 Jews notwithstanding their superior light. 
 The contemplation of this accumulated mass 
 
148 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 of iniquity seems to suggest the question, Is 
 not something beyond this principle of trust 
 now required ? Trust may suffice to sustain a 
 righteous man in righteousness, but how is it 
 to deal with transgression ? Can a man who is 
 conscious of guilt, who feels himself lying under 
 condemnation, trust in God as his Father ? 
 Is he entitled to do so ? "With this thought in 
 his mind the apostle seems led to the conclu- 
 sion that, if filial trust is the only possible 
 righteousness for a creature, there must be in 
 the character of God Himself a foundation for 
 such trust which no sin in man can overthrow ; 
 and he proceeds to show that ground for this 
 assurance is contained in the revelation of 
 Jesus Christ, " whom God set forth " as exer- 
 cising that very trust even whilst suffering 
 under the execution of the penalty which had 
 been denounced against sin. 
 
 This is the advance made in the third 
 chapter beyond the principle announced in 
 the first. In that first statement human 
 righteousness is declared to consist in filial 
 trust, and when the question is moved, Can 
 man under the condemnation of sin exercise 
 this trust ? it is answered by the appearance 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 149 
 
 of Jesus actually exercising this trust whilst 
 under this condemnation, and thus declaring 
 that it was competent for every man to do the 
 same. 1 From the beginning the trust was not 
 to rest on any merit in the truster, but simply 
 on the fatherly love of Him in whom the trust 
 is placed, and seeing that filial trust is the 
 root-principle through which alone true inward 
 rightness of character as well as right ac- 
 tions can be produced, there was, according 
 to the law of faith, no boasting before sin 
 entered into the world any more than after. 
 The apostle therefore is not setting aside the 
 law through faith, but establishing it. 
 
 In the 21st verse of the third chapter, St. 
 Paul returns to the subject of the righteousness 
 of faith, and to the manifestation of it in Christ 
 Jesus. He is brought back to this subject by 
 the conviction that it is a real substantial 
 righteousness which is required, not a mere 
 forgiveness of past sin ; so that nothing con- 
 
 1 It has been remarked that our apostle is often in the habit 
 of carrying forward his argument not so much by the way of 
 premiss and inference as by the re-statement of the same idea 
 with some addition or modification. He is following out this 
 method most strikingly in these two passages. 
 
150 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 ventional or ceremonial, even though instituted 
 by God Himself, can supply what is wanting. 
 Jew and Gentile stand on the same level, both 
 being sinners and both requiring righteousness. 
 I am sure that many readers, imbued with 
 the theology of later times, must have felt that 
 up to this point there has been a defect in this 
 Gospel of St. Paul. There has been no allusion 
 in it to what they have been accustomed to con- 
 sider the most important part of Christ's work 
 upon earth, namely his vicarious sacrificial 
 death as an atonement for the sins of the 
 world, and they will now expect this defect to 
 be filled up. I think that on candidly ex- 
 amining the passage they will find that the 
 apostle is only strengthening his former state- 
 ment, and that the want which they feel is 
 really filled up in that very statement, though 
 not altogether in the way they expected. His 
 words are " But now the righteousness of God 
 without the law is manifested, being witnessed 
 by the law and the prophets ; even the right- 
 eousness of God which is by faith of Jesus 
 Christ unto all and upon all them that be- 
 lieve ; for there is no difference : for all have 
 sinned and come short of the glory of God : 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 
 
 151 
 
 being justified freely by his grace, through the 
 redemption that is in Christ Jesus ; whom God 
 hath set forth to he a propitiation through faith 
 in his blood, to declare His righteousness for 
 the remission of sins that are past, through 
 the forbearance of God ; to declare, I say, at 
 this time His righteousness ; that He might be 
 just, and the justifier of him which believeth 
 in Jesus." 
 
 I am aware that the doctrine of expiation 
 through the vicarious death of Christ is sacred 
 and precious to the hearts of many, never- 
 theless I am compelled to regard it as a 
 human invention opposed to the true charac- 
 ter of God. Christianity reveals God as a 
 Father whose purpose is to train His children 
 into a participation of the spirit and character 
 of His Son. The "justification " therefore or 
 vindication of His dealings towards us is not in 
 the assurance that the claims of justice have 
 been satisfied before He shows mercy, but in 
 the discovery of this gracious purpose in those 
 dealings, and in their fitness to accomplish it. 
 Just as the righteousness of an earthly father 
 consists in his purpose to make his children 
 righteous, and cannot be conceived of as sepa- 
 
152 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 rate from it, and the vindication of his right- 
 eousness is the discovery of this purpose in all 
 his conduct towards them. 
 
 The appearance of Jesus Christ on the earth 
 was the expression of an infinite love already 
 existing in the Father's heart. His coming 
 into man's flesh whilst it lay under condemna- 
 tion of death was the announcement that the 
 sin of man had not changed God's fatherly pur- 
 pose, and that, however overwhelming our sense 
 of sin may be, we are yet called on — without 
 any intervening process — at once (ev ra> vvv 
 Kaipcp, i.e. in each successive present moment) 
 to trust God as our Father, and thus to come 
 into a righteous state. On this fact faith 
 may always rest, and from it faith may always 
 take a fresh start, into whatever sin we may 
 have fallen. 
 
 It is a chief point in the teaching of Chris- 
 tianity that we should always have this assur- 
 ance, and yet that it should be no encourage- 
 ment to continue in sin. It reveals to us that 
 according to the eternal necessity of things 
 blessedness cannot be separated from that trust 
 in God which constitutes righteousness, nor 
 misery from that self-trust which constitutes 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 153 
 
 sin ; and that the very ground of our trust in 
 Him is the unchangeableness of His purpose 
 that we should be righteous. This unchange- 
 ableness is revealed in Christ, and we know 
 that whatever our sin may have been, the 
 favour of God always rests on him, and we as 
 his members always participate- — in a true 
 and real sense — in that favour, and in order 
 to be right with God have only to open our 
 hearts to its influence. So long as we are not 
 doing; so we cannot but remain unrighteous 
 and unblessed, but we must not allow ourselves 
 to forget that this is our position ; we must not 
 i.e. interpret the condemnation of our own con- 
 science as a declaration from God that He has 
 cast us off, but rather as His declaration that, 
 because He has not cast us off, He cannot per- 
 mit us to go on separating ourselves from Him. 
 No suffering of a penalty due to sin either 
 by ourselves or by another in our place can 
 put sin away, for sin is a spiritual thing and 
 can only be put away by return to righteous- 
 ness ; and, as sin has also a strictly individual 
 character, it is only by becoming righteous our- 
 selves, and not by another being so in our 
 steady that sin in us can be truly put away. 
 
154 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 Salvation in its highest sense must be a per- 
 sonal and individual thing ; and therefore in 
 order to attain it each man must himself par- 
 ticipate in the filial trust of Christ which is 
 righteousness. 
 
 But although Christ's work is not substitu- 
 tional or, in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 vicarious, still it is work done for man in a 
 sense applicable to the work of no other human 
 being. He does nothing instead of us — no- 
 thing, that is, to save us from doing it ; he does 
 things for us that we also may in him have 
 power to do them. He did not die to save us 
 from dying, but that we might, in the power of 
 an endless life, die with him, that we might 
 by partaking in his death — by surrendering 
 our life as he did into the hand of the Father 
 in loving confidence — be also partakers of his 
 resurrection. When he assumed our nature 
 under all its evil conditions he lived by faith, 
 he accepted sorrow and death in faith, it was 
 the cup his Father had given him to drink, and 
 in doing so he overcame death and him who 
 had the power of death, thus by his example 
 giving guidance and encouragement to every 
 child of man. And further, he did this not as 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 155 
 
 an individual but as the Head of the race; 
 thereby lifting all humanity along with himself 
 up from the bondage of corruption into the 
 glorious liberty of the children of God. None 
 certainly can enter into his victory except by 
 partaking in his trust, but in that general ele- 
 vation of the nature there must be contained 
 real help for every man in his special work, as 
 well as a pledge that He who has raised Jesus 
 to His own right hand will not cease His 
 labour of love till He has raised thither also 
 the last and least of his members. In the vic- 
 tory of our Head He has given us an all-suffi- 
 cient foundation for the most absolute trust, as 
 well as a manifestation of the certain effects 
 resulting from its exercise. None but a Son 
 could have made this revelation, and none but 
 those who are created in the Son could be 
 capable of apprehending or receiving it. He 
 came to draw and guide the hearts of the 
 children back to the Father, and he did so by 
 his own life of filial trust. 
 
 The faith spoken of in the 25th verse is I 
 believe Christ's own trust in the Father — the 
 trust which sustained him even in the shed- 
 ding out of his life-blood. Faith, and the 
 
156 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 righteousness of faith, have been the theme of 
 the epistle hitherto, and Jesus has been pre- 
 sented to us as the model of it, so that we 
 ought to be prepared for what appears here to 
 be the announcement that the propitiation 
 consists in faith carried to its highest power, 
 faith whilst shedding out the life-blood, that 
 faith which says, " Father, into Thy hands I 
 commend my spirit." I know that this in- 
 terpretation is not commonly accepted, but 
 the whole passage is generally acknowledged 
 to be very obscure, and I shall endeavour to 
 give some reasons in support of my conviction 
 that it is the true one. I am well aware that 
 the faith here spoken of is almost always as- 
 sumed to be our faith, with as much confidence 
 as the blood is assumed to be Christ's blood. 
 But this is not the natural meaning. The 
 preposition Sta, necessarily by the construc- 
 tion connected with 7r/o-Tea>?, indicates faith 
 as the process or instrument through which 
 the propitiation was eifected, or rather through 
 which Jesus became a propitiation. But no 
 one can suppose that that could be through 
 our faith. Although the propitiation cannot 
 profit us spiritually except through our believ- 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 157 
 
 ing it, yet surely it is not our faith which 
 makes the propitiation ; he himself made it, 
 and By his own faith. 
 
 And if it was Christ's own faith it could not 
 be " faith in his blood " in the ordinary accep- 
 tation of that phrase ; x it must, as I have 
 said, have been faith whilst he was shedding 
 his blood. It was not his blood which made 
 the propitiation, but his faith in shedding it — 
 his perfect filial trust while suffering the ac- 
 cursed death of a criminal, the inherited pen- 
 alty of sin to which by taking our nature he 
 had subjected himself, and to the righteousness 
 of which he, as Head of the race, set his seal 
 by submitting to it. 
 
 His faith in death was the faithful summing 
 up and completion of his life of faith. It was 
 an act of entire self-sacrifice, the^ fullest and 
 most perfect manifestation of the loving de- 
 pendent recipiency by which the creature 
 becomes partaker of the righteousness of God. 
 
 1 " No such expression occurs in Scripture as faith in the blood, 
 or even in the death, of Christ. Nor is tt'kttis followed by iv in 
 the New Testament, though faith, like all other Christian states, 
 is often spoken of as existing in Christ (Gal. iii. 26). The two 
 clauses should therefore be separated, ' through faith ' — ' by 
 his blood.' " — Jowett's St. Paul's Epistles to the Thessalonians, 
 Romans, Galatians, vol. ii. p. 134, 2d edition (for part of note, 
 see 1st ed. vol. ii. p. 121). 
 
158 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAULS 
 
 This ivas the propitiatory act ; and God set 
 forth His Son, in this act, as a manifesta- 
 tion of the righteousness which He desires 
 to see in man. The righteous character of 
 the act made it a propitiation; and as God 
 desires to see righteousness in all men He in 
 fact desires to see that propitiation in all men. 
 It was not then Christ's blood which satis- 
 fied the Father's heart, but his faith whilst 
 shedding it, his faith in laying down his life 
 in fulfilment of the Father's will. This faith 
 was the element of which the apostle speaks 
 as approved by God, as propitiating His spirit, 
 and which he sets forth as the true manifesta- 
 tion of righteousness. This is the spiritual 
 condition in which He desires to see us at all 
 times, in each successive present moment (ev tu> 
 vvv icaipu)). But such an entire trust is only 
 possible on the condition of there being a per- 
 fect love in God towards us which forgives 
 even whilst it punishes all sin. We could 
 not lie trustful in the hand of God if we 
 thought that past sins were unforgivingly 
 remembered against us. I would connect the 
 clause Sea tj)v irdpe<nv y k.t.X. "on account of the 
 passing over of foregone sins " with the clause 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 159 
 
 "whom God set forth." God sent His Son 
 into the world because foregone sins were 
 passed over, and did not stand out as hin- 
 drances to His fatherly intercourse with men. 
 
 Thus then the faith of Jesus himself wit- 
 nesses to the trustworthiness of the Father. 
 He both manifests his Father's righteousness, 
 and declares the righteousness of all who have 
 the faith he himself had. 
 
 We are thus led on to the concluding clause 
 of the 26th verse, "That he might be just, and 
 the Justifier of him who believeth in Jesus." 
 The meaning of this I believe is that because 
 God is Himself righteous He is the communi- 
 cator of righteousness to — or the Eightener of 
 — him who had the faith which Jesus had. It 
 is not justification in the forensic sense which 
 is here spoken of. The apostle's subject has all 
 along been righteousness, not acquittal ; if we 
 forget this we lose the thread of the argument. 
 The revelation is made " for obedience to the 
 faith," that is, to bring men into submission to 
 the will of God. But in this clause we leave 
 the subjective and come to the objective ; not 
 indeed as a new thing, for all along we have 
 seen that the subjective — the righteousness of 
 
160 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 God in man — implies the objective, the right- 
 eousness of God in Himself. Still we welcome 
 the change. It is God's own character which 
 is the ground of all faith ; and the setting 
 forth of Jesus as the example of that faith is 
 only gospel to us when understood as a dis- 
 covery of the Father's purpose to make us 
 partakers of His own righteousness. 
 
 By following out this train of thought I 
 believe we shall arrive at the true sense in 
 which Jesus is set forth as a propitiation. If 
 we receive the idea that he is the organic 
 Head of the race, and that everything which 
 he did is in its principle to be reproduced in 
 us ; and if we further consider that, having sub- 
 jected himself to all our conditions of weakness 
 and suffering and death, he waged his success- 
 ful war against our spiritual enemies simply 
 in the might of filial trust, we can understand 
 how the Father, looking upon him as he thus 
 fulfilled all righteousness, should be well 
 pleased. He saw in him the reflection of His 
 own loving desire for the salvation of-xdl men ; 
 He saw in him the completeness of that right- 
 eousness which He desires to see in them ; He 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 161 
 
 saw him also as their Head sending forth 
 spiritual impulses through the whole body, 
 inviting and enabling all the members to yield 
 themselves to His Spirit ; — He saw and was 
 well pleased. He set him forth as the object 
 of His entire complacency in that self-sacrifice 
 which alone can put away sin. Once before 
 the Father had borne witness by a voice from 
 heaven, saying, " This is my beloved Son, in 
 whom I am well pleased;" and the same 
 witness is borne, not in word but in deed, 
 when on the third day He raised him from 
 the dead. In that word of witness "in 
 whom I am well pleased " (iv a> ev&o/erjo-a) is 
 to be found I believe the true meaning of 
 " propitiation " (iXao-rripiov) when understood 
 as expressing the Divine judgment that Jesus 
 was the fitting channel through whom the 
 blessing of righteousness is to be communi- 
 cated to the human race. In his Epistle to 
 the Colossians the apostle sums up the gospel 
 which he was commissioned to preach in these 
 words, " Christ in you the hope of glory," and 
 as we meditate on them we may discover that 
 they not only contain a full gospel to man but 
 in some sense, with reverence be it spoken, a 
 
 L 
 
162 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 gospel to God also, the indwelling presence of 
 the Son in every man being to the Father's 
 heart the hope of glory for every man. 
 
