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THE GOSPEL
ACCORDING TO
SAINT PAUL

BT
W. P. DU BOSE, M.A., S.T.D.

The Soteriology of the New Testament
Crown Svo.
The Gospel in the Gospels
Crown Svo.
The Gospel According to Saint Paul
Crown Svo.

THE GOSPEL
ACCORDING TO
SAINT PAUL

BY
William Porcher DxtBose, m.a., s.t.d.
AUTHOR OF "THE SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT,"
" THE ECUMENICAL COUNCILS," "THE GOSPEL IN THE
GOSPEIfi"; PROFESSOR OF EXEGESIS IN THE
UNIVERSITY OP THE SOUTH

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1907

COPYEIOHT, 1907
BY
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

AU rights reserved

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. V.S.A.

to
S. P. D.
IN TOKEN OF VALUABLE
SERVICE IN THE PREPA
RATION OF THIS VOLUME.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Introduction .... . . 3
II. The Presuppositions of the Gospel  17
III. The Definition of the Gospel  31
IV. The Further Definition of the Gospel  45 '
V. The Wrath of God against Sin  57
VI. The New Righteousness . . .69
VII. The Object of Justifying or Saving Faith . . 83
VIII. The Clearing up of the Mystery of Righteousness . 97
IX. The Faith of Abraham  113
X. The Status of the Christian Believer  125
XI. Saint Paul's Terminology  . 143
XII. The First and the Last Adam  157
XIII. The Christian in Christ  171
XIV. Not imder the Law but under Grace . . . 187
XV. Law, Sin, and Redemption  . 203
XVI. The Condemnation of Sin in the Flesh . 219
XVII. The Law of the Spirit  233
XVIII. The Mind of the Spirit  249
XIX. The Redemption of the Body  261
XX. The Process of Divine Grace  277
XXL The Christ of Saint Paul  293

I
INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION
In advocating and pressing any particular point of
view, one is inevitably liable to press it unduly and at
the expense of other points of view. In the quest of
truth this danger ought not to be too much of a deter
rent to either freedom of thought or boldness of expres
sion. The ultimate aim of each one of us should be
not to save ourselves from error but to advance the
truth. We may safely rely upon it that our truth will
in the end be accepted and our error corrected. If I
had been too much afraid of going wrong I should
have made no progress in growing right; — who of us
that has really thought or spoken may not say that of
himself? For my own part, I have not merely tradi
tionally believed but become personally convinced that
there is a truth of the Scriptures and that there is a
mind of the Church; and that each of these will take
care of itself as against the infinite errors and vagaries
of individual thinkers and writers. I have in my mind
not only an impKcit faith but a rational science or
philosophy of these things, which at least satisfies
myself and gives me security and rest from the fear
of even my own shortcomings or too-far-goings. I do

4 Introduction
not hesitate to say then, on the one hand, that I hold
what I hold subject to the revision and correction of
the deeper truth of the Scriptures and the larger
wisdom of the Church; and, on the other hand, that,
leaving to these their function of final acceptance or
rejection, I conceive it to be my duty to the truth,
and my best service to them, to think the thoughts
and express the conclusions, as best I may, which
I have found to be to myself their own best
interpretation. The particular method which, after a lifetime of
study and reflection, I have found to be the best for
entering into the meaning of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, or into the meaning of Jesus Christ as Himself
the immediate Word or Gospel of God, may be brought
out by a parallelism or analogy between the independent
and very diflPerent treatments of St. Paul and St. John.
The starting-point, and standpoint all through, of
St. John's interpretation of our Lord is best expressed
in the words. The Life was manifested. The Life had
been manifested first to the outward eye and then to
the inward vision of a few; and it was the mission of
these few so to declare and present it to all others
that they too might know and enter into and share it.
St. John, both in his Gospel and in his Epistles, acts
upon the true Aristotelian principle that in every
investigation of reality the fact or the actual (to on)
is the proper starting-point {apxri)- The fact which
is the starting-point in this case is the simple objective
truth that Jesus Christ is the Life. That is fact in

Introduction 5
itself, independently of any external dogmatic affirma
tion or logical demonstration of it. And it is, if fact
in itself, then fact verifiable in itself; for truth, if
allowed to do so, always can and always will prove
itself. And this is truest of what is to us the ultimate
truth, the truth of Life and of ourselves, God's truth
of us. Wisdom, which is knowledge of God's truth, is
justified of her children. There is the Life — human
life in all the fulness of its meaning and divine reality.
There is the Truth — the Life expressed and mani
fested, something not only ideal or potential but actual,
not only vision or shadow or symbol but eternal sub
stance. There is the Way: Life, human life at least,
God's life in us, cannot come just so, out of hand, by
immediate fiat or creation from without. It can come
only in conjunction, in reaction, in conflict and strife
with human environment as it is and with all human
conditions as they are. Jesus Christ is not only the
truth or reality of life; He is the way of it to us, and He
is so only as Himself our own true way of life.
Life can be lived by ourselves, and our Lord's life
was lived, only in and through the mastery of the one
true way of human life, by practical solution of the
meaning, the reason, and the use of all actual human
conditions. In this world none of us can escape its
conditions, or be saved otherwise than by discharging
its inevitable tasks. Only through conquest of the
world, the flesh, and the devil may we attain unto
life eternal. But we have His parting assurance, In
the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good

6 Introduction
cheer, I have overcome the world. The overcoming
was His way and ours: He drank the cup and was
baptized with the baptism which we must drink and
be baptized withal, if we would be where and what
He is. In leading us all to glory, it behooved God to
make the author of our salvation perfect through the
sufferings which are the conditions and the means of
our own perfection and salvation. The point to be
emphasized is, that our salvation, in all the conditions,
means, and way of it, was first enacted or wrought out
in the personal human experiences and life of our Lord.
He is in fact to us the Way: no man can come to God,
and so to himself and to life, save through Him.
Thus St. John saw Jesus Christ as The Life; the
truth or reality or actuality of it, as distinguished not
only from its falsities, but from its mere dreams or
shadows; the way of it, as including and involving all
its conditions and causes, all its necessary means and
processes. Precisely analogously, though not with the
contemplative, poetic vision of St. John, but rather
with his own more active and practical insight, St.
Paul sees Jesus Christ as not so much our Life as our
Righteousness. He regards salvation less in the
accomplished fact than in the accomplishing act or
process; in the making rather than in the made product.
St. Paul does indeed see in our Lord Himself a process
completed, but in the joy of the completion he never
forgets or loses sight of the process; in all the glory of
what our Lord is as man, the important thing to re
member is the one lifelong human act of faith and

Introduction 7
obedience through which He became the man He is.
Life, and therefore salvation, is indeed an act, a life
long act or activity, a process of self-actualizing or
becoming ourselves. Life can be lived, or self realized,
only as they are so rightly, in accordance with their
own meaning and reason and law. That is what the
whole Bible means when it so emphatically and per
sistently proclaims that Tightness or righteousness alone
is life, that he who obeys the law shall live by it, and
he who violates it shall die by it. It is a universal
and necessary fact in itself that life, blessedness, or
salvation is to be found in nothing else than in right
being and right doing.
The first truth with St. Paul, then, is that righteous
ness is salvation; and the second is that Jesus Christ
is righteousness. This determines for us the stand
point from which, I think, we may best interpret the
Gospel according to St. Paul. Our task is first to
interpret righteousness in itself, as realized and mani
fested to us in the person of our Lord. It is then,
secondly, to learn how that righteousness is to be made
ours. The method in a word is this: through the
constant appropriating or taking it to ourselves in
faith, it is gradually and in the end made or becomes
our own in fact. This introduces the fact or principle
of the marvellous assimilative and transforming power
of faith. Man believes unto salvation — that is to say,
unto righteousness and life. Faith in the righteousness
and life of Christ assimilates and transforms us into
the likeness of Christ's righteousness and life: reflect-

8 Introduction
ing as a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are transformed
into the same image from glory to glory, even as from
the Lord the Spirit.
To understand this new-creative power of faith, we
must comprehend something of the complex and com
prehensive nature of faith. In the light of the mystery
or miracle by which all nature is made ours through
the senses, we ought not to halt at that higher mystery
whereby God makes Himself our own through faith.
After all there is as much of higher naturalness in the
latter as there is of lower in the former. Faith is the
highest and most distinctive function and activity of
the spirit of man. It involves the highest energy not
alone of his intelligence but of his affections, his vdll,
his entire selfhood or personality. If we reaUze even
in the lower spheres a truth in such sayings as that:
what we think, we are; what we love, we are; what we
believe or mean or intend, we are; — how much truer
should it be that what our most real self and selfhood
concentrates itself upon, attaches and gives itself up to
through every spiritual faculty and passion of its nature,
that, if we not already are, we most assuredly shall be.
This, I repeat, gives a sort of naturalness, if not indeed
the highest and truest naturalness, to the truth that we
believe unto righteousness or unto Kfe; that faith saves;
and that there is no other way of spiritual salvation or
of personal self-realization than through faith.
There are those who object to our making salvation,
the life of the spirit, the life of religion in general, too
natural a process. We cannot kick against the pricks;

Introduction 9
the world has begun to make the discovery, and it
will not go backward in it, that the natural is God's
way. The natural is the rational and the divine.
There is no real break between the natural and the
supernatural; the one is only the higher or further
other. We shall come to see that Adam and Christ
are the same Man; that earth and heaven are one
continuous life, easy here or there to be made a hell
of; that nature and God are one world, too easily
divorced and set at enmity, incapable of too close
reconcihation or at-onement. Under the prevalence of
the modem scientific principle of evolution we have
discovered that the great primal truth of God creating
is neither denied nor obscured, but is as much as ever
not only a possibility but a postulate of thought in
what, nevertheless, appears and can appear to Science
only as a world self -evolving. Still more shall we need
to learn in Jesus Christ and His Church that the
greater truth of God redeeming and saving is neither
diminished nor obscured by the fact that it is a truth
made visible to us only in the phenomenon of a hu
manity self-redeemed and self-saved. No man hath
seen God at any time; if God be in a man, He will be
visible in him only in what the man himself is. God
was in Christ sub specie hominis, not Dei. He was
here to fulfil and manifest Himself in us and us in
Him; not Himself otherwise than in us, or in any
other revelation of Himself than as our holiness,
righteousness, and Ufe. That was effected for us ob
jectively, or as an object or end to our faith, in the

10 Introduction
person of the Incarnate Word; it is effected subjectively
by a power working in us through faith, the power of
the Incarnate Spirit. That the personal Spirit of God
and the personal character and Ufe of God should be
ours through faith is as truly natural an operation and
result as that nature's breath and Hfe should be ours
through our bodily organs.
Forasmuch then as God was in Christ for the
specific purpose and to the specific end of being to
us and in us the whole truth of ourselves, of manifesting
and imparting to us Himself as our holiness, our
righteousness, and our eternal Hfe, it follows that it
should be our part to see in Jesus Christ just that as
what God wills to reveal, and to accept in Him just
that as what God wills to bestow. I say so much in
explanation and justification of what will seem to some
an undue insistence upon the humanity of our Lord.
There will be statements no doubt so one-sided in
themselves as, if they stood alone, to endanger or to
obscure other no less essential sides of the truth. But
I hope it will be seen and felt that they do not stand
alone. One such statement I would make clear in
the beginning: I lay dovra the principle that in inter
preting the human hfe and work of Jesus Christ I
construe Him to myself in terms of humanity. I make
no difference there between Him and us save in the
one particular, which is the one Scriptural exception,
of His sole perfect sinlessness or holiness. His sole
complete and perfect victory over the world, His
accomplished task of uniting humanity with God and

Introduction 11
so redeeming it from sin and death. That is enough
for me as demonstration of our Lord's deity also,
enough not alone to enable but to compel the confession
that Jesus Christ was as truly more than man as He
was also truly man. I bow before not only the work
of Jesus Christ as truly God's but the Worker in Jesus
Christ as truly God. God's eternal Wisdom and Word
which are eternally God's Self were truly incarnate in
His person, and wrought with His hands the creed of
creeds. I go further and repeat the conviction that,
so far as our knowledge and experience can go, no
where else in all God's universe, in all His infinite
and manifold activities, is God so God as in the person
and work of Jesus Christ. For in Jesus Christ God
is all love, and love of all things is most God.
I might be allowed to use the opportunity to say an
additional word upon the subject of discussions such
as we are here touching upon. These are times — but,
let us remember, not more so than were the earliest
and most living ages of Christianity — of thought and
speculation, original and independent thought and spec
ulation, upon the truth as it is in Jesus Christ. They
are not times of unthinking and unquestioning accept
ance of foregone and foreclosed inquiry and investi
gation. The fact may be condemned and lamented,
but no amount of shutting our own or others' eyes
and ears to it will make it any the less a fact. The
whole truth of Scripture and the whole mind of
the Church might surely, one might say, be accepted
as being conjointly the ultimate expression to us of

12 Introduction
what Christlaniiy is, what constitutes the essential or
necessary truth of it. This, however, as a matter of
fact, does not end the matter. What is the whole
truth of the Scripture, and what is the whole mind of
the Church.? Some will say, these are things which
have been determined for us, and the very reopening
them is fatal to the fact or the possibiUty of any such
thing as a catholic truth or unity. Are these questions
indeed closed.'' They may be for those who say they
are. But what of the great hving, thinking Christian
world to which, as a matter of fact, they are not closed ?
They are tremendously not closed, and tremendously
in question. And they are not going to be closed by
any possible amount of mere saying or asserting that
they ought to be. A few bewildered and weary souls,
to escape doubt and in despair of any self -determining
power of truth or life in itself, will from time to time
seek, and perhaps find, refuge and rest in the quiet
places where they are no longer in question and under
the assurance that they are infalhbly settled. But
there is in fact no such rest for a really living and a
really thinking world. The whole truth of the Scripture
and the whole mind of the Church are not dead but
live things. The fact of their being alive and forever
obliged to keep themselves alive with a life that is
within themselves will not preclude the possibility of
their gaining for themselves assent, consent, and agree
ment; of their attaining even, as every other kind of
truth does, a catholic unity and permanence of form
and expression, a quod semper, quod uhique, et quod ah

Introduction 13
omnibus. The fact of truth's being always alive and
always in question for its life does not militate against
its credit for truth or its tenure of life. And there is
every advantage in truth's being under the necessity
of being always our truth, and not merely that of other
thinkers and of another age.
The initial difficulty before us lies in the want of
assurance that there is such a thing possible, such a
thing to be sought and found, and to be held in union
and unity with all our might, as a truth of the Scripture
and a mind of the Church. We need to have and to
spread such a conviction; and the best and only way
to extend the conviction is that we who share it shall
as much as possible act in union and harmony with
one another in the common cause of its extension.
There is no real unity in which there is not diversity,
and in the highest unity there is the utmost diversity.
We shall not all agree in the methods or in the infinite
details; we shall not all be altogether right; we shall
all be wrong in many ways. But for all that, if we are
thoroughly agreed that there is a truth of the Scripture
to be known and a mind of the Church to be understood
and shared, we shall not fail to accompUsh great things
towards a necessary and a possible result, the divine
result of Christian unity. In that spirit, we shall
gratefully acknowledge one another's contributions of
truth, whatever they may be; and we shall not content
ourselves with anathematizing one another's short
comings or errors, but rather labour in love for mutual
understanding and mutual correction and amendment.