 The righteousness of faith is revealed in 
 Christ, the Head of our spiritual nature, for 
 our belief (eh irtoriv), i.e. that we may actually 
 possess it. Kighteousness cannot be vicarious, 
 yet its attainment may be facilitated by condi- 
 tions which do not depend on our own actings 
 but on those of another. "We cannot be right- 
 eous or blessed without our own personal faith, 
 but we aremembersof a body, the Head of which 
 has essentially in himself the life of faith, and 
 he is ever calling on us as members of his 
 body to participate in it, assuring us that we 
 have the same reason to trust in the Father as 
 he himself has ; and that though his life does 
 not become ours until we partake in his faith, 
 still its pulsations are felt in us when our con- 
 science condemns our rejection of it, thus 
 livingly witnessing th^t it is ours if we will 
 only receive it. Jesus is presented to us as 
 the true spiritual head of our race. He came 
 into our flesh after it had fallen under the 
 condemnation of death, and through his fulfil- 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 163 
 
 ment of righteousness under these conditions 
 he has overcome death and nullified the con- 
 demnation. We are therefore no longer under 
 a condemned Head, we are in the state which 
 St. Paul describes in ch. v. 2 as a state of 
 grace, standing under Christ. This does not 
 refer to character but to condition ; we are put 
 into Christ's standing that we may receive his 
 spirit and his character. Thus is Christ's trust 
 the pattern of man's righteousness, not slavishly 
 to copy but livingly to reproduce by the in- 
 dwelling of his Spirit. 
 
 According to this conception of the purpose 
 of God in Jesus Christ, all those expressions 
 which have been interpreted as if the forgive- 
 ness of sin had been purchased by the sacrifice 
 accomplished on the cross, will be understood 
 as teaching how the spiritual apprehension of 
 the mind of God, manifested in that sacrifice, 
 necessarily produces filial trust and thus works 
 participation in the character of the Son. The 
 apostle seems to indicate this as the natural 
 result of the exposition given in this epistle of 
 the meaning of Christ's work on earth, when 
 after finishing his argument in chapter xi. he 
 draws this conclusion in the opening of chapter 
 
164 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 xii. — " I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the 
 mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a 
 living sacrifice ;" he refers apparently to this 
 very passage, iii. 25, where he had spoken of 
 Jesus as propitiating the Father by the sacri- 
 fice of himself, and urges that this sacrifice 
 which — as Leader of the faith (o apxyyo? tt}? 
 7t/o-t66)?) i.e. Leader in the path of filial trust, 
 the model and inspirer of trust — Christ had 
 made, should be reproduced in them. 
 
 In virtue of our original constitution we 
 are all indwelt by him, as the natural body, 
 in virtue of the nervous system, is indwelt 
 throughout by the brain ; and his assump- 
 tion of our flesh in its actual conditions 
 qualifies him in a special manner to act for us, 
 so that we may benefit by his actions and that 
 they may in their spirit be reproduced in us. 
 If we can really identify with Jesus of Naza- 
 reth that light within us which is ever calling us 
 upward out of sin into righteousness, we shall 
 feel that he is our true Head and Eepresenta- 
 tive on whom the Father always looks with per- 
 fect complacency, seeing in him the fulfilment 
 of that which He desires to see in each one of 
 us. We shall feel that we have a property in 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 165 
 
 him and in all his doings, he did them for us, 
 he lived and suffered and died and rose on 
 our behalf, as our Champion and Leader, he 
 went through life and death to enable us to go 
 through them also. Shall we not then regard 
 his death as our own, and his grave as a refuge 
 from the tyranny of the flesh and of all seen 
 things, in which we may lay down our old man 
 — all that is corrupt within us — and in his re- 
 surrection rise up new men cleansed from every 
 taint, finding the fountain of our life hencefor- 
 ward not in ourselves but in him ? " Ye are 
 dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." 
 
 " Where is boasting then V the apostle asks 
 as the conclusion of the foregoing argument. 
 "It is excluded." Evidently, if justification 
 means righteousness, boasting is excluded, be- 
 cause the righteousness of filial trust is not a 
 possession of our own, it is not self-originated 
 but communicated to us, and also because it 
 rests on the forgiveness of sin and consequently 
 on an acknowledgment of unworthiness. Thus 
 all boasting is excluded, national and sectarian 
 no less than individual ; for the righteousness 
 of filial trust is equally accessible to all, and is 
 
1 6 6 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL S 
 
 independent of race or caste, and of all rites 
 and ceremonies whatsoever. And yet the law 
 is not made void but established ; because by 
 filial trust the spirit of man is brought to 
 accept the whole will of God. 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 These ideas are further brought out in the 
 following chapter, wherein Abraham's right- 
 eousness is shown to have consisted simply in 
 trust — a trust which he had whilst yet in 
 uncircumcision, and before the institution of 
 any religious ordinances peculiar to Judaism. 
 " What then shall we say of the righteousness 
 of our father Abraham V Shall we say that 
 he found it according to the flesh, that is, by 
 doing something to obtain it ? For if so, he at 
 least would have some ground for boasting. 
 But this is not God's account of the matter ; 
 " for what saith the Scripture \ Abraham 
 trusted in God {eTrlarevae tw ®eeo), and that 
 was counted to him for righteousness" — placed 
 to his account as righteousness — reckoned, 
 i.e. by God, to be the right state for him 
 to be in. The knowledge of the purpose of 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 167 
 
 God to bless him, and through him all the 
 families of the earth, and the belief of His per- 
 fect trustworthiness, put Abraham in a right 
 state in relation to God and to all things. 
 
 It is remarkable that in speaking of Abra- 
 ham and his faith the apostle makes no direct 
 mention of the sacrifice of Isaac. We should 
 have expected this to occupy a prominent 
 place in the argument ; but his object being 
 to show that the promise was made, and faith 
 in the promise accepted as righteousness, before 
 the institution of circumcision — and that thus 
 both the promise and the righteousness were 
 unconnected with Judaism and as free to the 
 Gentile as to the Jew — he satisfies himself with 
 stating the first step in the patriarch's career 
 of faith. Yet the history of Isaac's sacrifice is 
 virtually referred to, for Abraham's faith in God 
 as "the God who quickeneth the dead and 
 calleth those things which be not as though they 
 were " belongs to that history, and the promise, 
 not of the Seed but to the Seed, that "in him 
 all the families of the earth should be blessed," 
 was also made in connection with it. 1 
 
 Evidently the apostle introduces the faith 
 
 1 Compare Genesis xii. 2, 3, with xxii. 16-18. 
 
168 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 of Abraham, as lie had before introduced that 
 of Habakkuk, to help the Jewish converts to 
 apprehend the meaning of the faith of Christ, 
 and to show them that he is setting forth no 
 new principle but one which had been re- 
 cognised through the whole course of God's 
 communications with their nation. Besides, 
 the very mention of Abraham and of God's 
 promises to him must have awakened the 
 thought of that " Seed " in whom both Jews 
 and Gentiles were to be blessed — that Messiah 
 who was the special subject of the Gospel. 
 
 He may however have had another object 
 in this reference to him. He may have in- 
 tended thus to prepare the minds of the Jews in 
 the church at Rome for what he was about to 
 say of the relation in which Christ stood to the 
 human race as a Head, and of the privileges 
 which were to flow to them through that rela- 
 tion. The Jews always felt that their peculiar 
 relation to God was connected with their 
 descent from Ahraham — that their national 
 privileges were God's testimony to his faith. 
 They could not indeed enjoy the spiritual 
 blessings contained in the privileges without 
 an actual participation in the faith, but the 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 169 
 
 privileges themselves belonged to them simply 
 in virtue of their descent. Abraham was thus 
 not only by his example a preacher of the 
 righteousness of faith, but was also, in acknow- 
 ledgment of that faith, made a channel — in 
 some sense a propitiation — through whom most 
 important benefits were communicated to his 
 descendants and to the whole world. 
 
 Let us follow the apostle in his own way of 
 bringing this out. 
 
 This faith of Abraham is set forth as that 
 which really made him a righteous man ; and 
 then it is added " this was not written for Abra- 
 ham's sake alone, that it was imputed to him but 
 for us also, to whom " — in like wise — " it shall 
 be imputed if we believe " (or better, whilst we 
 believe) " on Him who raised up Jesus our Lord 
 from the dead ; who was delivered for (i.e. 
 because of) our offences" as a race — he having 
 assumed our nature, and having thus subjected 
 himself to the death which our offences had 
 drawn down on the nature — " and was raised 
 again for (i.e. because of) our justification " — 
 our rightening — as a race, far indeed from be- 
 ing yet accomplished in the members but antici- 
 pated in the purpose and foreknowledge of God, 
 
170 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 and actually accomplished in our Head. He 
 has taken part with us in all our burdens and 
 liabilities that he may deliver us from them ; 
 he has so bound himself to us that in his 
 resurrection we have the pledge of our own 
 life. 
 
 Let us pause over this passage, and ask our- 
 selves whether we can accept the meaning 
 which has been suggested. Jesus is said 
 to have been delivered for our offences, evi- 
 dently not that we might offend, but because 
 ive had offended ; evidently also not for the 
 offences of certain individuals but for the 
 offences of the race ; and then it is added, " he 
 was raised again for our justification," which 
 words, if we follow the same principle of inter- 
 pretation, must mean — not that we might be 
 justified but — on account of our justification, 
 or, because we are justified. And not because 
 certain individuals are justified, but because we 
 — the race — are justified ; whatever that phrase 
 may mean. In other words, the resurrection 
 of Christ is a result and proof of man's justifi- 
 cation. We hesitate perhaps to adopt this 
 interpretation, yet it is the natural one. The 
 entire participation of Jesus in our lot and 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 171 
 
 ours in his, his acceptance of all our evil cir- 
 cumstances that we might share in his victory 
 over them, is unquestionably the point to which 
 the apostle would direct our attention, that 
 by the example of Jesus we may be encouraged 
 to follow in the " steps of that faith " which 
 had burst the bands of death. He sets before 
 us Christ the Conqueror of death, as the first 
 fruits of the whole humanity, the pledge of 
 the ultimate resurrection and glory of the race, 
 that we may be constrained to give ourselves 
 up to God with the same entire and undoubted 
 trust. 
 
 Chapter V. 
 
 The fifth chapter begins with a triumphant 
 summing up of the t blessings connected with, 
 and rising out of faith — Being therefore justi- 
 fied or put into a right state of mind towards 
 God by a belief of His loving purpose, we 
 have peace with him through our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, through whom also we have access by 
 faith into this grace or gracious position in which 
 we stand (it being the very position in which 
 he himself stands), and rejoice in hope of the 
 
172 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAULS 
 
 glory of God. The appearance of the Eternal 
 Son in our nature and his triumph over death 
 as our Head occupy in the apostle's mind the 
 place which the vision of the future glory oc- 
 cupied in the mind of Habakkuk — and with 
 greater substance and power, for in the resur- 
 rection of Christ he saw the commenced fulfil- 
 ment of the prophecy of final victory. As 
 he believed himself and all mankind to be 
 included in Christ as their Head, he saw in his 
 resurrection the pledge of their ultimate de- 
 liverance from sin and death, and meantime, 
 in virtue of their relation to him, he saw them 
 standing in the same environment of grace that 
 ever surrounded him. 
 
 This I believe is the true meaning of the 
 apostolical benediction with which St. Pau] 
 concludes his epistles. " The grace of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ be with you all," not the grace 
 bestowed by Christ but the grace in which 
 Christ himself stands, and of which the apostle 
 elsewhere specifies the composing elements, — 
 " the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy 
 Spirit/' By this interpretation we escape that 
 infringement of the hierarchical order in the 
 latter passage, involved in placing the name 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 173 
 
 of the Son before that of the Father, which 
 otherwise must be accepted. 
 
 The apostle, consciously standing in this 
 grace and speaking in the name of all who 
 were partakers in the same faith, says, "We 
 rejoice in hope of the glory of God," in hope, 
 i.e. of the fulfilment of Habakkuk's vision : 
 "The earth shall be filled with the glory of 
 God, as the waters cover the sea/' And this 
 expectation enables him to rejoice also in the 
 process needed for its accomplishment. He 
 looks forward to the great result, and under- 
 stands the connection between that result and 
 all the steps of the process. He glories in 
 tribulations because he sees that they work 
 patience, and that patience works experience 
 of God's supporting hand, and that experience 
 of past support works hope for the future — a 
 hope that is not disappointed, " because the love 
 of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the 
 Holy Spirit which is given to us." 
 
 " For when we were yet without strength, 
 in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For 
 scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet 
 peradventure for a good man some would even 
 dare to die ; but God commendeth His love 
 
174 THOUGHTS OX ST. PAULS 
 
 towards us, in that while we were yet sinners" 
 — while yet under the righteous sentence of 
 death — " Christ died for us." 
 
 It is worthy of remark that in this passage 
 Christ's death is mentioned simply as a mea- 
 sure of God's love, no reason being given why 
 His love should have taken this form. Does 
 not this suggest that the words which follow, 
 " being justified by " (or rather in) " his blood," 
 may be interpreted in the subjective sense ? 
 being " set right " with God by our belief in so 
 great a love, a love which could make such a 
 sacrifice \ for it is not the shedding of Christ's 
 blood which sets us right with God, but our 
 trust in the love which shed it. Whilst we 
 were yet sinners — consciously deserving of re- 
 jection — God commended his love towards us, 
 in that Christ died for us ; saying while he did 
 so, " He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father." It is not expiation that is here spoken 
 of, but a manifestation of love towards sinners 
 on the part of a righteous God, who knows 
 that the only way by which they can be 
 brought back into righteousness is by trust in 
 love. 
 
 Yet surely we cannot separate the form 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 175 
 
 which God's love took — the blood-shedding of 
 His Son — from the relation in which Christ 
 stands to us as our Head. Love took this 
 form, because it was the form needed for the 
 accomplishment of its object. He was de- 
 livered on account of our offences, he died as 
 the Head of a race which had incurred the 
 penalty of death, he accepted in filial trust 
 their sentence and thus acknowledged its 
 righteousness ; accepting it not merely as a 
 penalty but as part of the process by which 
 men were to be restored to righteousness. 
 Thus Christ delivered men from the terrors of 
 death by accompanying them into it ; winding 
 up by anticipation this stage of human exist- 
 ence, and by the outpouring of his Spirit 
 giving to the race a new spiritual commence- 
 ment of which each individual may avail him- 
 self. Yet it is not the payment of a debt, 
 either for us or by us, which is to be the 
 ground of our confidence, but that love of God 
 which, through the life and death and resurrec- 
 tion of His Son, seeks our righteousness. God 
 commendeth His own love towards us, in that, 
 while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 
 The apostle continues — Much more then, 
 
176 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL S 
 
 being justified, that is, set right, by this mani- 
 festation of love in his death, we shall be saved 
 (through our knowledge of his relation to us) 
 from all apprehension of wrath. For if when 
 we were enemies to God — opposed to Him 
 through self-seeking and distrust — we were 
 reconciled to Him by the manifestation of His 
 love in the death of His Son, much more, being 
 reconciled, we shall be saved by the knowledge 
 and power of his risen life as our Head, see- 
 ing that we are called and destined to partici- 
 pate in that life. " And not only so, but we 
 also joy in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 through whom we have now received the re- 
 conciliation " (marginal reading) — " Wherefore 
 as by one man sin entered into the world, and 
 death by sin ; and so death passed upon all men, 
 for that all have sinned, for until the law " — 
 or previous to the law — " sin was in the world, 
 but sin is not imputed where there is no law " — 
 sin therefore must have been inherited from a 
 head — " nevertheless death reigned from Adam 
 to Moses, even over those who had not sinned 
 after the similitude of Adam's transgression, 
 who is the figure of him that was to come." 
 These three last verses on the headship of 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 177 
 
 Adam are evidently intended by the apostle as 
 an introduction to what he has to say of the 
 headship of Christ and of the relation in which 
 Christ stands to the human race. He assumes 
 that Adam's sin had brought death upon all 
 his descendants, even upon those who had not 
 sinned after the similitude of his transgression, 
 that is, although they had not personally in- 
 curred the sentence ; and the 13th verse seems 
 to be inserted simply with the view of con- 
 firming this idea. Sin and death had been 
 inherited by the whole human race, even by 
 those who had not personally sinned, who 
 therefore had not earned death, but were 
 under sin and death in consequence of their 
 descent from Adam. We are thus, each one 
 of us, born with a proneness to sin and under 
 sentence of death. What are we to think of 
 such a constitution ? What are we to think 
 of Him who is its author ? 
 
 In his deepest heart St. Paul always assumes 
 the righteousness of God as the foundation of 
 all things, and therefore when he sees any- 
 thing in the ordering of the world which has 
 the appearance of unrighteousness he is pre- 
 pared to expect some great counterbalancing 
 M 
 
178 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 manifestation which shall justify God by- 
 showing a result of good abounding out of it 
 and over it. His argument in the present case 
 is to this effect. Man, as being both carnal 
 (o-apfcifcos;) and spiritual (rrvev/jLaTifcos), has two 
 Heads corresponding to these two natures — 
 Adam and Christ — who by their respective 
 characters and actions, essentially affect the 
 whole condition of the race and of all the 
 individuals composing it, independently of any 
 doings or deservings of their own. 
 
 In the actual condition of the world, lying in 
 sin and subject to sorrow and death, we see the 
 consequence of our relation to Adam. The 
 apostle has no desire and makes no attempt to 
 soften the horror of the spectacle, but he turns 
 directly from it and reasons thus : If God has 
 permitted such evil to come to us from the 
 one Head, He must have the intention that a 
 counterbalancing good should come to us from 
 the other — a good which may in all respects 
 meet and overcome the evil. " For if by one 
 man's offence death reigned by one, much 
 more they which receive abundance of grace 
 and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in 
 life by one, Jesus Christ/' As the evil is 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 179 
 
 universal, not passing over a single individual, 
 so must the good be ; and as it is not outward 
 evil only — a sentence of physical death resting 
 on all — but a spirit of moral corruption work- 
 ing within all, so must it be as to the good. 
 
 The meaning of the 15 th verse is somewhat 
 obscure in the English version. St. Paul 
 evidently means to state a parallelism between 
 the offence and the free gift ; that is, between 
 Adam and Christ, yet the words seem to deny 
 it. All thoughtful readers must feel this diffi- 
 culty, but it is generally explained by suppos- 
 ing that the apostle saw such abounding grace 
 coming through Christ beyond the evil derived 
 from Adam that his mind was more occupied 
 with the difference than the resemblance. I 
 am satisfied that instead of denying the paral- 
 lelism of the offence and the free gift he meant 
 most emphatically to affirm it ; and this he 
 does very naturally by a negative interrogation. 
 But as the offence, is not the free gift also ? or 
 rather, Ought it not to be so also? For if 
 through the offence of the one Head — Adam — 
 the many be dead, that is, all except the one 
 — as in a monarchy we say the one rules the 
 many — much more it may be assumed, from 
 
180 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 the character of God, that His grace and the 
 gift by grace, which is by the other Head — 
 the one man Christ Jesus — hath abounded also 
 unto the many, that is, to all. 1 
 
 The grammatical construction of the 16 th 
 verse indicates, that instead of Be eVo? a\xapTr\- 
 aavTos, " through, or by, one that had sinned," 
 we should read Bl eVo? dfiaprruiaTos, " through, 
 or by, one sin," because the one, in the two 
 former clauses of the verse, seems to be con- 
 trasted with the many offences (ttoWwv irapa- 
 tttw/jlcltcov) in the last clause ; and also because 
 throughout the passage wherever the numeral 
 eh (one) occurs indicating a person — i.e. one of 
 
 1 This argument of cumulative inference, expressed in the 
 phrase, much more and how much more, appears frequently in 
 the Bible. Thus, "If God so clothe the grass of the field which 
 to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not 
 much more clothe you, ye of little faith ?" Can we suppose 
 that God will care for the lesser and neglect the greater ! If 
 His love of order and beauty shows itself so wonderfully in the 
 material creation, in the movements of the heavenly bpdies, in 
 the forms and colours of flowers, are we not sure that in the 
 world of spirit His love will never rest until there also it has 
 accomplished its perfect work ? Again, ' ' If ye, being evil, 
 know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much 
 more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them 
 that ask Him ?" The very existence of a good earthly father 
 is to the spiritual reason a demonstration of the universal and 
 surpassing fatherhood of God ; the best earthly father being but 
 an emanation from Him, a faint image of His fatherliness. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 181 
 
 the two personal Heads — it is invariably accom- 
 panied by the article (tov), which is not the 
 case here. " And, as the judgment came by 
 one sin or offence, is not the free gift parallel 
 to it % for the judgment — after that one offence 
 — became universal condemnation, but the free 
 gift became — after many offences — through an 
 opposite act of righteousness, universal justi- 
 fication ; that is, it brought all men (notwith- 
 standing the multitude of past sins) under a 
 purpose of grace." "For if by one offence 
 death reigned through the one Head, much 
 more " — we may infer from the goodness of God 
 — "they who accept the abundance of grace 
 and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in 
 life through the other, Jesus Christ." 
 
 In the 18 th verse we have manifestly the 
 subjective idea of righteousness presented to 
 us — the righteousness of faith — to counteract 
 the tendencies of our descent from Adam. 
 "The abundance of grace" can be received 
 only through faith, the recipient organ. 
 "Therefore, as, by the offence of the one, 
 judgment came on all men to condemnation, 
 even so, by the righteousness of the other, the 
 free gift came upon all men unto justifica- 
 
182 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 tion of life" (et? ZiKaiwaiv &?)<>), (the same 
 word which is used in the last verse of the 
 preceding chapter) as the moving spring of 
 that process by which all men shall ultimately 
 be brought into living righteousness. "For 
 as by one man's disobedience the many were 
 made sinners, so by the obedience of the other 
 shall the many be made righteous." 
 
 The whole passage is one of special preg- 
 nancy. In the first place, establishing, as a 
 fundamental principle of St. Paul's theology, 
 the ultimate salvation of the whole human 
 race, and in the second, showing how the idea 
 of Headship really explains and fulfils all that 
 is supposed to be contained in the doctrine of 
 substitution, even in the estimation of those 
 who hold it most strongly. The difference 
 lies in this, that according to the idea of 
 Headship Christ acts organically for {yirip) 
 men, in order that by what he does his spirit 
 may be reproduced in them, while according to 
 the doctrine of substitution he acts instead of 
 (dvTi) them, and to exempt them from acting. 
 , "Moreover, the law entered (i.e. came in 
 by the way or by parenthesis) that the 
 offence might abound." I believe that the 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 183 
 
 "law" is here the principle of law, including 
 the law of Moses and all institutions which 
 address and awaken the conscience. It en- 
 tered or manifested itself, "that the offence 
 might abound," that is, be largely felt in the 
 consciences of individuals, convincing them 
 that it was not merely for an hereditary taint 
 or an offence of their forefather that they were 
 suffering, but that they themselves were per- 
 sonally guilty. But where sin thus abounded 
 grace still abounded over it, that as sin had 
 reigned in the infliction of death, even so 
 might grace reign through righteousness unto 
 eternal life. 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 
 I am sure that every one who has attentively 
 followed the apostle through his argument 
 will admit that he has not really laid himself 
 open to a charge of antinomianism. And yet 
 the charge must have been made, or he would 
 not have felt it necessary to reply to it. 
 Perhaps the prominent place given to the for- 
 giveness of sin in all Christian teaching may 
 have led to such an accusation, especially 
 
184 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 when connected with the universal practice in 
 the early Churches, of recognising all who were 
 admitted into their communion, however pol- 
 luted their former lives may have been, as 
 pure and holy. "With this charge he deals in 
 the following verses. 
 
 " What shall we say then ? Shall we con- 
 tinue in sin, that grace may abound ? God 
 forbid ! How shall we who are dead to sin 
 live any longer therein ? Do you not know 
 that so many of us as were baptised into 
 Christ Jesus were baptised into his death ; so 
 that we are buried with him, by this baptism 
 into his death V As the death of Christ was 
 the embodiment of self-sacrifice, so our spiritual 
 participation in his death would be truly a 
 death unto sin, and as our baptism is a pro- 
 fession of such participation the apostle would 
 be justified in meeting the suggestion " shall we 
 continue in sin that grace may abound V by 
 asking " How shall we, who are dead to sin, 
 live any longer therein V He would I believe 
 have been justified in thus meeting it ; yet I 
 would suggest that the Greek (rrj dfiaprla) 
 both here and in verse 10 may be rendered 
 by sin. How shall we who are dead by sin 
 
EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS. 185 
 
 live any longer therein \ If this be St. Paul's 
 meaning then his answer is just an appeal to 
 the common sense of men, implying a charge 
 of absurdity and self-contradiction on the 
 objectors. If we have already become sub- 
 ject to death, and have even died by sin, 
 and have thus experienced that its natural 
 effect is death, how is it possible that we 
 should either expect or find life in it ? In 
 fact the objection is a very unfair one — for 
 the apostle through the whole course of his 
 discussion has been inquiring, not how grace 
 or forgiveness of sin may be obtained, but how 
 righteousness itself can be arrived at, and he 
 introduces grace in the concluding verse of the 
 5th chapter, as reigning "through righteous- 
 ness unto eternal life." By bringing forward 
 this objection he however shows that it was 
 one which, although unreasonable, was yet 
 frequently made and which required to be 
 specially dealt with. And accordingly he 
 proceeds to show how the whole Christian 
 doctrine is essentially antagonistic to sin 
 itself. He had begun by laying down the 
 principle that righteousness is the product of 
 trust, and then he shows how full our warrant 
 
186 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 is for holding such a trust. We might 
 then have expected that he would have main- 
 tained his position by simply insisting that 
 trust in God, being itself man's right state, 
 cannot possibly produce sin, and therefore 
 that the declaration of the grace of God which 
 alone can call forth that trust is the only true 
 preaching of righteousness. At all events we 
 had reason to expect that the argument by 
 which he defended his doctrine would have 
 been connected with the statement which he 
 gives of it in the opening of the Epistle. And 
 as we naturally desire to find logical coherence 
 in a discourse, we should have welcomed the 
 reappearance here of the principle of faith, as 
 the power of God unto salvation. 
 
 But though there is a change in the form, 
 there is a perfect continuity in the sense. 
 We saw, in the 17th verse of the first chapter, 
 that the revelation of the righteousness of 
 faith was given to us in the person of Jesus 
 Christ, who was set before us as the model 
 truster ; so that in fact we are called upon to 
 be trusters when we are called upon to abide 
 in him, and the original line of reasoning 
 is continued when the apostle, after having 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 187 
 
 in the 5th chapter presented him to us as our 
 spiritual head and fountain of righteousness, 
 proceeds here to urge upon us the consequences 
 of this relationship and the obligations arising 
 out of it. For thus we are assured of our right 
 to partake in his trust, and are invited to pass 
 with him through all the steps of his progress 
 to the upper glory. Our baptism into him is, 
 according to the Apostle, specially a baptism 
 into his death, a recognition that we were per- 
 sonally included in it, and are called to par- 
 take in its spirit. Therefore we were virtually 
 buried with him by this baptism into his death 
 — and to this end, that "like as Christ was 
 raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, 
 we also should walk in newness of life. For 
 if we have been united with him in the like- 
 ness of his death, we shall be also in the like- 
 ness of his resurrection ; knowing this, that our 
 old man is crucified with him, in order that 
 the body of sin in us (the flesh, that part of 
 our nature which yielded to the power of sin) 
 might be destroyed or paralysed, that thence- 
 forth we should not serve sin ; even as he by 
 dying has been set free from all temptations 
 to, and all claims of sin." 
 
188 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 I do not think that St. Paul means here to 
 state it as a general principle, that by death a 
 man is set free from sin and its consequences ; 
 I rather think that as Christ's Headship is at 
 present his theme, so it is Christ's own death 
 in its speciality which he here presents to us, 
 as that in which we are, in virtue of our rela- 
 tionship to him, actually involved, and in which 
 we are called to participate spiritually and 
 consciously. 
 
 " Now if we be dead with Christ we believe 
 that we shall also live with him, knowing that 
 Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no 
 more ; death hath no more dominion over him ; 
 for in that he died he died by sin" (that is, 
 under the penalty of sin and as it were by the 
 hand of sin) " once, but in that he liveth he 
 liveth by God," that is, by the life and love 
 and power of God. 
 
 Observe here how the Apostle hastens to 
 show that his object is to inspire us with the 
 confidence that, in virtue of our relation to 
 Christ, his sufferings and their glorious result 
 are ours. Even so reckon yourselves (through 
 your relationship to him) to have verily shared 
 in his death by sin, and now seek to share in 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 189 
 
 that resurrection-life to which he has been 
 raised. Take his resurrection as a pledge of 
 your final triumph, and be bold to resist all 
 attempts of sin to reign over you. Yield not 
 to its usurpation — for it is a usurpation, it has 
 no right to rule over you — but yield your- 
 selves to God as those who have been raised 
 from the dead, and your members as instru- 
 ments of righteousness unto God. And be 
 encouraged in this conflict by the assurance 
 that sin shall not have dominion or finally 
 prevail over you, for " ye are not under the law 
 but under grace." If ye were under the law, sin 
 ivould have dominion over you, for as there is 
 no forgiveness according to the law, sins claim 
 upon you could never be got over, but ye are 
 under grace — under a continual purpose of God 
 that you should become righteous, which pur- 
 pose contains a permanent forgiveness, and is 
 a continual ground of filial trust. Ye are so 
 included in Christ's death that ye may at every 
 moment lie down in his grave as your own, and 
 leaving there all bygone sins, recommence life 
 afresh as free men unburdened by past guilt. 
 
 " What then ? Shall we sin, because we are 
 not under law but under grace ?" The Apostle 
 
190 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 seems to have felt as if it were foolish to use 
 the forms of reasoning in so plain a matter — he 
 seems to say, " Cannot you use your common 
 sense ?" Is it not evident that to whom you 
 yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants 
 ye are to whom you so yield yourselves, — and 
 that you must accept the wages of the master 
 whose service you thus choose ? The object of 
 grace is not to change the nature of sin or of 
 its service or of its wages, but to induce you 
 to choose another master. The evil of sin does 
 not consist in its producing misery or death, 
 but in its essential contradiction to Tightness." 
 In writing to the Corinthians 1 the Apostle 
 speaks not of death as being the sting of 
 sin but of sin as being the sting of death, 
 and, throughout the epistle with which we are 
 now engaged, his object has been to inquire 
 not how grace or forgiveness may be obtained, 
 but how righteousness may be acquired, and 
 when he introduces grace it is that he may 
 show how, when truly received, it produces 
 righteousness. His strong feeling on this 
 matter is very remarkably expressed in the 
 verse which I have now paraphrased, " Know 
 
 1 1 Cor. xv. 55, 56. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 191 
 
 ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves 
 servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom 
 ye obey ; whether of sin unto death or of 
 obedience unto righteousness ? " We might 
 have expected that as he had said "of sin 
 unto death/' he would have completed his 
 parallel by saying "of righteousness unto 
 life ;" but when he thought of righteousness 
 it doubtless appeared to him to be itself the 
 ultimate good, desirable not for its best con- 
 sequences but for its own intrinsic precious- 
 ness. 
 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 The 7th chapter is occupied with the sub- 
 ject of law, and its influences on the character. 
 Although the Jewish law is referred to by the 
 apostle in the beginning of the chapter, it is 
 only as an illustration of the argument, for the 
 principle of law in the conscience, as contrasted 
 with grace, is his real theme throughout. This 
 is evident from the 5 th verse. " For when we 
 were in the flesh, the motions of sins which 
 were by the law did work in our members to 
 bring forth fruit unto death." His great sub- 
 ject, as we know, is righteousness — the right- 
 
192 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 eousness which is founded on a true apprehen- 
 sion of the relation in which we stand to God 
 as our forgiving Father ; and he desires to 
 guard against the misinterpretation of the prin- 
 ciple of law, because, if misunderstood, although 
 it seems to commend itself to the conscience 
 it really bewilders it. If the law is not seen to 
 be in harmony with the forgiving mercy of 
 God and his fatherly purpose to deliver us 
 from sin — if it discovers to us that we have 
 incurred his condemnation without showing 
 us any way of deliverance — its tendency must 
 be to awaken in us a sense of guilt, and con- 
 sequently to alienate us from God. It is to 
 law, thus misunderstood, that Paul says "we 
 are dead through the body of Christ " (that is, 
 through our partaking in his death and in the 
 faith which sustained him under death), " that 
 we should be married to another, even to him 
 who has been raised from the dead, that we 
 should bring forth fruit unto God." Christ is 
 the true law, being the personification of the 
 righteous will of God which is ever seeking 
 to reproduce itself in the hearts of all men, 
 and actually accomplishing its object in so far 
 as the love which gave Christ is apprehended. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 193 
 
 But it is no misunderstanding of the law to 
 suppose that it condemns sin and pronounces 
 the penalty of death upon sin. The death of 
 Christ was his acknowledgment, as Head of 
 the race, that the sentence was righteous. 
 The misunderstanding consists in not appre- 
 hending that it was our Father's love which 
 gave the law and ratified the sentence, and 
 that the sentence itself is remedial, being part 
 of the process by which He would train us 
 into His own likeness. Grace does not lower 
 the demands of the law, or abrogate, or even 
 soften down, its sentence. Eightly under- 
 stood, law is the delineation of the righteous- 
 ness and blessedness for which God created 
 us, and its sentence of sorrow and death on 
 disobedience is just the outward expression of 
 that eternal self- executing principle which 
 proportions the true spiritual life and enjoy- 
 ment of the creature to the measure in which 
 it has attained to, or fallen short of, that 
 righteousness. 
 