14 Introduction
If we are to work successfully to the common end, we
must learn so to work together as that our very faults
and falsities shall, through the sympathetic and co
operating correction and amendment of one another,
be made to work together for the common good. In
this spirit, I offer all I shall have to say to the further
ance of the common cause of Christian unity, subject
to correction by the higher truth of the Scriptures and
the larger wisdom of the Church.
The position here taken is, to my mind, independent
of any present or future conclusions of scepticism or
criticism with regard either to the Scriptures or the
Church. I fully recognize not only the function but
the necessity of both scepticism and criticism, in their
true meaning and use; and I presume neither to hmit
nor to define these. But the fact will always remain
that we receive our Christianity through the Scriptures
and the Church, and that these are the tribunal of
final resort for determining what Christianity is.
Human reason and human experience have a great
part too to play in the matter, but that is both later
and different. It was not theirs to give us Chris
tianity, but it is theirs to pass upon the question whether
Christianity as given is not what it claims to be, the
whole truth of ourselves, because the whole truth of
God in ourselves. Through them we set-to our own
seals that God in Christ is true. But by reason and
experience I mean not those of each but those of all,
which really means of those who know. The judges
of spiritual things are spiritual men.

II

THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE
GOSPEL

The Gospel of God, which He promised afore by His prophets
in the Holy Scriptures. — Romans I. 1, 2.
We speak God's wisdom in a mystery, even the vrisdom that
hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto
our gloiy. — 1 Corinthians U. 7.

II

THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE GOSPEL
A GOSPEL, to be such, presupposes all the conditions
necessary to make it a gospel. A gospel from God
to men presupposes on the side of men all the capaci
ties, needs, and desires which are to be gratified and
satisfied by it; and on the part of God, the nature,
disposition, and power to communicate the satisfac
tions which compose it. It is impossible, therefore,
for a gospel to be a sudden or unexpected thing.
The wants it suppHes must have pre-existed, and must
have developed to the point of preparing an adequate
receptivity. And there must have been growing pre
monition, promise, and expectation of the internal satis
faction from its external source. The infant is not only
sensible of its need of nourishment, but equally at
once expects it from the mother's breast. The spiritual
needs may be of later development than the physical,
but it is the spiritual nature of man not only to have
needs, but to expect their gratification and satisfaction
from God. The human soul must not only have
called upon God but have received answers from Him
long before the complete response of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. What was gospel or fulfilment in Him
17

18 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
must have been from the beginning of spiritual ex
perience, promise, and expectation of Him.
The Gospel as St. Paul knows it presupposes always
premonitions and prophecies of itself in the previous
history of humanity from the beginning, and especially
of Hebrew humanity since Abraham. His recognition
of the prophets need not now concern us beyond the
universal sense and function of prophecy. In the
nature of the thing there must have been prophecy
before gospel. There would naturally be most dis
tinctive and developed prophecy along that line of
human history on wliich spiritual consciousness and
experience were most emphasized and developed; but
in Hebrew history itself there was recognition of
prophecy outside itself. We need not make a point
of locating or Hmiting all the inspiration or the proph
ecy of the world. Wherever in any measure or in
any manner the supply of the divine spirit meets and
satisfies the demand of the human spirit, there is at
least the beginning of inspiration; and wherever there
is even a little there is always potency and promise
and prophecy of more or of all.
We must, however, insist upon confining our own
sense of inspiration to its proper content and its proper
source. There are many kinds of inspiration, and
many kinds of prophecy; and since all truth and all
beauty as well as all goodness is divine, all those
through whom at first hand these have come to us have
been in a true sense prophets of the divine. But the
abstract or impersonal spirit of truth, of beauty, and

The Presuppositions of the Gospel 19
even of justice or righteousness, has spoken through
many who were strangers and even enemies to the
personal Spirit of God. There has been many an
inspired poet or artist or philosopher or scientist or
even moraUst who knew nothing of the inspiration
that is either from God or of God. If any man have
not the spirit of God he is none of His. And the
spirit of God is the Spirit of God. It is no abstract or
impersonal, physical or metaphysical, attribute or con
cept or symbol or influence of Him, — but Himself, in
the deepest personal truth of Himself, in us as the
deepest personal truth of ourselves. The man himself,
the real personality of a man, is not the brilliance of
his intellect, or the greatness of his power, or the
magnitude of his achievements, — it is " the manner
of spirit he is of." When we come to pass judgment
upon the man, Julius Csesar or Napoleon Bonaparte
or Bacon or Seneca or Voltaire, all accidental differ
ences disappear, and the common standard applies to
them and to the least among us. The spirit of the
man is the man, and the spirit that he "is of" is what
he is personally in relation with other persons. We
are not abstractions ourselves, and our real dealings
are not with abstract things — even though it be abstract
truth or beauty or duty — but with persons. So God
Himself is not wisdom or power or cause or substance.
He is not truth or beauty or goodness, — He is Him
self, He is God. And God Himself is the Spirit He is
of; He is what He is to all other beings, and especially
to all other personal beings. Above all other being.

20 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
spiritual being is a "being in relation," and in relations.
The perfect personal relation is that of perfect Love;
and the true physical or metaphysical as well as spiritual
definition or expression of God as Personal God is
Love. That is Himself, and that is what we have to
do with when in the most real sense we speak of such
high things as inspiration or prophecy. Inspiration,
therefore, as we mean it, is any real communication
of the Spirit of God Himself to the spirit of man; and
the prophet is he through whom at first hand God
Himself speaks to us of Himself. The prophet is thus
first, in his own personality, the representative of man
to Godward; he is man in the highest reach of his
affinity or relationship with God. Above all else, he
is prophet, forerunner and preparer, of Him who is
more than prophet, — not only man to Godward, but
no less God to manward.
The first presupposition of the Gospel, then, in the
mind of St. Paul as well as in fact, was God's promise
afore by His prophets. The second is expressed in
the words "in holy scriptures, or writings." That the
pre-existence of the Hebrew Scriptures was humanly
and historically a prior condition of the appearance
of the Gospel is clear enough. Our Lord regarded
Himself as in a sense the product and fulfilment of
the Scriptures; although — in a truer sense — He re
garded the Scriptures as promise and product of Him
self; as the shadow, though cast before, is nevertheless
consequence and not cause of the substance that
follows after. But the ideas, the principles, the whole

The Presuppositions of the Gospel 21
truth as well as expression of the Gospel was so pre
pared beforehand in the spiritual history and literature
of the Jews that it is sufficiently correct to number
these among its presuppositions and conditions, with
the understanding which we proceed now to present.
If we may say that Christianity was a higher devel
opment or a product of Judaism, we must nevertheless
recognize it as a case in which the effect so manifestly
transcends the cause that we cannot but admit the
appearance in it of some new thing, which as much
differentiates it from its past as it is identified with it.
When, for example, our Lord Himself, as well as all
after Him, insists upon interpreting the whole Old
Testament Scriptures as a witness beforehand of the
truth or principle of the Resurrection, which in its
turn is the essence of the Gospel, it is quite legitimate
for literary and historical criticism to insist on its part
that the prophetic proof of the resurrection in the Old
Testament is not a legitimate interpretation of the
Old Testament. Indeed it is not, if we intend by it
to say, either that the letter of the Old Testament
means as much as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,
or that the truth of Christ's resurrection does not tran
scend any natural expectation of the Old Testament.
The fact is, it does so transcend it that the Old Testa
ment proofs of the New Testament facts are, for the
most part, from the true standpoint of natural criticism,
not interpretations at all, but rather only applications
or accommodations. The truth of the New Testament
is the meaning of the Old, but it goes beyond that

22 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
meaning; just as the great fact of the New Testament
is the logical and historical sequent of the events of
the Old Testament, and yet transcends the natural
order of those events. That the Old Testament did
not produce the New is witnessed by the verdict of
criticism that the fulfilments of the latter transcend all
promises or prophecies of the former. That the Old
Testament did, in a sense or degree, produce the New
is proved by the fact that criticism cannot find outside
of it the antecedent conditions which did produce it.
Christianity both was not the product of Judaism and,
so far as criticism can discover, was the product of
nothing else than Judaism.
Now, to recur to our crucial example, in what sense
does, and does not, the Old Testament as a whole
bear witness to, promise and prophecy, the resurrection
of Jesus Christ.? How, for instance, could Bishop
Home, as I beUeve he did, claim that every psalm in
the Psalter might be understood as Messianic, might be
interpreted to mean not only Christ but Christ's suffer
ings and triumph. His death and His resurrection?
The answer is that the Psalter is the typical book of
human devotion, the intercourse between the soul and
its God. Every least saint, every one who beHeves
and prays and receives comfort from God, is in his
measure a type and prophecy of the perfect saint, the
perfect sanctity which is Jesus Christ Himself, the final
victory of faith, hope, and love, the consummated
death to sin, sorrow, and death itself, the etemal life
in and to God. The burden of the Old Testament is

The Presuppositions of the Gospel 23
just that relationship of the personal spirit of man to
the personal Spirit of God which first finds its complete
expression in Jesus Christ, and finds it in Him through
the act and experience of what we call the Cross. So
our Lord could see, as each of us can see just in pro
portion as we see as He saw, with the eyes not of sense
but of the spirit, that not alone the Old Testament, but
humanity itself, and the whole creation, and God,
were full of the truth and meaning of Him. Before
Abraham was, or Adam, or the worlds — He is, because
He was their meaning in the beginning, and will be
their fufilment in the end. But, while even the least
saint or sanctity of the Old Testament could be a type
and prophecy of the risen Christ, to the extent of being
on the fine and pointing in the direction of Him —
even though the differences might still be far more
evident than the likeness — yet none before Him could
so express Him, and nothing before it could so pre
figure the supreme act of His resurrection, as that it
could be Uterally or visibly true to say that the Old
Testament ever rose to the height of the truth of the
New. It is perfectly plain to see, with one and all the
writers of the New Testament, that they are never
trying to construct facts out of the material of the Old,
but on the contrary are ever striving to find in the Old
the meaning and interpretation of facts which quite as
much transcended and confounded as they fulfilled
and satisfied its expectations. When once the spiritual
mind that responded to Christianity was surprised to
enthusiasm with the fulfilments and satisfactions which

24 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
it had to offer to that which it was replacing rather
than displacing, it was but natural that it should run
to extremes, and not only find true interpretations of
the new in the old, but endeavour to bend everything in
the old to the meaning of the new. And so, I say,
many of the proofs and explanations of the New Tes
tament taken from the Old are to be treated not as
interpretations but as applications of the ideas, prin
ciples, and even the bare language of the latter to the
truths and facts of the former. But is there not some
thing remarkable in the way and extent of the appli-
cabiHty of the spirit and the letter of the Old Testament
to the New, even where the connection is only appHca-
tion and not genuine interpretation ? What other whole
history and Hterature is so applicable to a single fact
or event which nevertheless so completely transcends,
while fulfilling, its meaning ?
In close connection with prophecy and scripture,
there is another no whit less vital historical presuppo
sition of the Gospel, and one which St. Paul was much
more immediately concerned to reckon with than all
the others. That is the Law, which the Gospel, mainly
through his own instrumentahty, displaced; but dis
placed only by fulfilling and replacing. There vsdll be
so much to say upon the relation of the Law to the
Gospel, that the following must suffice in the present
connection. There is so much said in St. Paul's
presentation of the Gospel of the impotence and con
sequent superseding of the Law, that we are in danger
of forgetting under his seeming disparagement how

The Presuppositions of the Gospel 25
much he is really magnifying it. The fact is that the
Gospel itself is only the Gospel in so far as it is the
tme, and the only, fulfilling of the Law. The Gospel
is the power to fulfil the Law. And if there had not
been first the developed experience and sense of the
Law itself and of the necessity of fulfilling it; and then
the no less true experience of the impossibility of the
Law fuffilhng itself in us, or of our fuffilling it in our
selves; and then again the experience of actual trans
gression and the consequent sense of sin, — if all this
had not gone before, there would have been neither
truth in itself nor possible meaning for us in the Gospel
of Jesus Christ. The Law, therefore, was the most
immediate and essential presupposition of the Gospel;
and the Hebrew development of the moral sense and
the moral law, the Hebrew passion for righteousness
and sense of sin, was the most necessary historical
preparation for the advent of the Gospel.
There is one other point upon which, before passing
from the historical presuppositions of the Gospel, we
must touch, and far more briefly than its importance
deserves. The Hebrew contributed to the final religion
not only the moral principle of the law, or righteousness,
but the spiritual principle of faith, or holiness; which
means that in Hebraism there was not only the end of
the Law but the beginning of the Gospel. For the
transition from one to the other is that from self-right
eousness, or obedience of law, to God-righteousness, or
the receptivity of faith. Along with and through
experience of the insufficiency of the law as a means

26 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of righteousness and life, there is developed faith or
dependence in God as the source and power of right
eousness and hfe. Faith is the sense and consciousness
and knowledge of God as a person. As such, in the
historical antecedents of Christianity, God was known
only among the Jews. They gave to it not only the
supernatural object — which is God — but the super
natural sense or faculty, which is the condition of
knowing God. We must count, then, the Hebrew
evolution of faith as not least among the historical
presuppositions of the Gospel.
But behind and before all these historical antecedents,
the profound philosophic mind of St. Paul recognized
yet deeper natural, we might say evolutional, pre
conditions of the Gospel. The Gospel is conditioned
by the very nature of man. It is not only part but
chiefest and highest part in God's foreknowledge and
predestination of man. We cannot discriminate be
tween the predestination of God and the predestination
of nature. What our nature constitutes us to become
God has predestined us to be. " Has predestined " or
" predestines " ; for neither can we distinguish between
what God did and does. Beginnings, processes, and
ends are all one with Him. His purposes are identical
with the actual working of things. Humanity was
predestined for the Gospel in the sense that the Gospel,
which is Jesus Christ Himself, is the natural — more
than natural, supernatural or ultimate highest natural
— end or completion, and so predestination, of hu
manity. Jesus Christ, according to St. Paul, or the

The Presuppositions of the Gospel 27
Gospel of the resurrection and etemal Hfe in and
through Him, is the end and consummation of the
whole creation. In Him, or It, we have the revelation
of the mystery or secret of the divine purpose from the
beginning. In Him is made manifest the hidden
wisdom of God, foreordained before the worlds unto
our glory. If the rulers of this world had known it,
they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. The
general meaning of glory in this connection is that
final completion of the whole creation in God, to which
from the beginning, because in itself and by its divine
constitution, it was predestined in man, as man in
Christ. Just what the natural predestination of man
in Christ is, St. Paul defines to be a predetermination
— which in the process of fulfilment is an actual
determination — unto sonship through Jesus Christ
unto God. In the divine foreknowledge humanity was
predetermined to be conformed to the image of the
Son of God, that He might be the first-born among
many brethren. So Jesus Christ is the God-appointed,
as He is the naturally constituted, heir of all things.
In Him man comes into his divinely predetermined,
and his naturally as well as divinely determined, in
heritance — and in man, as its head, the whole creation.
I touch lightly now upon this Pauline philosophy of
the meaning of man and the purpose of God as revealed
in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, merely to call attention
to the fact that to St. Paul the Gospel is no new or
disconnected incident or event in the history of hu
manity or in the course of nature. It is that which.