 We are created for righteousness, not in it, 
 that being impossible ; but we are created in 
 Christ Jesus, and are therefore capable of en- 
 tering into his spirit, of understanding the 
 
 N 
 
194 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 Father's loving purpose towards us, and thus 
 of receiving the sorrow and death awarded 
 by the law as a part of that education by 
 which He would accomplish His purpose. 
 The full understanding that God's condemna- 
 tion of sin is not for destruction but for cor- 
 rection is necessary to the full understanding 
 of the law. The co-existence of that con- 
 demnation with an inexhaustible purpose to 
 make us partakers of His own blessedness, is 
 the great revelation of Christianity. 
 
 In the latter part of the 7th chapter the 
 apostle describes the conflict which takes place 
 within a man whose conscience is fully awake 
 to the excellency of righteousness and to the 
 unchangeable obligation of the law which 
 requires it, whilst yet ignorant of the full 
 grace of God. He makes his exposition 
 peculiarly striking by speaking in the first 
 person, thus giving the impression that it is 
 the history of his own personal experience 
 which he is disclosing. He sets before us three 
 different stages of the spiritual life — the first 
 characterised by unconsciousness of any moral 
 demand upon us, corresponding to natural 
 childhood though not necessarily limited to 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 195 
 
 that period, as indeed with perhaps the 
 majority of mankind it fills the whole earthly 
 existence. " I was alive," he says, "without the 
 law once, I had no sense of being under con- 
 demnation, but when the commandment came 
 home to me the sense of sin like a serpent 
 that had been asleep rose up within me and I 
 died, — I felt myself under its condemnation, 
 and thus the commandment, which seemed 
 intended to point out the path of life, I found 
 to be unto death." "Was then that which is 
 good made death unto me ! God forbid, but 
 sin, that it might appear sin, working death in 
 me by that which is good ; that sin by the 
 commandment might appear exceeding sinful." 
 " Had I remained unconscious of the evil in 
 me I could never have known what right- 
 eousness means, nor have learned to compre- 
 hend and appreciate the contradiction which 
 exists between what I am and what I was 
 intended to be. Had I not learned the evil 
 of my selfish desires and my own inability to 
 subdue them I could never have felt my 
 need of God, of His forgiving love, and of His 
 quickening helping Spirit. This good then 
 the law has done to me. It has discovered to 
 
196 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 me the truth concerning myself, it has dis- 
 covered to me that I am in a wrong condition, 
 and that while I remain in it I must be 
 miserable." This is the apostle's second stage, 
 preparing the way for the joyful deliverance 
 which is the last stage. 
 
 "For we know that the law is spiritual, 
 but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what 
 I do, I know not ; for what I would, that do 
 I not ; but what I hate, that do I. Now 
 if I do that I would not, it is no more I that 
 do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." He 
 thus finds that he has two selves — a sinful 
 and a righteous self, — or rather perhaps that 
 sin and righteousness are both parts of his 
 being and that he himself stands between 
 them; and not at all, in this individual in- 
 stance, as an indifferent looker-on, for he de- 
 lights in the law of God after the inward man, 
 and yet he is forcibly carried in the opposite 
 direction by the law of sin in his members. 
 He seems thus doomed to a hopeless internal 
 strife, in which his efforts after good are always 
 destined to be overborne. Under this oppres- 
 sive consciousness he cries out, " wretched 
 man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 197 
 
 body of this death — from the power of this 
 flesh within me, which is keeping me in a state 
 of sin, and is forcing upon me continually the 
 wages of sin V 
 
 And here St. Paul, who had begun his 
 high argument by the glorious declaration, 
 "lam not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for 
 it is the power of God unto salvation," answers 
 the cry by bearing renewed testimony to the 
 sufficiency of that salvation, and by repeating 
 the same boast as an accomplished reality, 
 " Thanks be to God, there is deliverance, and 
 it is to be found in Jesus Christ our Lord ; I 
 have found it." This note of triumph is then 
 followed up with a clause which in its form 
 appears to be the resumption of the whole pre- 
 ceding passage, " So then with the mind " or 
 conscience " I myself serve the law of God, but 
 with the flesh the law of sin/' In form, I say, 
 this is a resumption of what is gone before, 
 nevertheless it disappoints us by seeming to 
 leave the conflict in its original state. It 
 is obvious from the whole context that the 
 writer means no such thing, for nothing can 
 be more confident than his language in the 
 second and third verses of the 8 th chapter. 
 
198 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 Yet, in several of those which follow, his 
 prevailing tone is that of earnest warning, 
 the note of triumph has passed away, and he 
 speaks to his disciples like one who sees a great 
 danger threatening against which he would 
 guard them. Evidently this is the thought 
 which gives its singular character to that con- 
 cluding clause of the 7th chapter, which is just 
 the text on which the exhortations of the 8 th 
 are founded. 1 In that clause he most dis- 
 tinctly teaches that the deliverance through 
 Jesus Christ, for which he had given thanks, 
 had not put an end to the conflict. It had put 
 an end to its hopelessness, but the flesh still 
 remained as an element of man's being, and still 
 continued to be enmity to God, and St. Paul 
 
 1 It cannot be denied that the clause comes in abruptly, and 
 almost gives the impression that the apostle meant to qualify 
 the note of triumph which preceded it. The language of Scrip- 
 ture is addressed to the heart and conscience, not to the logical 
 faculty, and, to be rightly understood, must be interpreted not 
 in the letter, but in the spirit ; that is, it must be interpreted 
 in consistency with the two principles — (1.) that it is the pur- 
 pose of God to educate all men into righteousness ; and (2.) 
 that human righteousness consists in man's will receiving and 
 adopting the will of God. Unless it be so interpreted, its warn- 
 ings and threatenings will naturally produce either a fear de- 
 structive of confidence in God and His revelations of grace, or 
 an indolent security, or perhaps in some minds the one may 
 simply neutralise the other. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 199 
 
 felt and testified concerning himself that the 
 moment he ceased to keep it under the control 
 of the Spirit, that moment he fell into the 
 service of sin. Grace operates not by annihi- 
 lating the flesh or by making it better, but by 
 enabling us to have our habitual thoughts and 
 desires and interests, not in the flesh, but 
 in the love of God and in fellowship with 
 Him. 
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 
 Thus grace does not dispense with our exer- 
 tions, but encourages us to make them by the 
 assurance of success. The way of success 
 which it points out is to be spiritually minded, 
 that is, to set our affections on things above, 
 not on things on the earth ; and the funda- 
 mental blessing of the gospel is that it enables 
 us to be spiritually minded by the revelation 
 which it makes of the treasures which we have 
 in heaven and by its urgent call on us to make 
 them our treasures, to know them as our 
 eternal life and joy, and so to live in them that 
 we may be out of the reach of the flesh. 1 Any 
 
 1 Faith does not change the nature either of the good or of 
 
200 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 direct efforts against evil must be compara- 
 tively ineffectual. When passion or appetite, 
 covetousness or vanity, presents a gratification 
 which my sentient nature recognises as a 
 reality, my surest defence lies in my living in 
 a higher atmosphere and amongst joys which 
 commend themselves to me as more real, be- 
 cause they address a higher part of my being. 
 The gospel becomes to us the power of God 
 unto salvation by introducing us into this higher 
 atmosphere, and by making us acquainted 
 with these better joys ; and we are throwing 
 away the help which it offers when, instead of 
 endeavouring to live in that atmosphere and to 
 familiarise ourselves with these joys, we content 
 ourselves with only protesting against evil when 
 it makes its assaults. Undoubtedly that was 
 
 the evil principle within us. It operates not by making the 
 flesh good but by helping a man to live "in the spirit;" that 
 is, in that part of his being which is in contact with and can 
 receive the Spirit of God. This agrees with our Lord's teaching 
 (Matt. xii. 35), " The good man, out of the good treasure of his 
 heart, bringeth forth that which is good : and the evil man, out 
 of the evil treasure, bringeth forth that which is evil," intimat- 
 ing that the goodness of the good man does not consist in his 
 having no evil treasure, no flesh {(rapt;) in him, but in his refus- 
 ing to make it his treasure — to bring it forth or to live in it ; 
 and that the evil of the evil man, in like manner, does not con- 
 sist in his having an evil treasure, but in his making it his trea- 
 sure — bringing it forth, living in it. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS. 201 
 
 the state of the man whose unsuccessful and 
 wretched though honest conflict is described in 
 chapter vii, and, if it was the apostle's own con- 
 flict which he there describes, it was assuredly 
 his consciousness that this was indeed its char- 
 acter which made him subjoin to his thanks- 
 giving for deliverance that solemn note of 
 warning which is contained in the clause we 
 have been considering. 
 
 Let me here draw the reader's attention to 
 a remarkable change which has been taking 
 place in the language of the apostle, in his 
 treatment of his great argument. When he 
 began, his whole mind seemed occupied with 
 the idea of faith ; the word occurs continually, 
 but now, from the 2d verse of the 5th chapter, 
 he has never named it, and never does again 
 till the 30th verse of the 9th chapter. How 
 are we to explain this ? Has he really changed 
 his ground, or has he only varied his expression 1 
 and what reason had he for this variation 1 
 
 Perhaps the true explanation is that he 
 made it unconsciously, led simply by the 
 natural course of his exposition. And it is 
 not difficult to understand and trace that lead- 
 ing. We must bear in mind that his subject 
 
202 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 is not faith but justification by faith, and 
 consequently that his purpose is not to insist 
 dogmatically on the necessity of faith, but to 
 explain how faith produces righteousness. In 
 fact the nature of righteousness is his real 
 subject, and faith is treated of only in relation 
 to it. He says that righteousness consists in 
 the development of faith in God, and he makes 
 the value and efficacy of the gospel to lie in 
 the revelation of this faith given in the person 
 of Jesus Christ, who was himself the eternal 
 Truster, and in whom we were created that 
 we might participate in his trust. Thus 
 " abiding in him " comes to be the truest ex- 
 pression of faith in its full development. Then 
 again, though our creation in Christ confers on 
 us the capacity of entering into his faith, it 
 does not save us — that is, it does not produce 
 righteousness — unless the capacity be exer- 
 cised. It is this consideration I believe which 
 leads the apostle to the adoption of the phrase- 
 ology of the 8th chapter, in which spiritual- 
 mindedness occupies the same place that faith 
 does in the early chapters. 
 
 Possibly Paul may have intended, by varying 
 his expression, to save the Eoman disciples from 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 203 
 
 a conventional and technical use of the word 
 faith, perhaps also to conform his own teach- 
 ing to that of the other apostles. That incor- 
 rect reports of his teaching had been brought 
 to Jerusalem appears probable, and certainly 
 St. James had felt that this doctrine of faith 
 was liable to be misunderstood and perverted. 
 It is remarkable that the meaning which he 
 attaches to the word is quite different from 
 that in which St. Paul uses it, and approaches 
 very nearly to the idea of a creed, or formula 
 of faith. It is only thus that we can under- 
 stand how he should (in opposition to what we 
 should conceive the natural idea of them) 
 describe faith as the body, and works as the 
 spirit. He is thinking of faith as a belief of 
 facts, and of works not merely as things done 
 (epya), but as the living principle (evepyeia) 
 which produces them. With St. Paul on the 
 other hand faith means the spirit of filial 
 trust, implying that God is essentially and 
 necessarily the Father of every man, and thus 
 the proper object of trust for every man, and 
 works mean not actions produced by such a 
 trust, but all efforts to obtain a ground of 
 confidence in ourselves, even by the observ- 
 
204 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 ance of institutions appointed by God Himself. 
 It is conceivable that St. Paul knew sus- 
 picions of his teaching to be entertained by 
 some of the Christian teachers, and that he 
 wished to remove these suspicions by language 
 which he was sure they would acknowledge 
 and respond to. And certainly the language 
 of chapter viii. is of this kind. 
 
 It has been said that our Lord's discourses, 
 and the sermon on the mount especially, 
 teach justification not by faith but by works. 
 Surely this is a great mistake, for is not the 
 whole of that teaching based on the fact that 
 God is truly and unchangeably our Father, 
 and that even whilst we are feeding on husks 
 with the swine, He is calling on us to return 
 to Him as His children ? And this I believe is 
 precisely that doctrine of justification by faith 
 which St. Paul insists on with such earnestness. 
 It may be admitted that he is often abrupt, 
 and that the occurrence of a particular word 
 sometimes makes him start off on what appears 
 to be a different train of thought, but no one 
 can doubt that there is a real and substantial 
 consistency in his treatment of his subject. 
 We may however in a manner admit this 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 205 
 
 consistency and yet not really perceive it. 
 For instance, some who would never dream 
 of questioning his inspiration might yet 
 find a difficulty in discerning the oneness of 
 his adopted text from Habakkuk, "The just 
 by faith shall live," with his own words in 
 chapter vi., "If we be dead with Christ we 
 believe that we shall also live with him," or 
 with those in the chapter we are now consider- 
 ing, " If ye live after the flesh ye shall die, but 
 if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds 
 of the body, ye shall live." Evidently unless 
 faith, dying with Christ, and spiritual-minded- 
 ness mean the self-same thing, he is pointing 
 out three different ways of arriving at eternal 
 life ; but this is inconceivable. Faith, dying 
 with Christ, and spiritual-mindedness must 
 therefore with St. Paul imply one another. 
 
 But to proceed ; after giving the solemn 
 warning in the close of the seventh chapter, 
 the apostle returns to the note of triumph 
 which precedes that warnings with the pur- 
 pose of explaining in what the deliverance 
 through Jesus Christ consists. To understand 
 his explanation, we must remember that the 
 wretched condition out of which the complainer 
 
206 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 had cried for deliverance was an incapacity to 
 resist the evil which he condemned, and to do 
 the good which he approved. He found a law 
 in his members warring against the law of his 
 conscience, and bringing him into subjection 
 to the law of sin which was in his members, 
 and it was out of that condition he had 
 obtained deliverance through Jesus Christ. 
 The apostle is here repeating what he had 
 said in the first chapter. He had there boasted 
 of the gospel of Christ, as a power by which 
 men might rise out of unrighteousness, and he 
 here boasts that the law of the spirit of life 
 in Christ Jesus had made him free from the 
 law of sin and death, — had given the victory 
 to the law of his mind over the law in his 
 members ; and in the 3d verse he tells us that 
 the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has 
 this power, through God's having sent His own 
 Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and having 
 thus condemned sin in the flesh, that so the 
 righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in 
 us by our walking not after the flesh but after 
 the spirit. 
 
 The apostle, as we have seen, is not always 
 careful to distinguish the objective from the 
 
EPLSTLE TO THE ROMANS. 207 
 
 subjective, the gospel concerning Christ from 
 the faith and filial trust which the gospel is 
 intended to produce ; and this expression 
 " the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus " 
 might stand for either. Probably it here 
 means filial trust, or spiritual-mindedness, in- 
 asmuch as the objective gospel follows imme- 
 diately in the statement that God had sent 
 His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. The 
 law of the spirit of life in Christ will thus be 
 Christ's own life, his own filial trust in the 
 Father, communicated to us through the 
 knowledge that his Father is our Father also, 
 and that He so loved us as to give His only 
 begotten Son to taste death for every man. 
 "For what the law" — that law of the mind 
 which he had spoken of in the preceding 
 chapter — " could not do in that it was weak 
 through the flesh," — in that its operation was 
 hindered by carnal insensibility to the great 
 truth that the Lawgiver is our Father — God 
 hath done, by sending His own Son Th the like- 
 ness of sinful flesh and for sin, thus condemn- 
 ing sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of 
 the law might be fulfilled in us by our walking 
 not after the flesh but after the spirit. 
 
208 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAULS 
 
 What was the sin in the flesh which God 
 condemned by sending His own Son in the 
 likeness of sinful flesh ? Want of filial trust 
 is the radical sin of the flesh. God is a Spirit, 
 and the flesh cannot discern Him. It is only 
 the spiritual faculty that can discern the 
 obligatory character of the law, but even this 
 may be done without discerning God's fatherly 
 purpose in giving the law, and therefore with- 
 out acquiring power to obey it. This disbelief 
 in love is the sin which God condemned by 
 sending His Son in the likeness of sinful 
 flesh. This act of unmistakeable love con- 
 demned the sin, by showing the unreasonable- 
 . ness of it — by showing that it was a lie. The 
 ' sin consisted in disbelief of God's love, and 
 He condemned it by this manifestation of 
 love. 
 
 This thought must have been in the apostle's 
 mind when he wrote the passage, but another 
 phase of the same thought would naturally 
 occur to him also. Jesus was himself the 
 pattern Truster ; he trusted the Father in the 
 extremity of suffering and death, and the 
 Father, by setting him forth as our example, 
 condemned the distrust of man, even as Noah 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 209 
 
 is said to have condemned the unbelieving 
 world by his own faith in God's warning of 
 the coming flood. 1 
 
 The object of God in condemning this dis- 
 trust was " that the righteousness of the law 
 might be fulfilled in us, by our walking not 
 after the flesh but after the spirit." The flesh 
 expects happiness from self-gratification, the 
 spirit seeks its good in God and in conform- 
 ity to His will. This is the righteousness of 
 the law, which is fulfilled in us when we ap- 
 prehend and accept the relations in which we 
 stand to the spiritual world — it is fulfilled in 
 the recognition of God as our Father, and of 
 men as our brethren. The flesh, in seeking 
 self-gratification and in its occupation with 
 outward things, ignores these relations, and 
 thus makes the law powerless even whilst its 
 claim is acknowledged, and the law of the 
 spirit of life in Christ Jesus gives the law its 
 proper power by quickening in us the appre- 
 hension of these relations. 
 
 The antagonism between faith and works 
 with which the epistle commences seems in 
 this chapter to be merged in an antagonism 
 
 1 Heb. xi. 7. 
 
 
210 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 between the spirit and the flesh ; the power 
 which was before attributed to faith being 
 here attributed to the spirit, and all that op- 
 poses faith which before had been spoken of 
 under the name of works, or the law, being 
 here called the flesh. 
 
 The expression in chapter v., " when we were 
 without strength," seems to correspond with the 
 idea expressed in the 8th chapter, "What the 
 law could not do in that it was weak through 
 the flesh," for though in the one the weakness 
 is ascribed to man, and in the other to the law, 
 yet evidently it is the same weakness, as in 
 both cases it is remedied by the knowledge of 
 the love of God manifested in sending His 
 Son to man s aid. 
 
 Throughout the chapter, as indeed through 
 the whole of the New Testament, it is always 
 assumed as a fact that flesh and spirit are co- 
 existing elements in man's being, that in fol- 
 lowing the first he is the child of the devil and 
 the servant of sin, and that in following the 
 second he is the child of God and the servant 
 of righteousness. Do we" cease then to be the 
 children of God when we follow the flesh ? 
 Certainly not. In becoming the children of 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 211 
 
 the devil we sin, not only because his service 
 is sin, but also because in choosing his service 
 we are repudiating our true Father. The 
 appearing of the Son of God in our flesh was 
 the manifestation of his brotherhood towards us 
 as a race, and thus it was a revelation that his 
 Father is our Father. The prodigal did not 
 cease to be his father's son when he went into 
 the far country, and nothing but the thought 
 that he had still a father in the old home-land 
 could have brought him back. Assuredly 
 while we are living in the selfish nature we 
 are doing what we can to separate ourselves 
 from the Father and the Son ; but it was 
 to reveal to us that in so living we are sin- 
 ning against our true normal status, that is, 
 against the relation to God in which and for 
 which we were created, — it was to condemn 
 this sin in the flesh, and to bring us out of it, — 
 that the Father sent the Son into the world 
 to taste death for every man. " Though the 
 hand say I am not of the body, is it therefore 
 not of the body T 
 
 The presence of the conscience in every man, 
 however condemning it may be and however 
 disregarded, is a satisfying demonstration of our 
 
212 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAULAS 
 
 organic relation to the Son of God, " the true 
 Light which lighteth every man that cometh 
 into the world," and our neglect of its admoni- 
 tionsdoes notdestroy that relation. " Have they 
 stumbled that they should fall ? God forbid." 
 The apostle assumes that this is the condi- 
 tion of all men. He assumes that Christ is in 
 them as the hope of glory, as the capacity of 
 rising out of the flesh and living in the spirit, 
 as the assurance that this is God's purpose con- 
 cerning them which shall yet be fulfilled in 
 every individual. And as he also assumes that 
 they are carnal, and have a fleshly nature which 
 needs to be striven against and brought under 
 subjection to the spirit, he does not regard any 
 present carnality as dissolving their relation to 
 Christ, or as cutting off the hope of final glory, 
 though in the meantime it does separate them 
 from his fellowship, and must continue to do 
 
 so as long as it remains unsubdued. 
 
 ***** 
 
 In the 14th verse we read, "As many as are 
 led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of 
 God." The Spirit of the Son is led by the 
 Spirit of the Father — " for ye have not received 
 the spirit of bondage again to fear, but ye have 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 213 
 
 received the spirit of sonship, whereby we cry, 
 Abba, Father" — that spirit which by its very 
 nature continually breathes out the first four 
 clauses of the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 Chapter IX. 
 
 In this chapter the apostle returns to a sub- 
 ject which he had before touched on, but 
 had not fully searched to its results, I mean 
 the apparent rejection of the Jewish people. 
 This subject was not only specially interesting 
 to him as a Jew, but was also connected with 
 that trustworthiness in the character of God 
 which he had held forth as the ground of faith 
 or trust to all mankind, to Gentiles as well as 
 Jews. 
 
 If the Jews were definitely cast away on 
 account of their repudiation of the gospel, what 
 confidence could a Gentile be warranted in 
 placing in God's fatherly purpose towards him ? 
 If man s sin could exhaust the mercy of God 
 there was every reason to fear that a very 
 small residue would ultimately be saved. But 
 then Habakkuk's prophecy of the earth being 
 
214 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 filled with the knowledge of the glory of God 
 would lose the very pith of its meaning, and our 
 apostle's words in the concluding verses of the 
 5th chapter would be but empty sounds. He 
 had been calling men to trust in an immoveable 
 purpose of God towards the race, and that 
 purpose is found not to be a universal purpose, 
 but one liable to immense deductions ! If this 
 be so he feels that the whole gospel which he 
 has been setting forth as the stable ground of 
 the faith of all men, is in fact crumbling under 
 their feet. To enable it really to bear the 
 weight of the human race, its universality and 
 its infallibility must be established. 
 
 If we enter in any measure into the fervid 
 outburst of the apostle at the conclusion of the 
 8th chapter we shall understand how, after 
 giving vent to it, he is instantaneously led to 
 contrast these high anticipations with the 
 actual condition of the Jewish people. Were 
 they not the special objects of God's foreknow- 
 ledge and predestination ? Had they not been 
 selected from amongst the nations as witnesses 
 for God \ How then had they been permitted 
 to fall into the enormity of rejecting His Son, 
 who had come to bless them and all men by 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 215 
 
 turning them from their iniquities and so to 
 accomplish the whole purpose of God for them 
 and for the race ? 
 
 There were many assuredly among the Koman 
 disciples who, as they owed their first hope 
 towards God to the Hebrew Scriptures, cherished 
 warm feelings of reverence and gratitude to the 
 nation from whom they had received those 
 Scriptures. Whilst drinking in the apostle's 
 glowing words they might think he had for- 
 gotten his connection with the seed of Abraham 
 for whom God had done such great things in 
 times past, and that he was satisfying himself 
 and trying to satisfy them, with a hope of glory 
 from which that seed was excluded. St. Paul 
 proceeds to answer these thoughts. He begins 
 with strong asseverations of devoted love to his 
 brethren according to the flesh, and of deep 
 interest in their present condition ; he emphati- 
 cally dwells on their national distinctions and 
 on the high place which God had given them 
 in His dealings with the human race. He says 
 not only that he has continual sorrow in his 
 heart on account of them, but that he could 
 wish to make himself an anathema for them, 
 following the example of Christ, who had made 
 
216 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL S 
 
 himself an anathema for them and for all men. 1 
 He then goes on through the three wonderful 
 chapters that follow, ix. x. xi., to explain the 
 dealings of God with both Jews and Gentiles, 
 and the purpose which He will most surely 
 accomplish in them all by these dealings. 
 
 These chapters have been stumbling-blocks 
 in the way of readers probably ever since they 
 were written, and yet they are just the exposi- 
 tion of " the mercies of God," as the apostle 
 testifies, when at their conclusion he says in 
 the beginning of the 12 th chapter, "I beseech 
 you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God/' 
 — by those very dealings of God, namely, which 
 he has been unfolding to them — " that ye pre- 
 sent your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and 
 acceptable to God, which is your reasonable 
 service." Let me here observe, in passing, that 
 
 1 We fail to understand this passage when we read it iD our 
 mistranslated version, where it is thusrendered : — " I could wish 
 that myself were accursed from Christ." It should rather be 
 "following the leading of Christ," which is undoubtedly the 
 meaning of the same preposition (dno) in 2 Timothy i. 3 : " God 
 whom I serve from my forefathers," that is, walking in their 
 steps. Thus Paul desires to follow Christ in making himself a 
 curse or anathema for his brethren, — not dreaming of separa- 
 tion from Christ, but desiring to partake in his curse, thereby 
 entering into a closer union with him by a participation in his 
 spirit of self-sacrificing love. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 21 7 
 
 the first great principle which St. Paul pressed 
 on us in the 8th chapter, and which is to be 
 always borne in mind in meditating on the 
 mercies of God, is that — although He is essen- 
 tially and eternally a Father, a God of 
 mercy and goodness and blessing, — His good- 
 ness cannot bless us until we yield up our 
 hearts to Him, that is, until we are spiritually 
 minded. This transformation of heart is accord- 
 ingly the great object of all His dealings with 
 us, an object which He will never cease to 
 urge by all means, in this and in every stage 
 of our being, until it is accomplished ; in 
 accordance with that emphatic word in the 
 parable, "He goeth after that which is lost 
 until he finds it" 
 
 The apostle has not lost sight of the pro- 
 phecy of Habakkuk, which is indeed the text 
 of the whole epistle. We have seen how in 
 that prophecy the assurance that all afflictions 
 and calamities are intended " not for destruc- 
 tion but correction," so that finally " the earth 
 shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory 
 of God," is represented as the basis of the faith 
 and consequently of the righteousness of man. 
 He had begun his epistle by setting down this 
 
218 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 assurance as his starting-point, and in the 8th 
 chapter we have seen how he returns to it, 
 when he tells us that " the creature was made 
 subject to vanity" for the one purpose of 
 forcing it to take refuge in this hope, that 
 "the creature shall be delivered from the 
 bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty 
 of the children of God," which is unquestion- 
 ably the very assurance proclaimed by Habak- 
 kuk in his day. The eye of St. Paul, 
 enlightened by faith, saw this blessed consum- 
 mation across all the present darkness, and 
 he could rejoice in it even as the old prophet 
 did ; he could calmly survey the darkness, and 
 discern how it could not only be reconciled 
 with the future glory, but be made by the 
 overruling wisdom of God subservient to it. 
 
 It is this assurance of a gracious purpose of 
 God in all things that can alone sustain us, as 
 it did of old the prophet and the apostle, when 
 we contemplate His dealings with our race or 
 with the individuals who compose it. He is 
 educating us by ways that we know not, but we 
 know the end to which he is leading each one 
 of us. He uses one man to subserve, in the edu- 
 cation of others, as a beacon or an example, as 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 219 
 
 a scourge or as a consolation ; yet though He 
 uses the man for these ends He does not then 
 throw him away as if his own individual in- 
 terests were unimportant. We have seen that 
 trustful recipiency is the right condition for 
 the creature, and to this condition God will 
 bring us all through the consciousness of entire 
 helplessness and even of sin, that so that 
 blessed word (ch. xi. 32) may have its fulfil- 
 ment, " For God hath concluded them all in 
 unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all;" 
 that is, that all may receive salvation, not as 
 the fruit of their own deservings, but as the 
 gift of God's free mercy. 
 
 " Is there then unrighteousness with God ? 
 God forbid !" (ix. 14.) This purpose of final 
 blessing is the vindication of His righteousness 
 in all His dealings with His creatures ; this is 
 what the apostle means to teach in his quota- 
 tion from Exodus, and in his commentary on 
 it in the following verse. If we consider it 
 well we shall see that it is a counterpart of 
 Habakkuk's prophecy. I have said that Paul 
 when he made that short quotation from 
 Habakkuk, "The just shall live by faith," 
 virtually referred to the whole prophecy ; so 
 
220 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 also I believe that he here refers to the whole 
 context — to chapters xxxii. xxxiii. xxxiv. of 
 Exodus. We flud there the record of Israel's 
 sin in worshipping the calf, and of its punish- 
 ment, and then we have the proclamation of 
 the name of the Lord, " The Lord God, merci- 
 ful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant 
 in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for 
 thousands, forgiviug iniquity and transgression 
 and sin, and that will by no means clear the 
 guilty ; visiting the iniquity of the fathers 
 upon the children unto the third and fourth 
 generation, and " (filling up the quotation from 
 the second commandment) "showing mercy 
 unto thousands of them that love Him, and keep 
 His commandments." This "name of God" 
 is the same in substance with that which 
 Habakkuk proclaimed when, in the prospect 
 of the Chaldean invasion, he said, " God, my 
 holy One, we shall not die, Thou hast esta- 
 blished them for correction." Moses saw that 
 the essential character of God in relation to man 
 is a mercy which does not " clear the guilty," 
 — which does not cease to punish the sinner 
 until he turns from his sin, until he has 
 received correction. Such punishments are 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMAKS. 221 
 
 the visitations " unto the third and fourth gene- 
 ration," the needful temporary chastisements 
 which lead to the mercies that are to rest for 
 ever — on the thousands of generations — who 
 through these chastisements have learned to 
 love God and keep his commandments. Evi- 
 dently as the limited period of the third and 
 fourth generation is contrasted with the un- 
 limited expanse of the thousand generations, 
 so the passing inflictions are contrasted with 
 the " everlasting mercies " which in due time 
 shall cover the earth as the waters cover the 
 sea. 1 The quotations from Hosea, as the at- 
 tentive reader will perceive, guide our thoughts 
 in the same direction. 
 