28 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
for the first time, gives fulness of meaning to them
both. The true presupposition of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ is the whole, natural and spiritual, creation of
God. It is something before that even, inasmuch as
it has its roots in the nature of God Himself, who as
Etemal Father is predestined to fulfil Himself in a
universal Sonship.

Ill
THE DEFINITION OF THE GOSPEL

The Gospel — concerning His Son, Who was bom of the seed of
David according to the flesh. Who was declared to be the Son of God
(Gt. determined Son of God) with power, according to the spirit of
holiness, by the resurrection of the dead, even Jesus Christ our Lord.
— Romans I. 3, 4.

Ill

THE DEFINITION OF THE GOSPEL
The Gospel may be defined in terms of Jesus Christ,
as it stands fulfilled and complete in Him ; or it may be
defined in terms of ourselves, as we stand in our present
relation to it, and as it manifests itself in its present
operation in us. St. Paul begins his most perfect
exposition of it with a definition from each of these
points of view, and we shall devote a chapter to each
of these definitions.
The Epistle to the Romans opens with a declaration
of the Apostle's separation and devotion to the Gospel
of God, wliich, he says, is concerning, or has to do
with, the Son of God. He then expresses his meaning
of the Son of God in the foUowing terms: Who was
bom of the seed of David according to the flesh, who
was declared to be (Gr. determined) the Son of God
with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the
resurrection of the dead; even Jesus Christ our Lord.
As preparatory to the interpretation of these words, I
wish to give a brief exegesis, not of any particular
passage or passages, but of the whole mind of St. Paul
as to the meaning of the Gospel. Human salvation,
which is the burden or content of the Gospel, is accord-
31

32 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
ing to him, not merely the result of, but — res ipsa —
the thing itself which was wrought by Jesus Christ in
and for humanity. He saved humanity by making it,
first in Him and then in itself, son of God; thus raising
it out of itself and sin and death into God and holiness
and Hfe. The essential question involved is this: Is
life, in the true sense of it, etemal life, the life which
Jesus Christ Himself claims to be and to give, — is
that life nature-determined, or self-determined, or
God-determined, in us? Jesus Christ — in Himself
first, and then in us — means not a nature-determined
nor a self-determined but a God-determined Ufe in
humanity. He is God our Life, just as He is God
our holiness, God our righteousness, etc. That fulness
of the Ufe of God first in Jesus Christ and then in
humanity through Him is just what makes Him and
it Son of God. But the life or the sonship of Jesus
Christ is ours only because in Him it is God-wrought
in humanity; and He Himself is not only the divine
God-working but the human God-worked, the humanity
made, become, son of God. Forever there will be the
questioning whether Jesus Christ as our salvation is so
actively or passively, salvatio salvans or salvatio
salvata, God saving or man saved, evOeo^ avOpumo's or
kv6.vdp(iy7ro<i Sea's. Is He the divine grace by which we
are saved or the human faith and obedience through
which we are saved ? Is He God or we in our salva
tion ? The answer must be that He is both, and just
that being both is what constitutes the Incarnation.
We have now, however, to take one step further and

The Definition of the Gospel 33
show that while the spiritual Ufe of Jesus Christ as
human is primarily not a self-determined but a God-
determined life, yet secondarily, from the very nature
of it, it cannot be God-determined in us — or in Him
first — without being, humanly, self-determined also.
We cannot remain persons, unless our personality, in
its highest activities and Hfe, retain its distinctive
property of self-determination or freedom. A purely
God-determined Hfe would not be our life. Jesus
Christ was not man if he had not a human will and
human freedom. And His holiness, righteousness, Hfe,
sonship of God, were not human, and consequently not
ours, if they were not the object and the product of a
human choice and self-determination on His part.
God can determine free will and personaUty only
through that which is its own act and activity, only
in that which is coequally its own self-determination.
The mystery of the harmony of grace and freedom is
only a part of the larger one of the metaphysical co
existence and reconciliation of freedom and necessity.
But that which is most obscure to reason may be most
self-evident to experience, and the fact remains that
the highest act of God in us is also the highest activity
of ourselves; and that which is nought if not God in us,
is equally nought if it is not ourselves in God.
We pass over, then, for another occasion and connec
tion the consideration of a higher personaUty or a
higher sonship in our Lord, to affirm that the imme
diate question with St. Paul was how humanity in Him
became or was made son of God — how He Himself

34 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
as man became or was made Son of God. For the
process by which man is made divine was first enacted
in Him, and He Himself became Son in the way in
which we must become sons of God. And this brings
us back to St. Paul's account of what I must beUeve
is the genesis or rationale of our Lord's, and our
human sonship to God.
Jesus Christ was bom of the seed of David according
to the flesh. He had a human derivation which iden
tified Him with humanity from David, from Abraham,
from Adam. According to the flesh means according
to the common natural humanity into which we are
all born and to which we are all Hmited by nature.
What the Apostle is going to contrast with this in the
words according to the spirit is what humanity was
made or became in Him — that is. Son of God. AU
through St. Paul, to be in the flesh means to be in
ourselves, what we are; to be in the spirit is to be in
Christ, what He is. To be in the spirit is to say with
the Apostle himself, I live no longer, Christ lives in
me. The question of the Gospel is how with our Lord
so to die to ourselves as to live to God. And the way
in which we are by that new birth of death and resur
rection to attain to the new life of divine sonship and
the divine nature is the way by which He did it.
That Way of Truth and Life is the Gospel, and the
mode or process of it is expressed for us in the passage
before us in divinely exact terms.
The principle especially to be emphasized in the
discussion before us is this: that Jesus Christ Himself,

The Definition of the Gospel 35
or the work wrought by Him in humanity, which is
the matter of the Gospel, may with equal truth and
propriety be expressed in terms of God and in terms
of man. We may regard Him as God saving or as
man saved. We may describe what took place in Him
not only as what God has done for us, but as God
Himself doing for or in us; and on the other hand
we may describe it as humanity, in Him as man,
doing for itself in God, becoming or being made, by
its own faith in God's grace in it. Son of God. Now
I contend that the Apostle is here describing our Lord's
sonship in terms of that humanity which in Him, and
by His act in it, became, was made, and made itself.
Son of God. The question of how man, any man,
becomes son of God is answered in the person of the
universal man, the Son of man. As St. John describes
it, the power as weU as right, the grace or gift to us,
to become sons of God comes to us through One who
not only as God brought it down from heaven, but as
man earned and exhibited it here on earth. The faith
by which we share it with Him is not only ours in Him
but His in us — the perfect faith through which by a
perfect grace He Himself as man was bom, not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of
man, but of God. And so the Epistle to the Hebrews
describes Him as the great Saint of saints, the Captain
and Perfecter of the faith which sanctifies, which as it
imparts to us the divine nature makes us all the sons
of God. The how of this human sonship, first realized
and revealed in Him who, by His death and resurrec-

36 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
tion, was the first-bom from the dead, was the point in
St. Paul's mind. The fact that in Jesus Christ, the
author and source of it, we must see not only man
begotten but God begetting, is another point wliich
elsewhere and otherwise is fully recognized by the
Apostle, but it is this thought which he proceeds to
develop here.
As we were from the beginning predetermined to
sonship through Jesus Christ unto God, so are we in
the actual process in time determined — in the tech
nical sense of the English word, but the primary and
natural sense of the Greek (see margin of the Revised
Version). It is true that Jesus Christ was by His
resurrection from the dead proved or declared to be,
designated, instated or instaUed, Son of God. But
even if any one of these were the immediate meaning
here, we must fall back upon the sense that He was
revealed to be only so much as He became through
the resurrection. The resurrection in itseff in no vsdse
proved or declared Him Son of God in the metaphysical
sense. All that was actually expressed in it, as such,
was this — humanity, by act of God in it, raised out
of sin and death into the hoUness and life of God,
become Son of God and partaker of the divine nature
by death to itself and a new Hfe in God. What is
imparted to the definition by the particular word
determined — " determined Son of God in power, ac
cording to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection
from the dead " — is as follows : In reaUty, it is only a
logical distinction which has no counterpart in fact

The Definition of the Gospel 37
which we make between what God predetermmed in
thought and determines in act or process. The tmth
is, that our life — above all, our more immediately
divine Ufe, our life in Christ — whether viewed by us
as predetermined in eternity or determined in time, is
not of nature or of ourselves but of God. It is an act
of God in us, manifested as, and existing only as, an
act of ourselves in God. It is an act equally of divine
determination, a life of God in us, and of our own
self-determination, a Hfe of ourselves in God. In this
divine-human Ufe it is not part God and part we, but
all God and all we, — just as Jesus Christ Himself is
not God in some acts and man in others, but equally
God and equally man in every act of His human Hfe.
But the special point to be observed here, as the re
mainder of the definition will plainly show, is that the
sonship wliich is the Gospel is precisely to be defined
in Jesus Himself as it is to be defined in us. He
is in Himself first everything which we are to be in
Him, and in the perfect way in which we are to be
it in Him. His life, which is ours, is what it is
not by mere fact of nature, whether human or divine.
Neither was it by His own act in the nature; for the
human nature in which He acted had its limitations
for Him, and to have imported into it the freedom
from Hmitation of the divine nature would have been
to contradict and nullify it. His life, as truly as ours
and only far more perfectly, was a life not of nature
nor of Himself but of God; a Ufe as of perfect faith in
God, so of perfect grace from God. He knew better

38 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
than any of us to say: All that is mine is not mine,
but His that sent me. I can of myself do nothing.
My father worketh and I work. I and my Father are
one. When St. Paul goes on to say of Jesus Christ that
He was determined Son of God in power, according to
the spirit, etc. — very much depends upon the nature
of that power. We must remember that just exactly
that which we have not by nature or in ourselves, and
the gift or addition of which to us by grace is the Gospel
of Jesus Christ, is the power to become sons of God.
The whole inability and failure of the Law to save us
turns upon our own want of power to be or do what it
bids us — not as claim on its part but as privilege and
blessing on ours. The whole Old Testament dispen
sation came to an end for want of power truly to make
us children of God. The last and greatest of the
prophets confessed his impotency to baptize with the
power necessary to impart the new birth and the new
life of the children of God. We shall see in the next
chapter that the definition of the Gospel from the
standpoint of its operation in us is that It is the power
of God unto salvation to every one who believes. It
makes no difference whether we connect in power with
determined or with Son of God. God determines us
to sonship by the spirit of holiness which He imparts,
by the enabling and victorious power of His Spirit
manifested in our spirit, in our power to be holy.
And equally we are sons of God by power and fact of
that holiness in us, which is participation in the divine

The Definition of the Gospel 39
nature and so the very essence and matter of divine
sonship. As the power of God manifested in our
Lord's own resurrection was not an external divine
operation upon Him, but a divine operation within
Him, manifesting itself in His own power to overcome
sin and death and to arise out of the universal condition
of humanity before Him into participation in the spirit
and Ufe of God, so is the very res of the Gospel for us
the divine gift in Him of participation in that self -same
resurrection and ascension.
The development or determination of sonship in
Jesus Christ, through the divine power in Him, is
next defined as not according to the flesh but according
to the spirit. It is not a natural but a spiritual sonship.
We are not born in it from below, but re-born in it
from above. This does not militate against the other
sense in which we are sons of God by nature. If there
were not the basis of a natural relationship and affinity
with God, there would be no place or possibiUty for
the actual spiritual relationship with Him into which
we are called to enter. The very fact of our predesti
nation from the beginning to sonship means that our
nature is constituted for sonship. God has made us
for Himself and we shall find no rest until we rest in
Him. But neither in the Christianity of the New
Testament nor in the facts of the Christian life can I
find any more meaning in the so-called natural sonship
of man than this, that man is constituted by his nature
— not son of God, but — to become son of God. That
is, it is his nature to enter, beyond his nature, and

40 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
outside of himself, into an objective, transcendental,
personal or spiritual relationship with God, of which
will be bom his sonship. All of son that there is in
him consists in his capacity to become son; the actual
sonship is not of himself but of the Father in him.
If it is to be hoped that there is in all of us, no matter
how inchoately, some sense and motion of the divine
fatherhood and our own sonship, it is, I beUeve, be
cause there is in us all some stirrings of actual inter
action over and above the merely potential interrelation
between God and us. But, however that may be, the
thing spoken of here is a sonship of man to God, first
reaUzed and brought to perfection in Jesus Christ, who
thus becomes to us the Spiritual Man, Man in perfect
personal relation to the personal God, Son of God, in
whom all divine Fatherhood is fulfilled and expressed
in the coequal correlative of a universal Sonship.
The addition in the definition of the next term is
most exactly pertinent and significant. We are, or our
Lord was, determined Son of God in power, according
to the spirit of holiness. The spirit of man, the God-
related part in him, — as the flesh is the nature-related
and self -related part, — needs to be designated not only
by itself but by its function. And the function of the
spirit is hoUness; it is that in us in and through which
we may be partakers of the divine spirit and the divine
nature. If not etymologically, yet actually and prac
tically in its New Testament use, hoUness means a
personal participation in the personal Spirit, in the
spiritual disposition, character, and nature of God-

The Definition of the Gospel 41
We define what holmess is by defining what God is.
If, says St. John, we are bom of God and are sons of
God, then we have the Spirit of God and are of the
spirit that God Himself is of. And if God is Love,
then is holiness, which is the spirit and nature of
God in us, love also. The Greek virtue is an ideal,
rather sesthetic than ethical, of highest and most beauti
ful manhood. The Hebrew righteousness carries with
it primarily the conception of conformity to an out
ward law, with them the highest and most universal
law, the law of God. The holiness of Christianity is
an inward spirit, the Spirit of God, the divine nature.
St. Paul, who is the opposite of legal, the great opponent
of legalism, has made the legal thing righteousness
rather than the evangeUcal thing hoUness the theme of
his exposition of Christianity. But his characteristic
contention that righteousness is not by nature nor by
law, but of God by His Spirit, is practically an argu
ment to prove that there is no true righteousness, as
indeed no highest manhood, but in hoUness, — that is
to say, in participation in the life of God.
It is the last word of St. Paul's definition of the
Gospel of God in the person of Jesus Christ which gives
the most distinctive touch to his own conception and
exposition of it. The sonship reaUzed by and in Christ
was reaUzed through His death and resurrection. The
truth involved in that fact is this : that all actual spiritual
sonship to God, all holiness, aU divine spirit and Hfe
in us, is not only a regeneration but a resurrection.
Not only does it come not from nature nor from our-

42 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
selves but from God — but it requires an act on our
part of renunciation of nature and of ourselves, a free,
personal, and spiritual death to nature and ourselves
and a new given and risen life of God, received and
made our own by faith. This will be so constantly
with us as we follow the Apostle through his thought
of the Gospel that we need pursue it no further here.
The point with wliich I close at present is this: The
Gospel as distinctively such is not alone what our
Lord was in His pre-existent eternity; it is not an
individual and solitary act performed for, apart from,
and instead of, ourselves. It is best understood and
best interpreted as the consummate act in which —
God in man and man in God — each perfectly fulfilled
himself in the other, God becoming actively the hoU
ness, righteousness, and life of man, and man, passively
as from God but actively in all else, becoming the holi
ness, righteousness, and life of God ; as St. Paul says.
That we might become the righteousness of God in
Him (Christ).. It is out of death and resurrection that
humanity in Christ was, as in itself it must be, deter
mined Son of God in power, according to the spirit of
holiness.

IV

THE FURTHER DEFINITION OF
THE GOSPEL

I am not ashamed of the Gospel: for it is the power of God to
every one that believeth: to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.
For therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith:
as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith. — Romans I.
16, 17.
If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt be
lieve in thine heart that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt
be saved: for with the heart man believeth unto righteousness. —
Romans X. 9, 10.

IV

THE FURTHER DEFINITION OF THE
GOSPEL
Aftek one of the most perfect of those personal
approaches by which the Apostle always comes in the
most natural way to the subject of his epistles, St. Paul
in Rom. i. 16, 17, states with scientific definiteness and
clearness the theme not only of this special epistle but
of his entire exposition of the Gospel. This he does
in a second definition, at bottom identical with the
first but differing from it in this, that whereas the former
viewed the Gospel as, to us, objectively completed and
existing in the individual person of our Lord, the
present one defines it as subjectively in process in us.
The Gospel, he says, is the power of God unto salva
tion to every one that believeth. For therein is re
vealed a righteousness of God from faith to faith.
We have here an exact statement of all the principal
"causes" which both determine and define the thing
under consideration. The final cause or end of the
Gospel is human salvation. Its efficient or determining
cause is the Spirit or grace or power of God operating
in us. The apprehending or receptive cause on our
part is faith. The material cause, or matter, of salva-
45

46 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
tion, and so of the Gospel, is righteousness, — which
again is from God, through faith.
We have, perhaps, in the previous chapter, suffi
ciently dwelt upon the Gospel as a power, and we shall
have occasion to elucidate yet further that aspect of it.
The words specially contributed by the present defi
nition to our understanding of the matter are just those
wliich most belong to it on its human side, — salva
tion and faith. The end or work of the Gospel is the
salvation of man; and that salvation consists in a
righteousness which he finds or attains not in himself
but in God. And he finds and possesses it there
through faith in Jesus Christ, who is God his right
eousness: the way to salvation is the way of faith;
man believes unto righteousness. The righteous shall
live of or through faith, which apprehends and appro
priates to itself the righteousness and life of God as
given or made ours in Christ.
But there are some other words of the definition
which require a truer understanding. In the first
place, the word Gospel itself is too commonly (though
often unavoidably) used in a way which brings to us
the divine matter of it at second or even third hand
instead of at first. The Gospel is not our preaching
of Christ's teaching of God's message to us of love
and life. The very differentia of the Gospel from any
other good news or information is that this is a com
munication from God, and is a direct and immediate
utterance of the Divine Word Himself. In the Gospel
God is the Speaker, and His Word is not as the words

Further Definition of the Gospel 47
of men — the mere symbol or madequate expression of
the thing they mean; rather is it the Thing Itself He
means. Jesus Christ Himself is God's Word, and He
is no mere proclamation to us of a divine righteousness
or Ufe; rather is He Himself the Divine Righteousness
and the Divine Life which not only in Him but as
Himself God proclaims to the world as its supreme
glad tidings. The true Gospel, then, is not something
of ours about God or Christ, it is God in Christ our
salvation, because our hoHness, our righteousness, our
etemal life.
When therefore it is said in our definition that in
the Gospel there is revealed a righteousness of God, I
take it in its highest sense and interpretation to mean
that in Jesus Christ Himseff, as God's Word and
Gospel, God reveals Himself as our righteousness and
our life. But in the divine-human righteousness which
is Himself, Jesus Christ is not only God's but our
righteousness, not only God in us but we in God.
And if our righteousness, as human, is necessarily of
faith, so His righteousness, on its human side, must
have been of faith. And so it was; the resurrection of
Jesus Christ was the perfect victory of the spirit over
the flesh, of faith over sense and the world. It is in
that sense that He was the author and finisher of our
faith, and so of the righteousness and the Ufe which
come to us from God through faith.
We may return now to a consideration of the proper
function or activity of faith in the operation of our
salvation. And in the study of this we shall be able

48 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
to illustrate more practically the meaning and tmth of
the Gospel as a power of God. Perhaps no passage
will better serve our purpose than that in the Epistle
to the Ephesians in which the Apostle prays that the
eyes of our heart may be enlightened, that we may
know what is the hope of God's calling, what the riches
of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what
the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who
believe, according to the working of the strength of
His might which He wrought in Christ, when He
raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at
His right hand in heavenly places. The greatness
of His power to usward who beUeve is manifestly a
spiritual power, the Spirit of God in our spirit impart
ing to us the power of God, the power of Jesus Christ,
the power of hoUness and righteousness and etemal
life, the power to overcome sin and to be victorious
even over death. And this spiritual power of hoUness
and Hfe in us, wrought by God's grace through our
faith, is identified in kind with the working of the
strength of His might which God wrought in Christ
when He raised Him from the dead. That is, the
resurrection of Jesus Christ Himself was the reaUzation
and manifestation of a new divine power in humanity
— in the might of the spirit to transcend the natural
possibiUties of the flesh and to attain the Ufe and free
dom of the children of God. The resurrection of our
Lord was therefore, as ours must be, on its human side
an act of faith in God, as on the divine side it was an
operation of the power of God, or of grace, in humanity.

Further Definition of the Gospel 49
The saving faith of Christianity is not a vague or
general beUef in the wisdom, power, and goodness of
God. Such a general and undefined implicit confi
dence and trust in His love and love-purpose conceming
us is the proper enough attitude of our finite spirits
toward the Father of spirits, but that is not the Gospel.
The Gospel was a definite promise and is a well-defined
and specific gift of God to man. It comes to us not
in human words but in the etemal personal Word of
God, who is God Himself in fulfilment of the promise
and in communication of the gift to us of Himself.
Our faith should be the exact correlative of God's
grace or gift. The faith that saves to the uttermost is
a faith which clearly apprehends in Christ Jesus and
wholly appropriates to itself the visible power of God
actually manifested in human salvation. To the eye
of faith the resurrection of Jesus Christ is its own
salvation realized and revealed. It is its own proved
power in the spirit to overcome and survive the weak
nesses and evils of the flesh, to find refuge from the
deficiencies and insufficiencies and shortcomings of
itself in the all-sufficiency and the self-fulfilment of
God. If, says St. Paul, we will confess with our
mouth Jesus as Lord, and will with our heart believe
that God raised Him from the dead, we shall be saved.
If Jesus is indeed Lord of our minds, our hearts, our
wills, our lives; if we see in Him all that we ought to,
and would, know and love and do and be; and if we
apprehend and appropriate to ourselves all the divine
presence and power that lifted Him, in order that it

50 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
might lift us in Him, out of the sin and death of the
world into the holiness and Ufe of God, — then not only
shall we be saved in fact, but are we already saved in
faith. For faith in the Word of God is a present
possession of future things.
The above is the precise thought of St. Peter, who
says of our Lord that He was foreknown indeed before
the foundation of the world, but was manifested at the
end of the times for our sake, who through Him are
believers in God, which raised Him from the dead and
gave Him glory; so that our faith and hope might be
in God. To be through Him beUevers in God, that
our faith and hope shall be in God, means that we see
in Jesus Christ the thing that we are to believe, that
we accept in His resurrection our own accompHshed
and assured salvation from sin and etemal death.
So much for the definite meaning and function of
faith in the actual operation in us of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ. It is very true that nothing is said in so
many terms of the death and resurrection of our Lord
in the definition we are discussing, but it is nevertheless
manifest from the whole tenor of St. Paul's teaching
that the power of God exercised in human salvation is
the power of God revealed in Christ's resurrection, and
that the essential truth of that resurrection is humanity's
own God-wrought and self-wrought victory over sin
and death.
That human salvation is not a natural thing but
primarily a moral thing, not a mere fact of man's
nature but essentially an act of himself, that it can

Further Definition of the Gospel 51
come to him only through a process of seff-reaUzation
and fulfilment, is the result and condition of his con
stitution as a person. PersonaUty comes only by
self-generation; that which is not of the self in the man
is not personal or himself. This truth had its abundant
recognition in the Old Testament. It is only righteous
ness, it was said, that saves or exalts either a man or
a nation. And righteousness is distinctively not a
physical or mechanical or natural but a moral right-
ness; a right attitude and habit and character of the
vdll, of the person, of the man. The reason, the will,
the conscious, free self-determination and selfhood of
the man is the man. Now righteousness is a matter
of right relations, and the Old Testament brought the
law of it to its highest possible expression when it
defined the spirit and letter of it to be — to love God
supremely and one's neighbor as one's self. I suggested
a possible surprise that St. Paul should have selected
for his keyword the Old Testament righteousness
instead of the New Testament holiness, or St. John's
life. Either of the three indeed carries the other two
with it. There is neither participation in the divine
nature, nor fulfilment of the divine law, nor part in
the divine life, by itself without the others. And Jesus
is equally our holiness, our righteousness, and our life.
Still the word righteousness carried with it so much
the association of mere obedience to law that we might
have expected the Apostle who was to expose the in
sufficiency of mere law, even the divine law, for human
salvation, to eschew it for the higher connotations of

52 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
spirit and life. And yet, if we look deeper, we may
discover, as well in the thing itself as in St. Paul's
special mission, a sufficient reason for its selection.
We must take very seriously and in earnest our Lord's
and St. Paul's strong declarations that the Gospel
comes not to supersede but to fulfil and estabUsh the
law. Indeed, as has been already said, the Gospel is
the Gospel only as it fulfils the law, as it is the power
of God in us to be what God's law, which is our own
law, constitutes and calls upon us to be. Nothing short
of that will be our Hfe or our blessedness, or consequently
our salvation.
I spoke in the second chapter of the historical disci-
pUne of Judaism under the law as one of the most im
portant presuppositions and preparations of Christianity.
That long training, according to St. Paul, was not merely
to convince human experience of the weakness and un
profitableness of the law as a means of spiritual health
and Ufe. By the law indeed was the knowledge of
sin, and the awakening and development of the con
sciousness of sin was the most immediate precondition
of the sense of need and the possibility of reception of
the grace of holiness. But the end of the law is not
alone to reveal its own impotence and inefficiency. It
is indeed in the end insufficient and unable to produce
the righteousness it requires and demands of us; but
what but for the law should we know of righteousness
at all? The law is the creation and expression to us
of righteousness. It is in the deepest and highest sense
itself righteousness; and Jesus Christ superseded the

Further Definition of the Gospel 53
law only as He was Himself the righteousness of the
law and the law of righteousness, whereas aU so-caUed
laws before Him were only imperfect and impotent
human symbols or letters of the law. But not only
does the law alone primarily give us the conception
and knowledge of righteousness; it alone awakens or
quickens and develops in us the moral necessity of
ourselves becoming and being righteous. The truth
that righteousness is moral or personal Ufe, and that
sin is death, is not only a revelation of God but a fact
of experience. And that experience comes to us only
through the experimental tutelage of the law. It is
only when the law has first taught effectually the lesson
that the ultimate necessity of personal Hfe is righteous
ness or the fulfilment of itself, that the law of a being
is but the expression of that being's perfection and
blessedness — it is only then that the law can impart
the further truth of experience, that it is in itself in
sufficient to produce in us the righteousness it prescribes
and requires of us. The fatal misconception that the
Gospel is something done for us or instead of us, and
not something to be done in us and by us; or again,
that it is something to be done only in us and not by
us, is an error so great as practically to contradict the
nature and neutralize the effects of Christianity. On
the contrary, the Gospel is the power of God to be
ourselves, and Jesus Christ has it in Him to help us
only as He can enable us to be ourselves what He is,
and to do for ourselves what He did. If we do not
know in ourselves the power of His resurrection, or

54 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the power of His divine righteousness, we do not know
Him. It is as true that nothing is personally ours that
is not of ourselves, as it is that nothing of holiness,
righteousness, or Hfe can be of ourselves, or ours,
that is not of God. Blessedness is above all else an
energy or activity of our own souls, however true it is
also that it is an energy or activity of God in our
souls. We conclude, therefore, that the Gospel is as
much still our own obedience to the law, as it is, over
and above that, the grace or power of God to attain
that obedience.
We can see from the above, I think, why it is that
St. Paul retained the term righteousness as the Christian
expression of that spiritual state, attitude, or activity,
the attainment of which is salvation, because the
possession of it is Hfe and blessedness.