 It seems to me that this idea of a spiritual 
 education for all men, continued through all 
 stages of their being until the righteousness of 
 God is fulfilled in them, is the real meaning 
 of all Scripture, and the light which can alone 
 guide us through these otherwise obscure 
 chapters, and through all the obscure chapters 
 of God's living dealings with ourselves and 
 our fellow-men. Let us only keep hold of 
 this great principle as expressed in the 3 2d 
 
 1 See Isaiah liv. 7, 8. 
 
222 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 verse of chapter xi., and we shall find all the 
 graver difficulties disappear. 
 
 But let us go back for a moment to the 6th 
 verse of chapter ix. and consider its connection 
 with the preceding verses. The apostle had 
 been dwelling with true Jewish feeling on the 
 high privileges of his nation. " To whom per- 
 taineth the adoption, and the glory, and the 
 covenants, and the giving of the law, and the 
 service of God, and the promises ; whose are the 
 fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh 
 Christ came." And now he proceeds to show 
 that all this is reconcilable with their present 
 state. The vision undoubtedly seemed to 
 tarry, but it had always done so, and they 
 must wait for it. Through the whole course 
 of their past history there had always been a 
 marked division amongst them ; there had been 
 those who from the heart received the divine 
 blessings and there had been those whose 
 hearts were wholly uninterested in them, — there 
 had been a spiritual Israel and a carnal Israel. 
 This distinction was typically set forth at the 
 beginning by the election of Isaac and the 
 rejection of Ishmael, and in like manner, in 
 the next generation, by the election of Jacob 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 223 
 
 and the rejection of Esau. And as it was 
 only in the spiritual Israel that the purpose of 
 God was really fulfilled, it might be supposed 
 that the spiritual Israel alone constituted the 
 true Israel, and that thus the promises of God 
 to His people were really fulfilled when they 
 were fulfilled to them. And yet the purpose 
 of God embraced the whole race, and could 
 not attain its true absolute fulfilment until 
 the carnal become spiritual. " Blindness in 
 part has " from the beginning " happened to 
 Israel," but only "until the fulness of the 
 Gentiles be come in, and so all Israel shall 
 be saved, as it is written, There shall come 
 out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away 
 ungodliness from Jacob," that is, He shall 
 make the carnal Israel spiritual, and that in a 
 way consistent with man's freedom, " Not by 
 might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith 
 the Lord/' 
 
 "Hath God cast away His people?" the 
 apostle asks, and the answer is "God for- 
 bid ! " Yet in the following verse this 
 emphatic negative seems to be somewhat 
 modified — "God hath not cast away His 
 people which he foreknew? which modiflca- 
 
224 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 tion is explained and commented on down to 
 the 7th verse, in which it is stated that 
 "Israel hath not attained that which he 
 seeketh for, but the election hath obtained it 
 and the rest were blinded." Here then we 
 have the elect portion of the Jewish people 
 blessedly disposed of, and now the apostle 
 proceeds to consider the condition of those 
 who did not belong to the election, whom he 
 calls " the rest who were blinded" and in 
 speaking of whom he uses the sternest lan- 
 guage which the Old Testament can supply ; 
 he speaks of them as those to whom " God 
 had given the spirit of slumber, eyes that they 
 should not see, and ears that they should not 
 hear unto this day ;" and of whom the prophet- 
 king had said, " let their table be made a 
 snare and a trap and stumbling-block unto 
 them, let their eyes be darkened that they 
 may not see, and bow down their back alway." 
 Well, what is to become of these lost ones? 
 What is to be their future \ Why, the apostle 
 commences his exposition of their fate in this 
 manner, " I say then, have they stumbled that 
 they should fall? God forbid! but rather 
 through their fall salvation is come unto the 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 225 
 
 Gentiles for to provoke them (the slumbering 
 ones) to jealousy." 
 
 Now let me beg the reader to go over 
 the whole passage again and satisfy himself 
 that the persons against whom those stern 
 denunciations are recorded are the same per- 
 sons who are referred to in this confident 
 tone. There can be no doubt that they are the 
 same. And it is of them also that it is said, 
 " If the casting away of them be the riches of 
 the world, and the diminishing of them the 
 riches of the Gentiles, how much more their 
 fulness V And again, " For if the casting away 
 of them be the reconciling of the world, what 
 shall the receiving of them be, but life from the 
 dead V This then, according to St. Paul, is the 
 future history of the reprobates — the rejected, 
 the lost — and he winds up his argument with 
 that emphatic word, " For God hath concluded 
 them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy 
 upon all ;" that is, as I have already said, that 
 they might all feel that their salvation was the 
 fruit of divine grace, not of human merit. 
 After arriving at this conclusion he looks back 
 on the way by which it has been attained with 
 admiring wonder ; he does not wonder at the 
 p 
 
226 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUl/s 
 
 mercy of God, but he wonders at the riches of 
 the wisdom and knowledge which have brought 
 about such a result by such means, making 
 darkness light and crooked things straight. 
 
 There are three stages in the Epistle at 
 which the triumphant feeling of the writer 
 seems to reach the culminating point — at which 
 his far-seeing hope seems to overlook all inter- 
 vening darkness, and to revel in the contem- 
 plation of a final result of universal blessedness. 
 These stages occur in chapter v., in the latter 
 part of chapter viii., and at the conclusion of 
 chapter xi. In chapter v. from verse 1 8 to the 
 end, and in chapter xi. from verse 32, we have 
 light without a cloud or shadow, we have what 
 appears to be an unequivocal revelation of an 
 ultimate glory in which all are to participate. 
 In chapter viii. an apparent limit is set to this 
 hope, so that we are surprised to find the 
 apostle able to maintain the triumphant tone 
 which distinguishes the concluding verses of 
 the chapter. " We know," he says, " that all 
 things work together for good to them who love 
 God, to them who are the called according to 
 His purpose ; for whom He did foreknow • He 
 also did predestinate to be conformed to the 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 227 
 
 image of His Son, that he might be the first- 
 born among many brethren. Moreover, whom 
 He did predestinate them He also called, and 
 whom He called them He also justified, and 
 whom He justified them He also glorified/' 
 
 This language, according to a very common 
 theology, and a verbal criticism which does not 
 appear illogical, has been so interpreted as to 
 imply that some are not foreknown and conse- 
 quently can have no part in the glorious things 
 spoken of in the following verses ; and those 
 who read it under the inspiration of this theo- 
 logy, instead of joining in the apostle's triumph, 
 are naturally led to ask the question, Are we 
 among the foreknown ? But is it not manifest 
 that the apostle expects the whole church to 
 enter into his glorious anticipations ? In the 
 2 1st verse he had said, " The creature " — that is 
 the whole creation, " shall be delivered from the 
 bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty 
 of the children of God," and here he goes back 
 in thought to that deliverance, and invites all 
 to rejoice in it, as the foreknowledge and pur- 
 pose of God concerning all. This is the " hope " 
 by which they were to be saved (see verse 24), 
 and by which they were to be enabled to wait 
 
228 THOUGHTS ON ST. PAUL'S 
 
 patiently for the accomplishment of the vision 
 of which Habakkuk had said, " Though it tarry, 
 wait for it, for at the end it will come, it will 
 not tarry." 
 
 If we may judge by the tenor of the verses 
 which follow (and this is surely our true 
 guidance), the apostle in writing the 29th 
 verse could not have meant to awaken self- 
 questionings, but rather to sweep away every 
 fear and misgiving. It is evidently correlative 
 to the 3 2d. verse; the "foreknown" in the 
 former are just the " all " in the latter, for whom 
 God spared not His own Son. The tone of 
 warning with which he concludes the 7th 
 chapter and which he maintains through the 
 first part of the 8th, is not intended to limit the 
 hope, but to show how it is to be fulfilled. It 
 is only through spiritual-mindedness, that is, 
 through conformity to the image of the Son, that 
 the ultimate glory is in any case to be reached ; 
 but God has predestined this preliminary con- 
 dition also, and He will not slack His dealings 
 with men until it is attained by all, as we find 
 it distinctly declared in the four last verses of 
 the 5 th chapter that it shall be. 
 
 It seems to me that this view of the apostle's 
 
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 229 
 
 meaning in this passage is confirmed by the 
 whole tenor of his thought in the three follow- 
 ing chapters, in which, after having given utter- 
 ance to his anticipations of the future glory and 
 blessedness of the Christian church, he turns 
 his eyes on his own countrymen. If there 
 could be any class who should be excepted from 
 the general statement made in the 3 2d verse, 
 " He that spared not his own Son, but gave 
 him up to the death for us all, how shall He 
 not with him also freely give us all things'?" 
 it might be expected to be the Jewish race, who 
 had crucified the Lord and who ceased not to 
 persecute all who put their trust in him, but 
 there is no exception. God will use their very 
 unbelief as the means whereby He will shut them 
 up to the acknowledgment of their transgres- 
 sion, that so He may have mercy upon all. " 
 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and 
 knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are 
 His judgments, and His ways past finding 
 out ! For who hath known the mind of the 
 Lord, or who hath been His counsellor % . . . . 
 For of Him, and to Him, and through Him are 
 all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen." 
 
FRAGMENTS. 
 
 I.— THE CLAIMS OF JESUS. 
 
 (Appendix A. Pages 9 and 40.) 
 
 In truth all the most striking declarations of the 
 love of God which we meet with in the New Testa- 
 ment are based upon the supernatural claims of Jesus, 
 and become vapid and unmeaning when these claims 
 are set aside or ignored. Thus if Jesus was not the 
 Son of God, in a sense peculiar to himself, how 
 weak and pointless would such words as these be, 
 " If God spared not His own Son, but gave him up 
 to the death for us all, how shall He not with him 
 also freely give us all things?" " God so loved the 
 world that He gave His only begotten Son, that 
 whosoever belie veth on him might not perish, but 
 have everlasting life ;" or these, " God commendeth 
 His love toward us, in that whilst we were yet sin- 
 ners Christ died for us." The power and life of these 
 and similar declarations lie entirely in the assumed 
 fact that Jesus was one with the Father ; the gift 
 of the only begotten Son is set before us as the 
 measure of the Father's love, and consequently if 
 
 \y 
 
232 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 Jesus was not the Son in a special sense, their whole 
 meaning disappears. Unless he was a divine per- 
 son, his love for men, manifested in every action of 
 his life, could not be a direct revelation of the 
 Father's love ; it might even be considered greater 
 than the Father's, self-sacrifice being the highest 
 of all love. " Greater love hath no man than this, 
 that a man lay down his life for his friends." 
 
 As a mere man, moreover, Christ could only have 
 addressed the conscience, and set before it a duty 
 to perform ; he would not have been himself a 
 foundation on which we might confidently rest — a 
 fountain from which we might draw living strength 
 enabling us to perform the duty. Whereas if he 
 was really one with the Father, he is at once the 
 revelation of God's paternal relation to us, and 
 V of His self-sacrificing love. In fact I believe that 
 the vital dynamic efficiency of Christianity lies 
 wholly in the discovery which it makes of the 
 divine Sonship of Jesus Christ. Any wise human 
 teacher might have taught his fellow-men that God 
 was their Father, and they all brethren. Doubtless 
 these are good and true words, but something more 
 than words was needed ; and to supply that need, 
 when God would teach men His own universal 
 Fatherhood and their relation of sonship to Him, 
 and of brotherhood to one another, He sent forth the 
 eternal Son, the Fountain of sonship, that by his 
 assumption of their nature under all its sinless con- 
 
FRAGMENTS. 
 
 233 
 
 ditions of weakness and suffering and death, he 
 might claim them as his brethren and as his Father's 
 children. He claims them as having been created in 
 him ; he claims them as their Head, as the vine 
 claims the branches, assuring them that they possess 
 in him both a status of sonship and a communion 
 of the spirit of sonship. 
 
 He thus opens up to us the spiritual world, 
 revealing that self-sacrificing love is the law which 
 binds its elements together. The Father sacrifices 
 self In giving up the Son — the Son in giving him- 
 self — anclfxom him the whole spiritual creation, 
 constituted in him, as its organic head, is supplied 
 with that same spirit of self-sacrificing love, which 
 can alone maintain order and harmony throughout. 
 
 1/ 
 
 II— "BLESSED AEE THE POOE m SPIRIT." 
 
 (Appendix B. Page 20.) 
 
 I am sure there must be many who have a diffi- 
 culty in understanding these words of our Lord. It 
 must almost seem to them as if he had meant to pro- 
 nounce a blessing on the cowardly and mean-spirited ; 
 whereas the blessing is on those who know and 
 keep their place in the divine hierarchy. 
 
 "We are dependent creatures, not self-existent or 
 self-sufficing ; but there is nothing degrading in this 
 dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son. 
 
2 34 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 When we forget this, we lose our blessedness, for it 
 consists in the spirit of sonship, by which alone 
 we can receive and respond to our Father's love. 
 God . does not call for the acknowledgment of our 
 dependence as a mere homage to His sovereignty, 
 but because we are His children, and it is only 
 through this acknowledgment that we can receive 
 His fatherly love and blessing. The blessedness 
 arises out of the spirit of dependence, and when 
 that spirit departs the blessedness departs with it ; 
 therefore as the spirit of independence is the spirit 
 of this world, 1 we need not wonder at its unblessed- 
 ness, for that spirit shuts the heart against God, and 
 cuts off its supply from the Fountain of life. 
 
 III.— WHAT IS RIGHTEOUSNESS? 
 
 (Appendix C. Page 106.) 
 
 This is a question more easily asked than answered. 
 Is righteousness something absolute, or is it relative ? 
 Assuredly it is difficult to conceive of a righteous- 
 ness without relations ; perhaps it is impossible. 
 When we think of the righteousness of God, we 
 think of it as eternal and unchangeable, yet not as 
 
 1 When I say that the spirit of independence is the spirit of 
 this world, I do not mean that men would distinctly assert 
 their independence of God, and avowedly cast off their depen- 
 dence on Him, but that in fact they do not depend on Him, i.e. 
 they look to other sources for their supply and enjoyment. 
 
FRAGMENTS. 235 
 
 altogether independent of relations, for we can 
 scarcely think of it except as characterising His 
 purpose in creation and His treatment of His 
 creatures, which implies the idea of relation. God 
 sees each human being different from every other, 
 and His thought and acting towards them are 
 righteous, because he has respect to this difference. 
 Farther, I believe that nothing so fills up our con- 
 ception of God's righteousness as the idea of pure 
 unselfish love, and love by the necessity of its 
 nature is relative. 
 
 Eighteousness in man is evidently relative, yet 
 not on that account either arbitrary or conventional. 
 Certain outward acts which are by common consent 
 recognised as the indications of inward right feel- 
 ings or purposes, may and doubtless do vary in 
 different places and circumstances, but still we 
 know that truth and honesty and unselfish kind- 
 ness and manliness are the substantial elements of 
 moral worth, and that these must be the same at 
 all times and in all places. 
 
 Eighteousness is not constituted such by authority, 
 but by everlasting truth. In one of Plato's dialogues, 
 the question is raised, " "Whether is an act holy be- 
 cause it pleases the gods, or does it please the gods 
 because it is holy?" and although no final solution 
 is arrived at, yet it is manifest that the author in- 
 tends his readers to choose the second alternative. 
 
 I believe that to the Jewish mind the connection 
 
236 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 between morality and an acknowledgment of the 
 will of God appeared more necessary and vital than 
 it does to the European mind ; and in accordance 
 with this, I am inclined to think that St. Paul 
 would have treated that question about holiness as a 
 mere play upon words. Yet he would have strongly 
 felt that it was not God's power but His holiness 
 which authorises and stamps and supplies holiness 
 in the creature. 
 