THE WRATH OP GOD AGAINST
SIN

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all imgodliness
and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteous
ness. — Romans I. 18.
Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whosoever thou art
that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another thou condemnest thy
self; for thou that judgest dost practise the same things. — Romans
n. 1.
What if some were without faith ? shall their want of faith make
the faithfulness of God of none effect? God forbid: yea, let Giod
be found true but every man a liar. — Romans HI. 3.

THE WRATH OF GOD AGAINST SIN
Perhaps we should have said that the most complete
and proper presupposition of the Gospel was the fact,
and the universal fact, of sin. And yet, I do not
believe that the coming, or the primary end and func
tion, of the Gospel was conditioned upon the fact of
sin. The Gospel of the Incarnation means the com
pletion as well as the redemption or restoration of
humanity. I for one, speculatively and not dogmati-
caUy, cannot see how there could have been a personal
evolution or completion, a production and development
of holiness, righteousness, and spiritual life, without
what we call the fall, without an experimental coming
to the knowledge of good and evil, of sin and hoUness,
of life and death. I cannot see how there could have
been generated in us the sense of hoHness except in
reaction against a sense of sin, or a fact of hoHness
except in conflict with and victory over an actuality of
sin. But if humanity could have attained spiritual
completion without sin, and therefore without redemp
tion or restoration, I hold that the Gospel of Jesus
Christ would have been as necessary for that as in
fact it was for that and the other also. Man is essen-
57

58 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
tially incomplete without God, and the relation to God
which he needs for his completion is not an immanental
unity and oneness with God by nature, but a transcen
dental personal union and fellowship with God by
grace and faith, — that is, by the mutual spiritual
intercommunion and intercommunication of love and
service, which is the life of God, and of all in the
universe who share the personal or spiritual life of
God. Jesus Christ is human completion in that He
is, not the natural unity, whatever it be, of God and
man, which is true of all men, but the personal union
and fellowship of God and men, which is perfectly
true only in Him as at once God and man, and is
true in us just in the measure of our knowledge and
participation of it in Him.
Sin, however, is in the world, and is universal, and
there is no deliverance from it and its consequences
except in a divine salvation. And the Gospel of Jesus
Christ is not only the divine proclamation but the
divine manifestation and fact of that salvation. What
ever may be thought of St. Paul's, either traditional or
speculative, account of the origin or natural history of
sin, we need only to remember that all that is material
to his truth of the Gospel is — not his theories but his
facts. Those facts are, that sin exists; that sin is
universal, a race as well as an individual fact, insep
arable from the flesh in itself; that nevertheless sin is
not the true nature or law of humanity; that it is its
death and not its life, which is holiness; that humanity
can be or become itself only through a redemption or

The Wrath of God Against Sin 59
salvation from sin and the death which is its conse
quence; that the natural condition of humanity on its
spiritual side is a sense, which grows with the growth
of the spiritual consciousness, of want or need, which
is in itself a prophecy and promise of the divine supply
which we call grace, by which we mean the personal
knowledge and fellowship of God Himself. These as
far as they go are the materials on the human side of
which the Apostle constructs his conception of the
Gospel. To complete the picture, in anticipation, we
might add that the materials on the other side are, the
etemal love-nature and love-purpose of God; the pre
destination in nature itself, as well as in the mind of
God, of the whole creation in man its highest part to
that personal participation in the divine spirit, nature,
and Ufe, which constitutes him son of God; the reaUza
tion and revelation of that relation in the individual
person of Jesus Christ; the provision for such a real
and vital fellowship with Christ and participation with
Him in the divine power of His life as to make us
actuaUy in Him partakers of the divine nature, and
sons of God.
I have given the above preliminary outline of the
whole Gospel according to St. Paul only, for the present,
to show the place of sin in it. All evil, as Kant says
in substance, is primarily spiritual and moral. Extract
the sting of sin, as St. Paul teaches, and death itself is
converted from a supreme evil into mere transition or
birth into the supreme good. Deliverance from the
evil of sin is to convert all other curse of the world into

60 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
blessing. But the only possible exemption or redemp
tion for a personal spirit from sin is through its own
conquest of sin. The conquest cannot be made for it,
but only by it; because in its own conquest alone is its
holiness, its righteousness, its life. The victory of any
other can be for it, only as it is capable of being made,
and will be made, its own self-undertaken and self-
accompHshed victory. The power of God to save us
actually saves us only as it is made our power to save
ourselves. To revert to St. Paul's account of sin. The wrath of
God, he says, is revealed from heaven against aU un
godliness and unrighteousness of men. In what way
is that wrath revealed ? There is no better illustration
than here of St. Paul's mental habit of seeing God's
attitudes or acts only in the facts of nature or of human
experience, that is to say, in the working of things.
If, as Bishop Butler says, all experience of life shows
what part God takes in it, on what side He is, viz. : on
the side of righteousness and against unrighteousness;
if the agnosticism even of Matthew Arnold can see
clearly enough that the power not ourselves in the affairs
of men makes for righteousness only and wholly, it
was not too much for the more spiritual vision of St.
Paul to discern that to say that the Righteous Lord
loveth righteousness can mean no more nor less than
that He hates unrighteousness. And indeed no terms
can express too strongly the wrath of God actually
revealed in nature and in human affairs against the
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men as it exists in

The Wrath of God Against Sin 61
the world. St. Paul expresses himself neither other
wise than as the actual facts revealed nor more strongly
than the actual facts justified. Those facts were no
doubt at their darkest when the true Light dawned in
the person of our Lord, and St. Paul saw and described
them in all their contrast with it. Nevertheless the
facts of the world are practically the same always, and
the contrasts are sufficient still to mutually exhibit each
other. The material points in the Apostle's treatment of
sin we may briefly consider. The first is a very essen
tial one in his view of the Gospel. It might be ex
pressed as his sense of the relation between ungodliness
and unrighteousness. It is identical with the question
still with us of the mutual dependence or independence
of morality and reUgion. No one denies the possibiUty
or actuality of a, relatively, high moraUty in a non-
religious individual person. That is not at all the
question. When a social morality exists, whatever or
however essential may be the causes or conditions of
its existence, it may nevertheless exist in a high degree
in those who mentally deny or contradict those condi
tions. The true question is, what would be the morality
or moral condition, the righteousness, of the world if
there were no such thing as godUness, if man were not
really a spiritual and religious being, and were not
often, in his better types, actually more religious than
is consistent with his own theory, or than he knows or
thinks himself to be. At any rate it was St. Paul's
conviction that man is a spiritual and reUgious being,

62 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
in the sense of being constituted and having a capacity
and a need for spirituality and religion. His highest
and true righteousness is not a mere experimental
matter of right relations with things and persons other
than himself, rather is it a vastly deeper personal
harmony with the spirit and law and, what these in
clude and imply, the Personality and personal mean
ing and purpose of the universe. Of course that
conviction is at the very root of the Apostle's central
truth — that righteousness is not a mere law, nor even
a mere abstract, impersonal, spirit, but the Personal
Spirit of the Hving God in us and become our spirit
too, God Himself our as well as His own righteousness.
I have often thought that in the Prayer Book there is
significance and point in the very mode of printing the
emphatic words in the Epistle for the Sunday before
Advent, as though it were an inscription upon the veiy
portal of the Church, or the Church Year: This is His
name whereby He shall be called, The Lord our
Righteousness. It is not merely that St. Paul connects the two words
together, godUness and righteousness, as though they
belonged so — spirit and body of one and the same
thing — but he expHcitly states and explains the fact
of their genetic connection. Moral corruption is the
consequence of which spiritual perversion is the cause.
Wherefore, he says, God gave them up in the lusts of
their hearts unto uncleanness. And he repeats. For
this cause God gave them up unto vile passions. For
what cause ? For this : Even as, or because, they saw

The Wrath of God Against Sin 63
not fit to have God in their mind, God gave them up to
an unfit or reprobate mind. Like every other part of
his nature, the spiritual or God-related nature of man
is Hable not only to non-use but to mis-use. And on
the principle that the corruption of the best is always
the worst, the perversion of the spiritual or religious
affections and passions has been responsible for a very
large part of the evil and confusion of the world.
Superstition and idolatry, fanaticism and spiritual pride
and intolerance, have always been recognized by relig
ion itself as quite as possible and actual in the world,
and often even more positively pernicious and injurious
and hateful, as a mere negative unbelief or disbelief of
the facts of the spirit. Much of the immorality which
St. Paul so graphically describes was actually asso
ciated with so-called religious worship. So that the
Apostle assigns as the cause of the universal condition
of moral corruption in the world the universal preva
lence not so much of no religion as of false religion.
We must remember, however, that the natural and
proper remedy for false reUgion, for the untold damage
that has been done in the name of reUgion, the immesis-
urable harm and hindrance that so-called reUgion has
been in the progress of human affairs, is not to be found
in an impossible abolition of religion, but in the bringing
it, as it devolves upon us to bring everything else in our
Hves, to its true meaning and function. The bodily
passions, the selfish impulses, of our nature have
wrought and still work evil enough surely in the world,
but who dreams of abolishing them — and not rather

64 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of reducing and subordinating them to the reason and
end of their existence in us ? In the knowledge of God
stands, and will forever stand, our etemal Hves. Only
in knowing Him can we know ourselves, and only in
the right knowledge of Him, which is not a mere
conceptual or representative but an experimental and
real knowledge, can we have that right knowledge
and possession and direction of ourselves which is the
first condition of rightness or righteousness in our
Hves. It is important, too, to observe in detail how the
wrath as well as the approval and favor of God mani
fests itself in the actual working of things. What
religion recognizes as the divine sanctions are all
attached as natural consequences. The blessing or
the curse of the thing is always sooner or later, but
inevitably and invariably, in the thing itself; and it lies
in the nature of the thing to breed or multiply itself
and so to be forever accumulating, organizing, and
consolidating, and so fixing and determining, within
itself its own inherent blessedness or accursedness.
Nor can there be any possible exception or objection
to this natural working of things. For how is it pos
sible that the divine hoHness, righteousness, and life
should be in itself and in all its consequences a per
fection and blessedness to us, and that the opposite
and contradiction of aU these should not be a corre
sponding imperfection and curse? What can God's
love and approval of hoUness revealed in its inherent
blessedness be but His hatred and condemnation of

The Wrath of God Against Sin 65
sin revealed from heaven in the awful logic of its
visible consequences in the world?
We are studying the Gospel in its meaning for our
selves, and it is unnecessary for our purpose here to go
into the details of the profound and overwhelming
exposure by which, himself a Jew, St. Paul turns the
tables against the Jews, and proves that for all their
horror of the corruption of the Gentile world they
themselves, in their self-righteousness, were no better.
The Jews had had, as the peculiar people of God,
greater advantages and opportunities — advantages
that were very substantial and real, and that had been
to the true spiritual children of Abraham, the Israelites
indeed, divine preparations and helps. But what use
had they made of their opportunity ? They had rested
in the objective possession of their privileges, without
turning them to the subjective use or account for
which they were given. They were Jews outwardly
and not inwardly; and their circumcision was outward
in the flesh, in the letter, and not that of the heart, in
the spirit; whose praise is not of men, but of God.
The outcome of the Apostle's profound reflections
upon a whole world lying thus in sin; upon the utter
failure of God's own people as a whole to realize the
divine promises or bring about the divine fulfilments;
upon the universal and disastrous collapse of the
Gentiles, under natural as of the Jews under the re
vealed law, in the effort to manifest the righteousness
which was their own as well as God's and nature's
law; — I say that the conclusion of St. Paul's thought

66 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
upon this depressing picture is one which we might
well take to heart still, and with which reassure our
selves and revive our drooping faith and hope. Is the
righteousness of God dead in the world ? No indeed !
Let every man be a liar, and God is still true. What
if few, or even none, have faith ? Shall the faithlessness
of man defeat the faithfulness of God? Shall the
absence of human faith disprove or dissolve the divine
objects of faith? No, God's promises and gifts are
there still, and will be there forever, to be accepted or
rejected for salvation or condemnation, for life or
death. But more than that, the Apostle" s words imply,
if they do not directly state, not only that the good
faith or faithfulness of God shall not be defeated by
the faithlessness of man, but that faith in God shall
not be brought to nought, and that the divine righteous
ness and life shall prevail over the unbeUef and indif
ference of men.

VI
THE NEW RIGHTEOUSNESS

They are all under sin; as it is written. There is none righteous,
no, not one.
Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it speaketh
to them that are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped,
and all the world may be brought under the judgment of God: be
cause by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in His sight:
for through the law cometh the knowledge of sin.
But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been man
ifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the right
eousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that be
lieve; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall short
of the glory of God; being justified freely by His grace. — Romans
m. 10, 19-24.