 But when I say that the Jewish mind had a 
 stronger sense of the connection between all morality 
 and a recognition of the will of God than is felt 
 amongst ourselves, do I mean to say that this was 
 merely a national idiosyncrasy, arising out of special 
 circumstances in the national physiology and history, 
 and that the European view of the matter is the 
 truer ? Very far from it ; I believe, on the con- 
 trary, that true morality can never be separated 
 from a knowledge and a recognition of the place 
 which we hold in the spiritual cosmos, and that 
 there can be no true theory of moral sentiments, no 
 true moral philosophy, which is not based on this 
 knowledge ; and I may add that the exceeding bar- 
 renness of European literature in this particular 
 province, seems to me a most decisive proof that 
 our thinkers have not taken the right path, when 
 they have attempted to expound ethics apart from 
 theology. 
 
FEAGMENTS. 237 
 
 IV.— JUSTIFICATION. 
 
 So long as we think of men as a mere mass of in- 
 dividuals, we shall find it difficult to form a definite 
 idea of righteousness or justification. But when we 
 think of them as members of a family of which God 
 is the Father, the difficulty is removed ; righteous- 
 ness is then seen to be healthful order ; filial trust in 
 relation to the Father, extending itself in brotherly 
 love to the rest of the family. If this be the true 
 view of man's condition, manifestly there can be no 
 other righteousness, no other real morality, but this 
 order. Manifestly also this order is not righteous- 
 ness in consequence of its being judged or imputed 
 as righteousness by God, but is so essentially, mak- 
 ing itself felt by the man who possesses it to be his 
 right state, just as a dislocated joint at once feels its 
 justification or rectification when it is restored to 
 its proper position. That is to say, the man does 
 not need to reason thus : " God calls me to filial 
 trust, and approves of it as my right state, and 
 therefore, as I am exercising this trust, I may infer 
 that I am in my right state, that is, justified" 
 He does not need to reason thus, for his filial trust 
 proves its own Tightness by reducing the dislocation 
 and giving him ease, thus consciously putting him in 
 his right state. I believe that this is the meaning 
 of the word justified in the parable of the Pharisee 
 
238 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 and the Publican (Luke xviii. 14). The self-flattery 
 of the Pharisee could not really give him ease, 
 because it did not reduce the dislocation,— it did not 
 put him in his right place in relation to God ; whilst 
 the Publican's confession of unworthiness, and his 
 casting of himself simply on the mercy of God, at 
 once put him in his right position — a position 
 which proves its rightness by its perfect peace — he 
 went to his house justified rather than the other. 
 
 This is the justification that we need — the reduc- 
 tion of all our dislocations — the rightening in us of 
 all that is wrong, delivering us from self-seeking, 
 and filling us with love. If we see that filial trust 
 in God is the only principle which can accomplish 
 this great thing, we shall at once recognise that it 
 has as much the stamp of God upon it, as the law 
 of gravitation in the material world has. 
 
 V.— FORGIVENESS. 
 
 When St. Paul spoke of justification by faith, he 
 meant to say that filial trust in God as a loving and 
 righteous Father is the real essential righteousness 
 of man — that it will make him a good man, a good 
 neighbour, a good citizen ; and he also meant to say 
 that no man could have this trust except through 
 the conviction that God is unchangeably his Father. 
 
FRAGMENTS. 239 
 
 There is no room here for imputation, in the sense 
 usually given to that word. Its sense in the Bible 
 itself is simply that in the judgment of God such 
 filial trust is righteousness. 
 
 This is no question of words, for if the righteous- 
 ness of faith be a mere conventionality, though God 
 Himself were the author of that conventionality, it 
 cannot be the ultimate good intended for man ; it 
 cannot permanently satisfy his spirit. It is more- 
 over evidently absurd to suppose that this faith is 
 followed or rewarded by forgiveness, for it cannot 
 exist without the assurance of forgiveness, that is, 
 without the assurance of an infinite and unchanging 
 love, which even in punishing seeks our good. 
 
 It is difficult for a man conscious of deep sin to 
 maintain this assurance — to believe that notwith- 
 standing all his transgressions, God is still his loving 
 forgiving Father, — and yet till he believes this he can 
 never pray a son's prayer, nor have a son's feeling 
 towards God. We must have this assurance as our 
 starting-point in the path of righteousness, we must 
 begin by having it, we cannot make a single step 
 without it, because filial trust is our righteousness, 
 and filial trust is impossible without an absolute and 
 unwavering assurance of forgiveness. Forgiveness, 
 therefore, must be a permanent fact in the relation 
 of God to man ; not a thing which our faith creates, 
 but a thing which exists whether we believe it or 
 net, a condition of things in which we live, and 
 
240 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 which our faith — or I would rather here say our 
 spiritual reason — perceives and lays hold of as an 
 existing reality, and as such rests on. 
 
 The intelligent belief that we are under a process 
 of education in filial righteousness — the belief that 
 this was God's purpose in creating us and that our 
 sins have not induced Him to abandon it — would, if 
 really held, necessarily involve the assurance that 
 forgiveness is man's permanent condition, because 
 such a purpose could not be carried on without a 
 continual forgiveness ; and it would at the same time 
 help us to understand that it is however a forgive- 
 ness which by no means excludes punishment, 
 though it uses all punishment for the correction and 
 essential good of the transgressor. But we find by 
 experience that our fears are too strong for our logic. 
 The sense of sin creates distrust, and therefore God, 
 to overcome this distrust, has in the gospel shown 
 us the eternal foundation of all trust, by opening up 
 to us the mystery of His own nature of Father and 
 Son, and by revealing to us that we are created in 
 the Son, who is thus the root and type and mould of 
 our being, and also the assured pledge of the Father's 
 relation to us, and of His purpose for us. He has 
 given him to die for us that in that act we might 
 have the measure of His love. 
 
FRAGMENTS. 241 
 
 VI— THE GOSPEL NO CHANGE IN THE 
 PUEPOSE OF GOD. 
 
 Are we to think that when Paul proclaimed the 
 gospel, he meant to teach that God had now changed 
 His tone and adopted a more loving method of 
 dealing with His moral creatures than in the former 
 times ? Assuredly he can have had no such mean- 
 ing ; he must mean to say that the gospel gives 
 the true representation of the unchangeable character 
 of God, and that it was the ignorance of men that 
 made them think otherwise of Him. There was a 
 progress in the teaching — no change in the character 
 or purpose of the Teacher. 
 
 The light in man's conscience which condemns 
 his sin ought to be understood by him to be " the 
 goodness of God leading him to repentance." But 
 man misinterprets that condemning light, and calls 
 it not the goodness but the enmity of God. And 
 therefore God in His mercy has met this misinter- 
 pretation, by sending that light of the conscience 
 (in the person of His Son) into the world, in the 
 likeness of sinful flesh, to seek and to save the 
 lost, thus giving the fullest manifestation of His 
 fatherly purpose. Eor the discovery that there ]y 
 exists a filial nature in God, and that conscience 
 testifies of the indwelling presence in man of that 
 filial nature, is the peculiar doctrine of Christianity, 
 
242 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 a doctrine communicated to us, not that we may be 
 rewarded for believing it, but that through the 
 belief of it we may know the place which we hold 
 in the heart and purpose of God, and be brought 
 into perfect sympathy with that heart and purpose. 
 
 VII.— GOD'S PUEPOSE FOE US IS 
 EIGHTEOUSNESS. 
 
 God sees us as we are, yet with a love that always 
 desires to make us — what we should be — like Him- 
 self ; and which will eternally persist in urging the 
 accomplishment of that desire. It is this charac- 
 teristic of God's love which alone makes it worthy 
 of trust. A love which does not seek return is not 
 really love, and a righteousness which does not seek 
 to make others righteous is not really righteousness. 
 
 If we saw a father punishing his child, and when 
 we asked him what effect he expected to produce 
 he were to answer, I don't think of that, I only 
 think of what he has deserved, should we not at 
 once say that he was neither a loving father nor 
 a righteous man ? 
 
 So long as I believe that God's condemnation of 
 my sin is not connected with this purpose, and that 
 He punishes me merely "because I deserve it, it is im- 
 possible to trust Him ; but when I understand that 
 His condemnation contains within it an unchange- 
 able purpose to draw me out of my sin, I can accept 
 
FRAGMENTS. 243 
 
 His condemnation and bless Him for it. It seems 
 to me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is just the 
 full and living manifestation of this purpose, — that 
 it means this or nothing. 
 
 VIII.— THE MEANING OF SALVATION. 
 
 We should ask what is the meaning of the word 
 salvation. For most assuredly the spirit and cha- 
 racter of our religion will much depend on the 
 signification which we attribute to it. If we really 
 believe that the great object of the Saviour's mission 
 to this earth was to save men from their sins, we 
 shall also believe that salvation means a deliver- 
 ance not from punishment but from sin. And how 
 is this to be effected ? How can we escape from 
 sin ? I would answer that the only conceivable way 
 is by ceasing from sin, that is, by becoming righteous. 
 And as we have seen that man's righteousness con- 
 sists in filial trust, we seem to be conducted to the 
 idea, that Christ saves us from sin, by revealing to 
 us the trustworthiness of the Father. 
 
 IX.— THE FATHEE EEVEALED IN THE SON. 
 
 If there be really in the Divine nature an only 
 begotten Son, one with the Father, who is also the 
 Beginning or Head of the spiritual creation, the 
 
A 
 
 244 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 necessary inference is, that the relations of father- 
 hood and sonship are the fundamental principles 
 which regulate and harmonise that creation. The 
 revelation of the Son is the only thorough revelation 
 of the Father ; and as the Son is the Head of the 
 spiritual creation, he of necessity communicates his 
 own relation of Sonship to all its members ; and as 
 a common sonship is a common brotherhood, he also 
 unites them all to each other in that bond. Thus 
 love is the universal living law, originating with the 
 Father and received by the Son, that it may by him 
 be propagated to the whole spiritual family. 
 
 The revelation of the Son is the revelation of the 
 universal sonship, a sonship which has not been 
 forfeited by sin ; for the appearance of Jesus on the 
 earth and his assumption of our nature, under all 
 its conditions of temptation and suffering and mor- 
 tality, gives the fullest and most absolute demon- 
 stration that our sin had not made God cease to 
 be our Father, or abandon His purpose of training 
 us into a participation of the Son's character and 
 blessedness. And this demonstration was necessary, 
 for a sense of unforgiven sin is incompatible with 
 the trust which constitutes filial goodness. 
 
 The appearance of Christ in our nature is in itself 
 a declaration of the forgiveness of sin ; not that 
 forgiveness is attainable, but that it exists as a 
 permanent fact in the Divine nature, and a perma- 
 nent element in the relation of God to man. It is 
 
FRAGMENTS. 245 
 
 a witness that His love survives our sin, and that 
 His punishments are not for destruction but for 
 correction. When we are sure of this, we can trust 
 ourselves in His hands, accepting any punishment 
 He may be pleased to send, assured that fatherly 
 love is the unwilling but wise inflictor of it, and 
 therefore we can love Him even though we know 
 that we have sinned against Him. 
 
 Man has lost his place in the spiritual order hj 
 ceasing to believe in the Father's love, and so feel- 
 ing himself constrained to seek his good in self- 
 gratification ; and as he had thus lost it, he could 
 only recover it by having that love forced (as it were) 
 upon him in such a form as to draw him out of his 
 self-seeking. And such, indeed, is the form of that 
 love of God which is revealed in Jesus Christ. The 
 principle of self-sacrifice underlies all true love. 
 It may remain undiscerned, and until discerned the 
 love may seem questionable ; but when it really is 
 recognised, the worst of men are affected by it. " All 
 these have of their abundance cast into the treasury; 
 but she of her penury hath cast in all that she had, 
 even all her living." This is the human type, and 
 the Divine original is " God so loved the world that 
 He gave His only begotten Son," that whosoever be- 
 lieveth in him — whosoever, that is, belie veth in this 
 self-sacrificing love — might not perish, but have, in 
 that very belief, eternal life. " He that spared not 
 His own Son, how shall He not with him freely give 
 
 f^ 
 
i 
 
 246 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 us all things ? Scarcely for a righteous man will 
 one die, but God commendeth His love towards us, 
 in that, whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for 
 us." Such is the Father's love. 
 
 The connection between these three great prin- 
 ciples, (1.) the eternal Sonship, (2.) faith or depen- 
 dent recipiency, and (3.) that sacrifice of self which 
 is the only putting away of sin, is to me an irrefra- 
 gable evidence of the truth of the whole revelation. 
 I see that sin can be put away only by this self- 
 sacrifice ; that filial trust is the only principle which 
 can produce such sacrifice ; and that this trust must 
 exist within the Divine nature itself. And thus 
 these three great doctrines of Christianity, the 
 Divine nature of Christ, the righteousness of faith, 
 and the necessity of self-sacrifice, appear to be cog- 
 nate principles existing as necessary elements of the 
 spiritual order, and in perfect harmony with the 
 reason and conscience of man. 
 
 This is the true natural religion, which carries 
 God's own certificate to my reason. 
 
 X.— THE TRUST OF CHRIST. 
 
 Christ come in the flesh, lived a life of faith or 
 trust in his Father. As the Head and Representa- 
 tive of men he trusted in the Father's purpose of 
 deliverance for the race, and in this trust he yielded 
 
FRAGMENTS. 247 
 
 himself up to the power of that purpose, so that it 
 was accomplished in him. And he did this that all 
 men might apprehend the trustworthiness of the 
 Father and the power of a real trust in Him, and 
 might thus "be strengthened and encouraged to 
 partake in his trust, that so they might also partake 
 in its results. 
 
 The righteousness of God towards man consists 
 in this loving purpose, and the righteousness of 
 man towards God consists in his faith in that pur- 
 pose, a trust which makes man a fellow-worker 
 with God in carrying it out. The eternal Son came 
 into our world to reveal the Fatherhood of God ; 
 none but a Son could have made such a revelation, 
 and none but those who are created in the Son's 
 nature could be capable of comprehending or receiv- 
 ing it. He came to draw and guide the hearts of 
 the children to their Father by revealing the father- 
 liness of the Father's heart, and he did this by his 
 own unfaltering trust even whilst standing in their 
 place, accepting and enduring that penalty which 
 they had incurred. 
 
 XL— CHEIST THE HEAD OE EEPEESEOTA- 
 TIVE OF MAN (rj apyr\ tt}? KTureoai). 
 
 Apart from outward revelation, is there anything 
 in human experience to help us in the apprehen- 
 
248 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 sion of this doctrine, of the truth of which St. Paul 
 had probably an intuitive perception ? It seems to 
 me that the argument in the fifth chapter of Eomans, 
 from verse 12 to the end, gives the answer to this 
 question, by referring to a fact in our nature which 
 at once suggests the idea of the doctrine as its cor- 
 relative. 
 
 It is certain that we inherit qualities both of 
 mind and body from our progenitors — often bad 
 qualities ; above all, we inherit death. We also feel 
 that from some quarter or other we inherit con- 
 science — the apprehension of righteousness, and the 
 sense of its obligatory character. But we cannot 
 refer the evil and the good to the same source ; we 
 must then have two descents — two fountains of 
 life ; there must be two heads of the race. Those 
 of my readers who adopt the Bible history of Adam, 
 and believe that God permitted the poison of sin 
 and its penalty to be transmitted from our carnal 
 Head to us his descendants, will at once feel that 
 much more is it to be credited that in the Divine 
 purpose there is a spiritual Head from whom spiri- 
 tual health and blessing, resurrection and eternal 
 life, may likewise be transmitted to all men. But 
 even those who have doubts as to the Headship of 
 Adam in respect to all men, can scarcely doubt of 
 the oneness of conscience in all men, and hence we 
 are logically conducted to the idea of a personal 
 fountain of righteousness as the Head of men. 
 
FEAGMENTS. 249 
 
 I believe that this idea was in the apostle's mind 
 from the beginning of the epistle, and that when 
 he represented the revelation of the Divine right- 
 eousness of faith as the chief boast of the gospel, he 
 thought of it as commencing with the eternal Son, 
 and laid up in him as its fountain, from whom it 
 was ever flowing out, and seeking entrance into all 
 men ; and therefore that it was in realising their 
 union with him, and their relation through him to 
 the Father, that they could best learn the great 
 lesson of faith. 
 