VI

THE NEW RIGHTEOUSNESS
The conclusion of the previous chapter brought us
up to the point in St. Paul's argument where the reason
and meaning of the Gospel most clearly appear. The
truth and need of righteousness, the recognition of the
claims of righteousness, the existence of a law of
righteousness, whether speaking in the hearts and con
sciences of men or thundered from heaven upon Sinai,
all these somehow do not avail to make righteous or to
produce an actual righteousness in the world. For, as
a matter of fact, righteousness does not exist. Where
it professes to exist, it is at best only a conceit of
righteousness, a seff-righteousness, which is the most
fatal and hopeless form of unrighteousness. Where
the real meaning and truth of righteousness has been
best conceived, and regard for the external divine law
of it has produced its best fruit in life and character,
what has that fruit been? Not by any means a con
sciousness of the possession or the conviction of a pos
sible self-attainment of righteousness, but on the
contrary, just in proportion to the high valuation and
real love of the law, the consciousness of not only
shortcoming but transgression, and the sense not only

70 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of sin but of impotence. Had not the Lord Himself
when on earth felt that the one hopeless symptom or
condition of a man was the conceit of his own right
eousness? Was He not driven to the conclusion that
it were better for a man to be the worst sinner and
know it — than to be a so-called righteous man and
unconscious of the sin that was in him ? There is an
absolute identity in the point of view of Jesus and of
St. Paul on this point. The science or knowledge
of the principles and rules of morality is not morality.
The only real righteousness is the spirit and the life
of Him whose law righteousness is. And the more
profoundly we know and feel what His righteousness
is, the more we know and feel that we need Him as
the spirit and power and Ufe of it. This, then, is St.
Paul's absolutely exact induction or generaUzation
from the spiritual facts of the world as he saw it, and
as it is still: There is none righteous, no not one. By
the law is only the knowledge, the sense, of sin. That
only can the law do for us; and yet in doing only that,
how much more has it in reality accompHshed! For
the very sense of sin which the law gives is itself the
promise and condition of the Gospel. God takes away
from us our righteousness only to give us His own.
Himself. The law does not exist merely to exhibit its
own weakness and unprofitableness, and in consequence
to be discredited and annulled. It exists rather to
create a need, a capacity, a hunger and thirst for holi
ness, righteousness, life — so deep, so high, so great,
that only God Himself can fill and satisfy it. Tmly,

The New Righteousness 71
as St. Paul says, The Law was and is a schoolmaster
to bring us to Christ.
From works of law shaU no flesh be justified in
God's sight; for through law comes knowledge of sin.
It is not said here that through law there comes not
actual righteousness, but that through law no man is
before God recognized as being righteous. No man
who knows what righteousness is will come into God's
presence with a claim of his own to it. And if he
does, so far from the claim being recognized, it will be
regarded as the one disquaUfication for the reality to
which it pretends. The Gospel of Jesus Christ was
for sinners of every type save the impossible one of
self-righteousness. This sense of being received, ac
cepted, regarded, treated, as righteous is carried on
from the mere negative statement under consideration
to a positive form of it which gives a new and important
step in St. Paul's Gospel. Not only will the most
righteous man who comes before God with the claim
of his own righteousness not be allowed as such, but
the chief of sinners who comes to God with a true
sense of his own unrighteousness and a sincere faith in
God's righteousness made his own in Jesus Christ will
he received, accepted, regarded, and treated, as being
righteous. It is this being treated as, not on the ground
of being righteous, but on the ground of a certain rela
tion of faith to Christ's righteousness, upon which is laid
the chief emphasis in St. Paul's system. It is impos
sible to attach too much importance to this turn of
thought, and we shall be largely occupied with it as

72 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
we go on. But in order to do justice to it we must
understand it, and in order to do that we must question
it. The Pharisee who went up into the temple to pray
and reminded God of his own righteousness was not
thereby justified; while the pubUcan who afar off was
conscious only of his own sin in the sight of God was,
we are told, justified. That cannot mean either that
he was recognized as actually being sinless, or that he
was by act of God at the time made sinless or righteous.
The term " justify " is not in the parable of the Gospel
used in the developed, almost technical, sense of the
epistle before us, but it is exactly on the Une of it, and
it illustrates the progress and the propriety of its later
use. If the pubUcan, rightly and truly knowing him
self to be a sinner, or a transgressor of the law of
righteousness, could be justified — which meant could
be regarded or accepted as righteous — it must of
course be, not on the ground of his actually being so
in Hfe and character, but on the ground of his, at the
time, occupying the right posture or attitude, the only
right attitude possible for him, towards righteousness
and at the same time towards his own conscious
unrighteousness. What was that attitude? There is
only one which it could possibly be, and every sinner
who in his sin is in any sense or degree justified before
God, can be so only on the ground of that one attitude.
It is the attitude which negatively towards our own
unrighteousness we call repentance, and positively
towards the righteousness of God we call faith. If a

The New Righteousness 73
man did not have some sense of the righteousness
which he violates, he could have no sense of the un
righteousness which is his violation of it. The condi
tion of possible or future righteousness is the right
attitude or intention of mind and feeling towards actual
present unrighteousness. It is possible in any sense to
justify or accept as right only that personal attitude
towards the matter which at the time is the nearest
right possible for the person. In the initial moment of
contrition the only possible and the necessarily first
right posture of the sinner is that consciousness of
himself which could not be the beginning of hatred
of his sin if it were not to the same extent the begin
ning of a love of hoUness. Where this exists in truth
and sincerity, even though it be but the beginning of
what is an infinite process, it is possible and right to
accept and treat already as right that which as yet is
only a first turning to and direction towards the right.
St. John expresses more fully this divine propriety of
justifying and accepting the simple sense of sin as the
beginning of holiness, when he says: If we say that
we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is
not in us; if we confess our sin, God is faithful and
just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness. We see already in our Lord's parable of the treatment
of the publican the precise and entire principle which
in St. Paul we find developed into the doctrine of
justification by faith. At its fullest and completest
that doctrine means this: that the veriest sinner who

74 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
begins to see and feel his sin in himself, by repentance,
and his hoUness or righteousness in Christ, by faith,
is as truly on the way and as near to the end of right
eousness as is then possible for him, and it is divinely
right that his faith should be received and treated as
being righteousness, because it is not only the actual
beginning of righteousness in him but is the righteous
ness proper for him at that stage. Righteousness in
us cannot begin otherwise than as an incipient sense
of sin and that prolepsis or pre-vision and apprehension
of holiness which we caU faith. Faith is therefore with
a divine truth and propriety reckoned or imputed to
us as being righteousness, for it is a necessary moment
or stage in our righteousness.
The above view is supplemented and completed by
the fact that God has first promised and now given us
in Jesus Christ the holiness or righteousness which is
the end and meaning of all repentance and faith. So
sure are His promises and so certain His gifts, that
there is no excuse for faith's not accepting them as
already in possession; and that which faith already
appropriates as its own, God's grace goes beyond our
faith in imputing to us as already our own. Such, in
so brief a preliminary sketch, is the new righteousness
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It differs from the old
in that, while the righteousness of the law consists in
our own obedience, and is thus a self-righteousness,
and under the law righteousness on our part is the
condition of our acceptance with God; the righteous
ness of faith, on the other hand, begins with only our

The New Righteousness 75
sense of sin and experience of weakness or insufficiency,
God's loving and free acceptance of which in us is the
condition and starting-point and earnest of a righteous
ness of our own : which righteousness, then, is further
and fully assured to us by the actual revelation of it to
us in Jesus Christ, in whom we see all the presence and
power of God in us, and in consequence all the power
in ourselves in God, necessary to its actual attainment
and possession.
It is true, then, that St. Paul's justification by faith
is not primarily and immediately a righteousing or
making us righteous, but an acceptance of our own
sense of unrighteousness and our faith in God's right
eousness as being our own; but nevertheless there is a
vital and necessary connection between the two things
which has to be taken into the fullest account. The
Apostle says that by works of law shall no flesh be
justified before God. Why is it that no man shall be
accepted or accounted as righteous through the opera
tion of the law? Is it riot solely because the law,
merely as such, that is, merely through the man's
knowledge or obedience of the law, is incapable of
making the man righteous or of operating or producing
righteousness ? Is not the point after all the fact that
the end of the whole matter, which is man's salvation,
which again is the effectuating or actuaUzing of his
potential righteousness and personal Ufe, is not to be
accomplished through any command on God's part
or any obligation on his own to be righteous, but only
through the grace and power of God in him to make

76 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
him, by enabling him to make himself, righteous ? As
the law is not the end but only a means, and a means
which, effectual as far as it goes in bringing us towards
the end, is ineffectual to bring us to the end, — so the
Gospel itself, too, however effectual to the end, is only
a means, and as such must be interpreted not in itself
but by its end. And what is the end of the Gospel ?
It is not that men in order to be righteous in the end
shall be provisionally accepted and treated as such in
the beginning; but exactly the reverse, that they shall
be so lovingly and graciously taken into God's right
eousness and treated as righteous in the beginning
that they shall become, or be made so, in the end.
It is the end always that determines the meaning and
nature of the thing, and the Gospel is the power of
God unto an actual righteousness of men; and only
by the way, or in a secondary sense, a gracious treating
of sinful men as not sinful, and of a faith wliich is not
yet righteousness as being already such.
The point I am insisting upon may be more plainly
put in the following way : It is true that the meaning of
the words in the passage before us is that no man is
accepted or accounted as righteous through operation
of the law; and then that a man is accepted as righteous,
or accounted righteous, upon faith in Christ, and apart
from any claim of righteousness of his own. But why
is he not accepted as righteous through the law, and
why is he accepted as such through faith ? The answer
to the first is, that he is not justified or accepted as
righteous through the law, not only because as a matter

The New Righteousness 77
of fact he is not so righteous, but because he cannot
be; the law has not for him any promise or power of
righteousness. Its insistence or enforcement so far
from imparting hoHness only plunges him more and
more deeply into sin. Is not the answer to the second
question then this: that a man is accepted as righteous
through faith in Christ, because Christ is his righteous
ness, and because faith in Christ has in it the potency
and the promise of his own actual righteousness in
and through Jesus Christ? The law cannot justify a
man or pronounce him righteous, because it cannot
make him so. The Gospel or faith in Jesus Christ as
our righteousness can justify us, because it is based
not only upon the only condition in ourselves of be
coming righteous — viz. : knowledge of our own un
righteousness and faith in God's righteousness — but
upon the only power without ourselves to make us
righteous — viz. : the love and grace and fellowship of
God; and all that manifestly expressed and communi
cated to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
The importance, and even necessity, of insisting upon
this last point is that Christianity is constantly in
danger of becoming a mere blind trust in the general
and indiscriminate goodness of God, apart from or
even in spite of what we are or do ourselves. We look
for our salvation in God or in Jesus Christ and not in
ourselves, as though there were any salvation possible
for us apart from or other than what we ourselves are
and do. We find a weak and selfish satisfaction and
comfort in what God is to us, without knowledge or

78 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
thought that the only real satisfaction or comfort that
we can ever know will be through what God is in us
and we are in Him. Of all the good things that it is
more blessed to give than to receive, that we can
continue to receive only through giving, the chiefest is
the supreme good of God Himself. The Spirit of God,
the holiness, righteousness, or Hfe of God can do us no
good save as they are our own, and they are our own
only in our own possession and exercise of them. It
is an infinite initial blessing, a present Gospel, to us
that God does not wait for us to be good, that He
takes us to Himself from the moment of the birth in
us of the will to be good, and by treating us as though
we were makes us good. But let us beware of stopping
with the Gospel of being accepted and not going on
to the real Gospel of being good. For there is no
other real good for man than that of being good, of
his own goodness. Any other is only a blessing on
the way, a refreshment and a help to the consummate
end and blessedness of being what God is. And let us
remember, too, what the goodness is that is our only
real good. It is the spirit, nature, and Ufe of God, it
is love, service, and sacrifice. We have heard it said,
I am content to be a sinner saved by grace. In the
first place, in its truest and highest sense, to be a sinner
saved is to be one who having been a sinner is so no
longer; to be content to be saved in and not from sin,
to be saved and still a sinner, is no true contentment.
To be content to have been a sinner and to be saved
by grace, or by God, only, is the highest contentment

The New Righteousness 79
of which we are capable. It is St. Augustine's bride
content to be adorned only with the gifts of her divine
spouse. But, in a lower sense, we may with truth and
right, in the impossibility of an immediate or instan
taneous attainment of the divine perfection, and even
with the consciousness of a still inhering defilement of
sin, be content to abide sinners still, waiting, without
the undue impatience which would be want of faith
and an insisting upon sight, for the glory that is to be
revealed in us, the glorious liberty and perfection of
the sons of God. For one in that stage and attitude
of faith and waiting, it is indeed a present though not
the whole or highest blessedness of the Gospel that we
are already, with God and in faith, all that we shall
be in God and in fact. Indeed, in St. Paul's immediate
crisis of thought and contention, this stage and phase
of the matter is so uppermost for the time that he almost
seems to treat it as the whole Gospel. He never really
does this, though his ardent and one-sided partisans
have abundantly done so ever since. St. Paul has ever
in his own mind the whole undismembered conception
of salvation in Christ, but he is passionately in earnest
in establishing the present gracious status of believers
as already and completely in possession in faith, though
not yet in fact, of all that God has made ours in Christ.
And as the word which the Apostle has deliberately
chosen to express the matter of God's gift to us in
Christ is righteousness, it is the point of his contention
to insist, as the very crux and substance of faith, that we
— not shall be, or are becoming, but — are righteous

80 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
before God. We may come to Him as perfectly
accepted and justified as Jesus Christ Himself, and be
treated by Him as though we were as complete in Him
as is our dead, risen, ascended, and glorified Lord in
heaven. Such is the unreserved fulness of divine grace,
and the unlimited and unhesitating power and confi
dence of human faith!
But the very and simple fact that our present justi
fying and justification are called — not as in EngUsh
by different words but in Greek by identical ones —
righteousing and righteousness, is sufficient evidence
that God's calHng or treating us as or accounting us
righteous means His thereby already potential and in
the end actual making us so.

VII
THE OBJECT OF JUSTIFYING
OR SAVING FAITH

The righteousness of God (is) through faith in Jesus Christ unto
all them that believe; being justified freely by His grace through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God set forth to be a pro
pitiation, through faith, by His blood. — Romans UI. 22-25.