 Faith in the Son as the Head and Eoot of humanity, 
 in whom men were created, thus becoming partakers 
 of his nature — the Divine favour which rested ever 
 on him resting a] so on them as the overshadowing 
 firmament under which all are born, and under which 
 all live — this faith appeared to Paul to be the ex- 
 planation of and guide into faith in the Father. And 
 this I believe is the meaning of that benediction with 
 which he concludes all his epistles — " The grace of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ " — not the grace which he be- 
 stoius, but that which he receives, the grace in which 
 he himself stands — " be with you all." This is his 
 usual formula ; and in 2 Cor. he simply expands it, 
 specifying the elements of which it consists, namely, 
 the love of God, and the communion of the Holy 
 Spirit. 
 
250 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 XIL— THE SACRIFICE WHICH PUTS 
 AWAY SIN. 
 
 In the epistle to the Hebrews, Christ is said to 
 have put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. I 
 believe that nothing but this sacrifice of self can in 
 any case put sin away, and that Christ as the Head 
 of the race, made this sacrifice that it might be 
 reproduced in every member of his body. It was 
 trust in his Father's righteous love which produced 
 it in him, and nothing but the same trust can pro- 
 duce it in any one. Therefore, whilst showing in 
 his own life a continual example of that trust, he 
 was at the same time continually declaring the 
 trust- worthiness and love-worthiness of the Father. 
 
 A son may reveal a father in two ways ; either 
 by being like him — so entirely in his image as to be 
 justified in saying, He that hath seen me hath seen 
 my father — or by manifesting a constant reverential 
 loving trust, and thus testifying that the father is 
 worthy of such trust. Jesus revealed the Father 
 in both these ways. He could say, " If you can 
 trust my love you may trust His, for in mine you 
 see His ;" and He could also say, " I know Him so 
 well that I have an unfaltering trust that everything 
 He appoints for me is with a purpose of infinite 
 love. That trust makes everything easy. It has 
 made my yoke easy and my burden light ; and if 
 
FRAGMENTS. 251 
 
 you knew Hira as I desire to reveal Him to you, it 
 would do the same for you." This is the meaning 
 of that beautiful word (Matt. xi. 28) " Come unto 
 me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest." The 27th verse is the key to all 
 which follows : " No man knoweth the Father save 
 the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him." 
 Jesus is the revealer of the Father, and if men will 
 believe in the revelation, they will become partakers 
 of his rest ; their yoke also will become easy and 
 their burden light. 
 
 XIII.— LIFE THBOUGH DEATH. 
 
 The promise to Abraham of a son in his old age 
 was associated with the hope of the final triumph 
 of good over evil in the world ; " in thy seed shall 
 all the families of the earth be blessed ;" and thus 
 his faith was not a mere confidence that the promise 
 of a son would be fulfilled, but was faith in a 
 righteous God, in a Being whose desire and purpose 
 is righteousness. Afterwards, when called by God 
 to offer up this promised son, he was strengthened 
 to obey by falling back on the fact that God had 
 already proved His power and trustworthiness by 
 giving him that son, and hence concluding that He 
 could restore him to life even from the dead. He 
 gave to God a full faith, and in heart a full obedience, 
 
252 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 though his hand was stayed from the execution. 
 He seems to have been taught by this dealing of 
 God, to look for the accomplishment of the pro- 
 mised blessing through death. 
 
 And this is the character of Christian faith ; it 
 is faith in God, who led His Son through death into 
 new life ; — through a death which, as due to sin, 
 he by assuming our nature had incurred, into a life 
 which he had taken hold of by filial trust, and 
 which the righteous purpose of God bestows on us 
 also through our participation in his trust. 
 
 The sentence of sorrow and death is not to he set 
 aside, hut 'passed through, and the foregone sins, 
 though pretermitted and passed over, — that is, not 
 regarded by God as reasons for abandoning His 
 purpose of training us in righteousness, — must yet 
 receive their penalty. 
 
 XIV.— THE DEATH OF CHEIST— JUDAS. 
 
 The death of Christ on the cross, as submitted to 
 by him in fulfilment of his Father's will, was an 
 act of self-sacrificing love, and was thus a manifes- 
 tation of the true nature of righteousness. But it 
 was more than this ; it was apparently the death of 
 a criminal — the execution of a penal sentence. He 
 had assumed a nature which, through sin, had fallen 
 under the condemnation of death, and being thus 
 
FRAGMENTS. 253 
 
 under condemnation, he voluntarily accepted death, 
 thereby acknowledging its righteousness. He did 
 this as the well-beloved Son and Eevealer of the 
 Father, and as the Head and Eepresentative of men ; 
 thereby declaring that the Father, even when pro- 
 nouncing and executing the sentence of death on 
 man, had not abandoned His purpose of training 
 him into righteousness, and that man in accepting 
 death yields himself to that purpose. 
 
 The Father sent the Son to pass through man's 
 suffering life and death to prove that whilst He saw 
 it to be right and inevitable that sin should be 
 visited by sorrow and death, His love ceased not 
 to rest on those who were thus visited ; and that it 
 was therefore at once their right and their duty to 
 trust in that love throughout the whole process. 
 
 Sin begins with distrust of God. The sinner 
 believes that following his own will and not God's 
 is the way of happiness, and having thus left his true 
 position, the consciousness of sin increases his dis- 
 trust ; he feels that he has forfeited the right to 
 trust God, that trusting now would seem like a 
 denial that he had sinned. Thus even the right 
 feeling which remains in him seems to forbid trust, 
 and yet trust is his only possible righteousness ! 
 
 The assurance, then, that God ever remains his 
 loving Father is the gospel which in all circum- 
 stances man needs in order to his being righteous, 
 and this is the gospel which is given him in Jesus 
 
254 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 Christ — a gospel which assures him that it is right — 
 even when lying under the consciousness and the 
 punishment of sin — to trust in the love of God. It 
 was the want of this trust which made Peter deny 
 his Lord, and nothing but the reawakening of trust 
 could bring him out of his sin. It would have been 
 right for Judas to have had that trust the moment 
 after he had betrayed his Lord. Such a trust, con- 
 taining, as it must have done, such an untold amount 
 of self-abhorrence, would, we believe, have been a 
 higher and deeper trust than he had ever had 
 before. 
 
 It is indeed difficult to conceive how Judas, even in 
 the exercise of such a trust, could through eternity 
 arrive at peace, with such a memory ever present 
 with him. We can scarcely conceive how even the 
 fullest forgiveness of God could enable him to for- 
 give himself, or purge his memory of its mortal 
 agony. It is evident that the purer we become we 
 must increasingly abhor and loathe all sin, especially 
 in ourselves ; and thus it would appear that if 
 memory remains in the future stages of our being, 
 the retrospect of past transgression must become 
 ever increasingly painful to us. Yet we cannot 
 doubt but that there must be a sufficient antidote in 
 the divine love even for this form of agony, — a 
 power to give perfect peace even to a Judas 
 when he turns to God. I believe that it is our 
 ignorance of the nature of divine love — of its power 
 
FRAGMENTS. 255 
 
 and sweetness and blessedness — which makes it so 
 difficult for us to conceive of such a deliverance. 
 And as that love, though it passes the reason to 
 conceive it, is yet in harmony with reason, we may 
 suppose that one of its consolations to a Judas will 
 be, not only that God has brought a blessing to the 
 world out of his transgression, but that, through 
 the very horror of that fearful act, his own soul has 
 been brought into a deeper trust in God, and thus 
 into a deeper righteousness than, it may be, he could 
 otherwise have attained. 
 
 XV.— SIK 
 
 I should feel myself sinning against God and my 
 own conscience if I were either in thought or ex- 
 pression to palliate the evil of sin. The enormous 
 misery in the world (evidently the consequence of 
 sin) marks God's estimate of it ; yet it seems to me 
 that the fact of His choosing to encounter all this 
 sin and all this misery with the view of educing 
 from it righteousness in man, marks also that in His 
 judgment it is worth while going through the pro- 
 cess in order to arrive at the result. It cannot be 
 from a necessity in the nature of things, but must 
 be according to God's own purpose in constructing 
 man, that evil tendencies are transmitted from 
 parent to child, and are thus indefinitely multiplied. 
 
256 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 Are we not from this fact compelled to conclude 
 that the spiritual education of man is to be carried 
 on through a conflict with such tendencies, and 
 through the self-condemnations arising out of our 
 failures in resisting temptations and our transgres- 
 sions in abandoning ourselves to them ? And thus 
 the sense of sin requiring mercy, and the sense of 
 weakness requiring help, seem to be the great means 
 whereby we are trained to cast ourselves upon God. 
 We must thus accept both the fact of the deep 
 culpability of sin, and also the fact that it is used 
 by God as an instrument of education. 
 
 These ideas must have been present to the mind 
 of the apostle, when, he put the question, Shall we 
 continue in sin that grace may abound ? and when 
 he spoke of the abounding of sin leading to the 
 superabounding of grace. It must always be wrong 
 to do wrong, and wrong must always be worthy of 
 condemnation ; and yet it is possible that there is 
 a righteousness educible from wrong — that is, from 
 an experience of sin — of a higher order than could 
 otherwise have been attained. It may seem as if 
 this were making a difference between our righteous- 
 ness and the righteousness of Christ, but I do not 
 think that it is so, because the object of this pro- 
 cess is to train man into that dependence on the 
 Father which belongs to the very essence of the 
 eternal Son. I do not attempt any further explana- 
 tion of the difficulty. 
 
FRAGMENTS. 257 
 
 XVI— INNATE GOOD AND EVIL. 
 
 The spiritual education of a man depends as much 
 on the internal qualities with which he is born as on 
 the external circumstances of his lot, and of course 
 the success of the education must depend on his 
 own apprehension and just appreciation of these 
 internal qualities. There is a great mistake on this 
 subject, into which we are exceedingly apt to fall, 
 both in judging of ourselves and in judging of others. 
 That of which we are most proud in ourselves, and 
 which we most admire in others, is spontaneity — 
 something which has been born with us — natural 
 kindliness and generosity, unconscious self-sacrifice, 
 and such like, preferring these to any qualities which 
 have been produced by culture and effort ; and that 
 of which we are most ashamed in ourselves, and 
 which we most condemn in others, is innate evil 
 tendencies which appear to have been born with 
 us. Yet certainly right reason would lead to an 
 opposite judgment ; and our true wisdom would be 
 to consider the presence of that innate evil within us 
 as permitted for the sake of our spiritual education, 
 and consequently as a call from God to take hold 
 of His strength, in order that we may successfully 
 fight the good fight of faith against it. Learning by 
 experience that dependence upon God is the true 
 and only righteousness of the creature, we should 
 
258 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 thus advance in meetness for our appointed place in 
 the body of His Son. 
 
 XVII.— THE TEUE IDEA OF "KATUKAL 
 KELIGION." 
 
 I kemembek well the satisfaction I felt on first 
 reading the works of William Law. I felt as if I 
 had found a great treasure, for I perceived that he 
 regarded Christianity, not as a system of doctrines 
 imposed on us by God, of which we could know 
 nothing except from the Scriptures, but as the 
 eternally true and natural religion to which all our 
 spiritual faculties are adapted, and the intrinsic truth 
 and certainty of which, though we could not have 
 discovered it for ourselves, yet when revealed we can 
 so apprehend, as to hold it on account of that in- 
 trinsic truth, and not on any outward authority 
 whatsoever. 
 
 I at once came to accept this idea, and have ever 
 since cherished it, as containing fundamental truth 
 and most important guidance. I felt that when thus 
 apprehended I really "believed the doctrines of Christi- 
 anity, and that until I did so apprehend them I could 
 not be said really to believe them at all. I also felt 
 that when God was pleased to reveal anything con- 
 cerning Himself, it was impossible that he could 
 be satisfied with our receiving it in the way of mere 
 
FRAGMENTS. 259 
 
 submissive obedience, and that He must mean us to 
 understand and sympathise with His purpose in the 
 revelation. Besides, I saw that the truest doctrines 
 could be of no use to us until thus apprehended. 
 If they were to affect the character, it was evidently 
 only thus that they could do so ; and what other 
 purpose could they be intended to serve ? Would 
 it not be almost profane to suppose that we are 
 called on to accept them merely as an exercise of 
 submission ? For what is a doctrine, and what is 
 its use ? Christian doctrine, as distinct from pre- 
 cept, means simply a discovery of the relation in 
 which God stands to man, implying of course a 
 revelation of His nature and character, so far as 
 we are capable of apprehending them, inasmuch as 
 our relation to Him necessarily depends on His 
 nature and character. I cannot know my duties 
 to any one, I cannot think of him, feel towards 
 him, act towards him rightly, until I know the 
 relation in which I stand to him. I believe that 
 this is the true and only meaning of all religious 
 dogmas. We are created in certain relations to 
 God and to the spiritual world, and we have capa- 
 cities and aptitudes suited to those relations, just 
 as we have material organs suited to their objects ; 
 and the test of a true religion is that it gives such a 
 representation of those relations as commends itself 
 to our deepest consciousness. The doctrines of 
 Christianity, if it is the true religion, must contain 
 
260 FKAGMENTS. 
 
 this representation. How then, in dealing with 
 other minds, can we justify or defend the trnth of 
 the representation ? In the last resort I believe our 
 only real argument must consist in reproducing to 
 them in our life the impression made by it on our 
 own reason and conscience. " Ye are my witnesses, 
 saith the Lord." — Isa. lxiii. 10. 
 
 XVIIL— "BY THIS SHALL ALL MEN KNOW 
 THAT YE AEE MY DISCIPLES." 
 
 Let us for a moment contemplate the effect that 
 thorough belief of their relationship to God would 
 necessarily produce on the characters of men. They 
 would feel that they were ever near to a loving 
 Father who, though ordering the universe, and 
 Himself the fountain out of which all things flow, 
 yet thinks of each of them and cares for each with 
 an unfailing love which is continually seeking fel- 
 lowship with them, a love which can tolerate no 
 sin, yet forgives all sin and strives to cast it out. 
 They would feel that they possessed a treasure in 
 this their Father's love above compare with any 
 earthly good — a treasure which could never cease 
 to satisfy them, and which could never be taken 
 from them ; yet they would not be lifted out of their 
 human relations and duties by it, for they would 
 feel that, as their Father orders all things in 
 
FRAGMENTS. 261 
 
 wisdom as well as in love, there must be a special 
 fitness in the circumstances of their lot, whether 
 pleasant or painful, to educate them for their high 
 calling, and they would gather the instruction in- 
 tended for them by a patient and dutiful watchful- 
 ness over each step of their way. They would love 
 each other because they would see in every man a 
 beloved child of their common Father. 
 
 And not only would the recognition of their high 
 relationship produce such feelings, but according to 
 the measure and activity of their faith — that recipi- 
 ent faculty by which the divine life is circulated 
 through the body — they would receive the inflow of 
 the spirit of the Son, disposing and enabling them 
 to do all their Father's will. 
 
 I am sure that a real belief in our relationship to 
 the Father through the Son would produce these 
 results, and therefore, though I am most sensible of 
 the difficulty of grasping it as a reality, and of the 
 discouraging impression naturally and necessarily 
 made by the faults of those who profess to believe 
 it, I desire to hear this gospel proclaimed through 
 the world, assured that it will prove itself to be the 
 power of God unto salvation wherever it is really 
 received. 
 
 It is a gospel which may be carried with equal 
 suitableness to the bosoms and business of all classes 
 of the community. It will help every man to do 
 his work and bear his burden by showing him why 
 
262 FRAGMENTS. 
 
 the work and the burden were appointed. It will 
 rescue him from the fluctuating uncertainties of 
 time by giving him a secure standing-place in the 
 eternal purpose of God. It will give him peace 
 under the accusations of his own inner man by 
 showing him that his Father can use even the 
 agonies of conscious guilt to break down the bar- 
 riers which self-reliance opposes to the reign of 
 His Will. 
 
 PRINTED BY T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO THE QUEEN, 
 AT THE EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
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