VII
THE OBJECT OF JUSTIFYING OR
SAVING FAITH
It being estabUshed that righteousness is both im
puted and imparted only through faith, or in the terms
of later theology that faith is the sole mean or instru
ment of both our justification and our sanctification, it
wiU be well to ascertain clearly from St. Paul's prelimi
nary statement what is the specific object of the faith
that justifies and sanctifies. It is here declared pro
gressively to be: First, Jesus Christ Himself. There
has been manifested a righteousness of God through
faith of Jesus Christ for all who share and exercise
that faith. Second, the object of faith is described
more explicitly as the redemption that is in Christ
Jesus, the propitiation or atonement set forth by God
for our acceptance through faith. And third, it is the
blood of Jesus which is the immediate object of faith.
The above benefits are ours through faith in His blood.
We will consider these steps of faith in the above order.
In the phrase A righteousness of God through faith
of Jesus Christ, it has been questioned whether Jesus
Christ is the object of the faith spoken of or the subject
of it; whether it is the faith of Jesus Himself or our
83

84 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
faith in Jesus that justifies, sanctifies, and saves us.
There is no doubt that the words here mean the latter,
that Jesus Christ is here the object and not the subject.
But there is a truth in the other view too which I am
solicitous of emphasizing for its own sake. Emphati
cally, the faith that saves us, that works in us, or more
exactly through which are worked in us all the wonders
of our salvation — our redemption, reconciliation, and
resurrection — is the human faith perfected and brought
to its victory over the world by our Lord Himself in
the consummate fact of His own resurrection, which
we must forever contend was not an act of mechanical
power exerted upon Him, but an act of spiritual and
moral power exerted in Him and by Him, and that
humanly. It is then the faith of which Jesus Christ
Himself was the supreme subject, the author and
finisher or perfecter, that by our sharing it with Him
becomes His salvation in us and ours in Him. The
faith spoken of here is, it is true, our faith in Jesus
Christ; but then our faith in Him is very largely, if not
chiefly, our faith in His faith — that is to say, our
faith in that supreme and completive act of faith on
His part which, as human victory over and redemption
from sin and death, is in itself human salvation.
Faith in Jesus Christ then goes on of itself to mean
faith in His redemption, or faith in human redemption,
our own redemption, wrought in and by Him. When
we say The redemption that is in Him, it is again a
question whether we mean a redemption that is in
Himself or only a redemption that we have in Him.

Justifying or Saving Faith 85
There is a truth in the first point of view which, on
account of its too long and too great obscuration, I wish
especially to bring forward in this exposition of St.
Paul's teaching. And for this purpose I will bring
together several passages in iHustration of it. When
we were speaking of the Gospel as the power of God
unto salvation, I asked where and how that power was
manifested, and what it was. When the definition
then under discussion went on to say that the Gospel
was the power of God unto salvation because therein
was revealed a righteousness of God through faith, I
asked again, where and how was that righteousness of
God revealed. And so here again in the passage now
before us, when it is said that there has been mani
fested a righteousness, not through law, but of God
through faith — I ask the same question. Where, and
what, and how, has this righteousness of God been
manifested ? I answer in the first case, that the power
of God at work in salvation was revealed in the act
and fact of the human salvation actually and visibly
wrought first in Jesus Christ Himself. The salvation
consisted in the manifest accomplished fact of His
perfect holiness and His risen life. That victory of
human faith was in itself human salvation. There
was the power to save, because there was the salvation
it had wrought. There was the divine power in faith
to conquer the world, for there was the world conquered
by faith. The grace enabUng faith and the faith
enabled by grace to overcome sin and destroy death,
the divine and the human conspiring to produce and

86 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
constitute the new righteousness of God in man and
man in God, were so met in Jesus that He Himself
was the revelation because He was Himself the thing
revealed. In the second case, I answer similarly, or identically,
that the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel
is the righteousness revealed in Jesus Christ Himself.
For Jesus Christ is Himself the Gospel. All that God,
whose Word of Love and Life is all our Gospel, has
to say, or reveal, or manifest, or in any way commu
nicate or impart to us, is said and done and stands
complete in the human person of His justified and
sanctified and glorified Son. The righteousness of
Christ is as truly and completely our righteousness as
it is God's. It is as truly a righteousness of human
faith and obedience, of sin conquered and death
suffered and survived, as it is a righteousness of God
Himself in it with all His divine power to sanctify and
save. The third case is only a repetition of the second
except as we recognize a difference between the more
general revelation of God's righteousness and the more
specific manifestation of it. While all communications
of the divine righteousness are through Jesus Christ,
the revelation views it more as extended through than
as at first existent only in Him, while the manifestation
views it more as existent only in Him than as yet
generally imparted through Him. Manifestation is the
word generally used to designate God's self-expressions
in the individual person of Jesus Christ — as when
St. John says, And the Life was manifested, and we

Justifying or Saving Faith 87
have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the
Ufe, the etemal life, that was with the Father, and was
manifested unto us. So here when the Apostle speaks
of a righteousness having been manifested, not by
nature, nor through law, but from God, he means that
it was manifested in the concrete form of our Lord's
own human righteousness. It is precisely parallel and
identical with St. John's description of sonship in
Christ as being bom not of blood, nor of the will of
the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. How
our Lord's own individual human righteousness was,
in Himself, not of nature nor of law, but of faith and
grace and God, I leave it to our whole exposition to
develop. We come now to apply the foregoing conclusions to
the consideration of the question, whether when St.
Paul speaks of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus
he means a redemption only in us and not in Him,
some redemption which we have through Him, and
not His own which we share with Him. Whatever
other and lower meanings redemption may have on
the way, its true meaning is that which it has or will
have in the end. It is a redemption to us already
simply to know by faith that our redemption is, without
a peradventure, provided for us by the redemptive act
of Jesus Christ. But that has no meaning at all if it
is not a looking forward to and a confident expectation
of an actual sharing of a redemption which actually
exists, reaUzed and complete, in Jesus Christ. We
have only to anticipate the whole teaching of the eighth

88 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
chapter of this Epistle to the Romans and remember
how is there described the blessed consummation of
the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Redemption
is a real setting free. Though already free in spirit,
through the divine power of faith, or the divine power
in faith (or both), we are not yet free in fact as long as
we are in the flesh. Even we who have the first fruits
of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves,
waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our
bodies. For the Apostle had just before given us as
surance that if the Spirit of God and of Christ were
really in us, then He who had raised up Christ Jesus
from the dead should quicken also our mortal bodies
through His Spirit that dwelleth in us. There is
involved the meaning that our partial redemption
which is as yet only in faith shall be complete in fact,
when we shall have been freed from the flesh with its
still inhering sin and death.
The more general faith in Jesus Christ has then to
be specialized and defined into faith in the redemption
which is in Him, in Himself as the actual first-fruits
of humanity to God, as well as in Him for us who
share it with Him. Any one who will now read the
description in the Epistle to the Hebrews of how our
great high priest and representative found, for himself
and for us, etemal redemption, will feel, especially in the
Greek expression of it, the force of what has been said.
St. Paul adds to this specification of Christ's redemp
tion the further truth that God has set forth, or in a
sense put forward, Jesus Christ as — not a mere ex-

Justifying or Saving Faith 89
pression but, we might say — a real expression (inas
much as He is the thing expressed as well as the ex
pression of it) of what throughout the New Testament
is called propitiation or reconcihation; or later atone
ment, in the sense of at-one-ment, though later still
with much accretion in that term of additional meaning.
It is very much questioned whether the Apostle in this
passage means to represent God as setting forth Jesus
Christ as the true mercy-seat, the meeting place or place
of reconciliation and at-one-ment between God and
man, corresponding to the ancient covering of the ark,
upon which was the shekinah, the luminous cloud,
thought to prefigure the great future truth of the
Incarnation; or whether the word means not the pro
pitiatory place but the propitiatory thing, meaning by
that the sacrifice which propitiates or effects recon
ciliation and peace between God and man. The more
general and probable conclusion is that the expression
is left unUmited so as to include all possible truth or
points of view. What is necessary for our argument
will be brought out in the next matter for our consid
eration. The object of saving faith, it will be remembered,
was stated to be, not Jesus Christ Himself in general,
nor yet only Jesus Christ as place or instrument of
our redemption and at-one-ment with God, but these
more specifically through faith in His blood. The
meaning of this tremendous expression is more clearly
than anywhere else brought out in the Epistle to the
Hebrews — which is thoroughly Pauline in substance

90 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
though not in form. And we may recur to the passage
alluded to immediately above. Christ, we are told,
having come as the true high priest of humanity, not
with blood of others but with or through His own
blood He entered once for all into the hoUest place,
having found etemal redemption. What was that
blood of His own with which, and only with or by
which, He found redemption and entered into etemal
oneness with God? The blood was Himself, His
human life, without spot or blemish, in the one only
perfect offering of love, service, and sacrifice, of com
pleted hoHness and righteousness. If the blood of
bulls and goats had a certain efficacy of their own,
how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through
the etemal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God,
cleanse our conscience, and our very consciousness,
from dead works to serve the Hving God!
Now what was the main point of comparison or
contrast between the blood offered to God in the
ancient sacrifices and that offered by our Lord in the
one only effectuating sacrifice of Himself ? The others,
too, were effectual, in their way and to a certain extent.
They were not perfectly or really so, because it was
impossible for them to be anything more than represen
tative, or substitutionary, or vicarious. Anything only
in another can never more than represent, it can never
be, something in us. The sacrifice which the ancient
Jew offered always represented or meant himself,
something which he himself ought to be or do. He
ought to offer up himself to God, as a whole bumt-

Justifying or Saving Faith 91
offering of love, service, and sacrifice. He knew that,
and acknowledged it by the symboUc act of offering up
something else as representative, or substitution, or
instead of himself (vice). At its best the act contained
in it a feeling and confession of his own failure and
weakness to do what he ought to do, or to be in himself
what he ought to be. If he could not be, he could at
least confess his conscious experience of not being and
of inability to be. That being at least the first step,
and in the direction of, and as far as he could go of
himself towards a right relation with God and his own
true self, it was right in God to accept it. But how
far or to what point could God's acceptance of it go ?
It could only go to the point of accepting the man's
sense of not being and wiU to be for, or instead of, his
being. It was only treating him as being what he
was not — and nothing more. It was putting aside,
not putting away, either his sin or his weakness. It
was covering up or putting out of sight, not removing
or putting out of existence, the whole sad fact of his
spiritual and moral condition.
Suppose we instance not the burnt-offering but the
sin-offering of the Jews. That is stiU more expressive.
We must define a thing only by its highest and final
meaning, sometimes by a meaning which it only points
to afterwards, and does not itself as yet attain. The
Jewish sin-offering could mean only, one or both of,
two things. The offerer symboUzed by his offering,
by the death infficted upon the substitute for himself,
either the death he deserved to die for his sins, or the

92 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
death he ought to die from his sins. Or to express it
in the more developed language of Christianity, he
symboHzed either the death of the old man in him, in
and for his sins, or the death of the new man, the
regenerate, risen man in him, to and from sin. But
suppose that the sin-offering did mean all that, and
even could mean it all to the man himself, what could
it do more than mean it? How could it be it? The
other thing's death, however significant of it it might
be, could not be what after all and in the end is the
thing and the only thing that the man truly wants,
the only thing that is or would be his salvation. What
would all even God's love and mercy and goodness,
and treating him as righteous in his unrighteousness,
be to him if after all it was only a fiction, an imputing
to him something not his own. And of all things in
the world the thing that must most be the man's own
is the holiness or righteousness which is his life, his
blessedness, himself.
When Jesus Christ made His offering to God, it was
the offering of the blood, of the Ufe, not of another but
of Himself. By the etemal Spirit that was in Him He
offered up Himself, He gave His Hfe, to God in an act
of perfect holiness and righteousness, that is to say, in
an act of perfect love, service, and sacrifice. It was,
because of that, a wAoZe-bumt-offering, an offering in
which nothing is held back, but the entire self is
given and used, spent or consumed, in the divine life
of obedience. More than that, it was an effectual
sin-offering, an offering in which the self of sin is

Justifying or Saving Faith 93
crucified, dead, and buried — thenceforth and forever
non-existent — and that which takes its place in the
person is at once no longer himself and, at the same
time, his own inner and truest self, the Christ in him,
the son of God that Hveth forevermore.
Why, then, could the blood of Jesus, as none other
could, take away sin? Because it did take away sin;
because it was and is the taking away of sin. Sin was
actually aboUshed in humanity in the person of Jesus
Christ, in whom in the most Uteral and actual sense
humanity died to itself and so to sin, and Hved to God
and so to hoHness and righteousness and etemal Ufe.
And such is Jesus Christ in Himself, and such is He
to us, that He can take us into such an actual partici
pation — in the etemal Spirit, in the divine nature, in
the life of God — with Himself, that we too in Him
and with Him can share His death and His resurrection.
And so I conclude that the whole work of Jesus
Christ was justifying or saving, just because it was not,
in any sense, merely representative. It was not merely
representative in the sense of being only exemplary,
the perfect sample or example of what every human
life should be. He was indeed, but He was not ordy
the one of us who saw the most clearly and reaUzed
the most perfectly the meaning of man and the end of
human Hfe. The very perfection of his doing that
transcended anything other than or outside of and
apart from His sole accompUshment of it. So much
so that His perfect righteousness and Hfe are not only
an example but the procuring and effectuating cause

94 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of ours: Because I Hve, ye shall Uve also. And not
only that but more stiU; He is effectual example and
effectuating cause, because He is the very matter or
substance, the res or thing itself, of our righteousness
and our Hfe. As He is God in us our righteousness,
so is He the power of God Himself in us manifested
in the actuaUty of our own resurrection and risen Ufe,
in the reaUzation of our own spiritual sonship to God
and participation in the divine nature.
In a yet higher sense is our Lord's consummate act
in humanity not only representative, — and that is, in
the sense of its not being, as all sacrifices before Him
were, only symboUcal or substitutionary or vicarious.
They were all accepted only as instead of the offerer, as
substitutes for his own act or sacrifice of himself,
because that was all they could be. Christ's act. His
precious death and glorious resurrection. His hoUness,
righteousness, and etemal life, can by God's grace and
our faith be made, and actually become, not only for
us but in us and of us and ours!

VIII
THE CLEARING UP OF THE
MYSTERY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

To show His righteousness, because of the passing over of sins
done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the shewing of His
righteousness at this present season: that He might himself be just,
and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus. Where then is the
glorying? It is excluded. By what manner of law? of works?
Nay; but by a law of faith.
We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from
the works of the law. Do we then make the law of none effect
through faith ? God forbid: Nay, we establish the law. — Romans
III. 25-28, 31.

VIII
THE CLEARING UP OF THE MYSTERY
OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
St. Paul in the passage still before us speaks of the
manifestation in the person of Jesus Christ of the
divine redemption or propitiation as being not, I
think, so much a vindication, or even a demonstration,
as simply a final elucidation, through fulfilment, of
God's etemal purpose of human salvation through
Himself becoming our righteousness and our life. He
speaks elsewhere of this purpose as God's wisdom,
foreordained before the worlds unto our glory, but
only now manifested unto all the nations for the
obedience of faith. Again he describes it as The
mystery which hath been hid from all ages and all
generations; but now hath it been manifested to His
saints, to whom God was pleased to make known what
is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the
Gentiles, which is — Christ in us, the hope of glory.
And yet again he tells us of God's Purpose and grace,
which was given us in Christ Jesus before times etemal,
but hath now been manifested by the appearing of our
Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought
Hfe and immortaUty to light through the Gospel.
97

98 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
The plan or method of human righteousness was
thus not an afterthought or an incidental or accidental
expedient, but the predestined, because the only real
or effectual, way. Man was designed from the begin
ning for the freedom and self-activity of the sons of
God. But the son and heir, as long as he is a child,
differeth nothing from a bond-servant, though he be
lord of all; but is under guardians and stewards until
the term appointed of the father. So we also, when
we were children, were kept in bondage under the tutel
age and discipline of the law. But when the fulness
of the time came, God sent forth His Son, bom of a
woman, bom under the law, that He might redeem
them which were under the law, that we might receive
the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons — that
is, through the redemption or accomplished sonship of
Jesus Christ — God sent forth the Spirit of His Son
into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So we are no
longer servants but sons, and if sons, then heirs. Thus
not only is the Gospel older than the worlds, the des
tiny of man predetermined before even his existence,
but in the actual spiritual and moral history of man
the Gospel is older than the law. The Gospel, in
promise, given to Abraham was not disannuUed by the
law which four hundred and thirty years after was
given through Moses. Let us put that into the language
not of figure but of fact.
Truths expressed in the Scriptures in the objective
or concrete form of history may be truths indepen
dently of the Uteral truth of the history. It is not

Clearing of Mystery of Righteousness 99
necessary to beUeve the story of the Garden and the
FaU to be historical fact in order to find in the story
the most effective primitive account of spiritual truths
and reaUties. To say that Abraham was before Moses,
the Gospel was prior to the law, is to utter a great
truth quite independently of what any one may beUeve
about Abraham or about Moses as historical facts or
factors in the actual history of the world. The end of
man is a truth in the mind of God and in the meaning
and final cause of the universe prior to any of the
means or incidents by which that end or destiny is at
last attained. In human life the strict and careful
discipline and training of childhood by external rule
or law is a very necessary incident and means, but it
is not an end in itself. To have learned obedience is
a necessary thing, but unless obedience has become
transmuted into something beyond and above itself,
unless the spirit has absorbed and replaced the form,
the status and nature of servants has not been ex
changed for that of sons. MoraUty or formal righteous
ness may indeed be the law of the universe, but that is
just precisely and distinctively what real righteousness
is not. When we say that it is Love, we say that it is
not a formal law but a living and personal Spirit; it
is not a mere mode of things or actions, but the Hving
Person within the true meaning and use of all things
and actions. It was necessary that man should be
taught the meaning of righteousness, and the necessity
of his own righteousness, and the insufficiency of the
law and his own will for righteousness, before finally

100 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
he could receive the manifestation of the divine right
eousness in Christ, and the impartation to himself of
the divine righteousness by the Holy Ghost. But the
thing intended before the worlds and before the law
was not that God should be a Creator of things, or a
Lord of wills, but a Father of spirits.
We come now nearer down to the argument imme
diately before us. In the actual human redemption
in Christ and in the perfect setting forth in His person
of the accompHshed propitiation, or reconcihation, or
at-one-ment, wrought by His act and realized in Him
self in our humanity, we have the final elucidation or
clearing up of the long mystery, the hidden wisdom,
of the divine righteousness and life. The thing to be
cleared up first was the difference of God's treatment
of unrighteousness under the old covenant and under
the new. Under the old the treatment might be
expressed by the general term paresis, the operation of
which has been already partiaUy described. God,
upon condition of a certain necessary disposition on
the part of the offender against the divine law, his
own right attitude towards his offence, passed over the
offence, put it aside, or covered it over, or remembered
it no more, and in general treated it as though it had
not been. The condition or ground of this pardon or
forgiveness was that the sinner was conscious of his
sin and repented him of it. His acknowledgment of
transgression against righteousness was acknowledg
ment of the fact and claims of righteousness, and this
is the necessary first step towards righteousness itself.

Clearing of Mystery of Righteousness 101
This right attitude was expressed, as has been ex
plained, in the several offerings or sacrifices, aU of
which were substitutionary or vicarious. And in just
that fact, as I have said, consisted their inefficiency
for the perfect or complete ends of righteousness.
They were confessions of not being, not sufficient and
effectual means of being, righteous. An imperfect and
impotent system like this, a scheme of righteousness
which went only so far as to convince and convict of
unrighteousness and fell so far short of producing
righteousness, needed explanation. And in the light
of the whoUy effectual and sufficient mode or scheme
of righteousness which succeeded and replaced it, it
found its own explanation. The meaning of it lay in
the fact that righteousness by law is only a step or a
stage in the progress and attainment of actual or real
righteousness. It is positive in its direction but nega
tive in its reach or achievement. It demonstrates that
man must be righteous, and with a righteousness of
his own, but at the same time that he cannot be so
by any process of self-righteousness or of self-right-
eousing. Any such true effort results inevitably not in
attainment but in the sense of failure and in the knowl
edge by experience only of transgression and sin.
God's treatment of this condition and spiritual attitude
was as yet, under the old covenant, one only of pity
and pardon. His response to man's only possible
right consciousness and disposition was the only half-
grace of mercy and forgiveness. The sin that the
man would fain put away from himself God put aside.

102 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
and treated it as though it were not or had been in
reality put away.
The response of the Gospel to the human sense of
actual sin and unattainable hoHness is not the half-
grace of forgiveness but the whole-grace of redemption
and deliverance. God manifests Himself in it, that is
to say in Jesus Christ, not as pitier and pardoner of
man in his sin, but as redeemer and saviour of man
from his sin. He is there seen, in all the completeness
of justifying, sanctifying, and saving grace, as at once
Righteous and righteousing or Righteouser. That is to
say, He is seen not only in the perfection of His own
divine righteousness, but — what is just the point in
the matter of our salvation — in the consummated and
completed act of becoming, or fact of having become,
our divine righteousness. In Jesus Christ God is
literally become The Lord our Righteousness.
In the phrase which describes God in the Gospel,
or in Jesus Christ, as being, as I have translated it,
at once Righteous and Righteouser, righteousness in
us as in Himself, there may arise again the old question
of how He is our righteousness — whether by gracious
imputation or by equally gracious impartation. The
answer is. Certainly not by the former only, and yet,
not less certainly, by the former in the beginning, even
though by the latter only in the end. The point to be
insisted upon is that in Jesus Christ is all and not only
half of our salvation, that if He is imputed to us as
righteousness, it is because He is our righteousness, and
if He is so to us in faith. He will be to us so also in fact.

Clearing of Mystery of Righteousness 103
While we are upon the subject of the progressive
unfolding of this tme principle of the Gospel, it will
be in place to trace the connection between the Gospel
in the Gospels and the Gospel in its further elucidation
or in its more scientific or philosophical interpretation
by St. Paul. I have elsewhere undertaken to prove
that the all-inclusive principle or germ of St. Paul's
most developed Gospel is distinctly stated at the
beginning of every one of the canonical Gospels; is
repeated at the end of one of them as being the sub
stance of what was to be preached to the world as the
Gospel of Jesus Christ; was actually after the Day of
Pentecost so preached by all the Jerusalem Apostles,
and preached exclusively or as practically the sole
burden of their preaching; and that then finally it was
taken up, identically the same, and developed by St.
Paul into the complete system which he has given us,
consistent everywhere with itself, in his epistles. I
will here repeat the general outUnes of that argument.
John the Baptist is introduced at the beginning of
all the Gospels preaching a baptism of repentance for
the remission or putting away of sin. The repentance
he preached was not in itself a putting away of sin,
but only a preparation for, or pre-condition of, its
putting away. Although John was last and greatest
of the prophets, and although the putting away of sin
was only the last and highest of the demands of the
law, yet John's one, reiterated, confession was the
impotence and insufficiency alike of him and it, for
any real or actual putting away of sin. That was his

104 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
constant refrain. No preaching of his, no symboUzing
of the need he preached of the putting away of sin, by
the divinely significant rite of baptism, could produce
or be its actual putting away, — which is at bottom,
and not its mere putting aside or pardoning, the real
thing needed. I baptize with water only, he said, and
water cannot wash away sin or quicken in the soul
the new birth of hoUness. That requires something
beyond law or prophecy, above the powers of nature
or the will of man; it requires the thing witnessed by
the very weakness of the law and anticipated by the
prescience of prophecy — the long expected promise
of the Spirit, which is the birth and life of God Himself
in the soul of man.
John the Baptist's preaching and baptism contained
everything that belongs to religion except, as he himself
confessed, the power of it or the possibility of its reaU
zation. As has been more than once said, not only
the primary condition but the actual first step in
religion, by which we mean the right relation of man
to God, is the knowledge and sense or feeling of his
own condition, his wants, and above all his own not
only shortcomings or failures but transgressions and
sins; and not only his sins but his sin. The prodigal
felt not only that he had sinned, but that, deeper than
that, he was a sinner. Everything depends upon man's
own attitude towards sin and his own sin. That attitude
we express by the word repentance. Applying again
the principle that a thing is truly defined only by what
it is in its completeness, I say that repentance means

Clearing of Mystery of Righteousness 105
the putting away of sin. In the first place it means
the actual putting it away, and in the second place it
means the putting it away by the sinner himself. Any
desire or any conferring of only pity or pardon is only,
at the best, an imperfect or incomplete either repentance
or remission. And in the second place, even God
Himself can in the full sense confer the true remission
or truly put away sin only as He can impart a true
repentance or the inward disposition, power, and act
of the man in himself putting away his sin. A real
aphesis is neither if it is not both God's and the man's
act. John the Baptist in preaching repentance prophet
ically at least preached faith also. He taught that that
which religion as yet lacked was in the approaching
Kingdom of God about to be added, that all that it
had ever meant it was now going to be seen to be.
The baptism -with sign only would give place to the
baptism with substance. The circumcision made with
hands would be replaced by that of the spirit, and
the sacrifices that could not take away sin should be
abolished for one that could and would. The law
which had hitherto been above and beyond man was
by the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ and through
the power and operation of the eternal Spirit to be
brought down from heaven, or up again from the
death to which sin had consigned it, and seated upon
its proper throne in the minds and hearts and lives
of men. I repeat that in what John preached as
prepared for by law, and foreseen and longed for by

106 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
prophets, and about to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ —
viz. : the coming of God's own kingdom of hoUness,
righteousness, and divine life in man — we have the
exact and complete matter of the whole Gospel.
Now just exactly what aU the Gospels begin with,
in St. Luke, who is the one to describe the transition
of the Gospel from the hands of the Lord to those of
the Apostles, the record of the ministry of Jesus Himself
also ends with : Thus it is written, are our Lord's own
last words, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again
from the dead; and that repentance and remission of
sins should be preached in His name unto all nations.
Ye are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send
forth the promise of my Father upon you; but tarry ye
in the city, until ye be clothed with power from on
high. The meaning that underlies all the human
experiences of Jesus Christ, His suffering, death, and
resurrection from the dead, is this: that in these we
see in Him, and by these we shall attain in Him, the
death to and from sin, the repentance that is unto —
that means, that attains, that is — the putting away of
sin; or, what is the same thing on its positive side,
the faith that sees in Christ, and that in Him achieves
and attains, the putting on of the holiness, righteous
ness, and life of God.
Once more, what according to John the Baptist was
to be the Gospel, what according to St. Luke our Lord
declares in His last words is to be preached in His
name as being the Gospel, the Jerusalem apostles
with St. Peter at their head did actually preach as the

Clearing of Mystery of Righteousness 107
Gospel. The God of our fathers — they declared —
raised up Jesus, whom ye slew. Him did God exalt
to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance
and remission of sins. And we are witnesses of these
things; and so is the Holy Ghost, whom God hath
given to them that obey Him. The distinctive gift of
the Gospel is, what was accomplished in the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the effectual putting
away of sin by death to it, and the effectual putting
on of holiness and Hfe by actual participation of the
spirit and power of God in Christ.
How exactly this teaching of the other apostles was
the substance of St. Paul's whole doctrine will appear,
as everywhere else, so clearly enough, for example, in
the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians. There St. Paul
declares what his Gospel is, and warns us that, if
Christ be not risen, then are his preaching and our
faith alike emptied of their content, — For, says he, if
Christ is not risen, we are yet in our sins, and those
who have fallen asleep in Him have perished.
We might go on to show the identity of St. John's
much later, and quite independent, declaration of what
the Gospel of Christ is. We know, says he, that He
was manifested to take away sin. And in Him is no
sin. Why was there in Him as man no sin ? Because
He himself abolished sin in the flesh. And how as
man did He do that? By resisting it unto blood, or
unto death, and by the victory over it of His own
human holiness in the spirit and power of God through
faith. The power of God thus manifested in Him is

108 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the self-same power with which God works in all who
are in Him. For not only in Him is there no sin, but
— Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not.
It is easy enough to say, but I do not think that it
is possible upon right and sufficient reflection to beUeve,
that this consistency of fundamental principle running
through the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the
Epistles of Sts. Paul, Peter, and John, and the Epistle
to the Hebrews, is in any part of it a matter of later
arrangement or accommodation, — as for example that
the teaching of John the Baptist, of our Lord as re
ported at the close of St. Luke's Gospel, and of St.
Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, has been made
subsequently to conform to the essential idea of St.
Paul's developed doctrine. The agreement is too
natural and unconscious, and at the same time too
deep and real.
In concluding his statement of the righteousness of
God, as distinguished from that of the law, St. Paul
remarks of it that it excludes all boasting on the part
of man. I cannot think that the Apostle's meaning is
wholly expressed by the explanation that any claim of
human merit is shut out in a system which is one not
of works but of faith. Boasting, pride or conceit, the
claim of merit or self-righteousness, is as much out of
place in the works of the Christian as in his faith, his
fides sola. I am not sure that that side of it is not
more than the other in the mind of St. Paul. He does
not hesitate to speak of his own works or labours, nor
to claim that they are more abundant than those of

Clearing of Mystery of Righteousness 109
others, while never forgetting to add. Yet not I, but
the grace of God which was with me. I labour also,
he says, striving according to His working, which
worketh in me mightily. And he bids us Christians
to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling,
remembering that it is God who worketh in us both
to will and to do. He claims that the sufficiency of
his own abundant ministry is of God and not himself,
and seeks to exercise it always as though God did so
through him. I dwell on this not to prove that the
Gospel of Christ is a system of the most strenuous
works as well as of faith, because I do not suppose
any one to deny this, but in order to make occasion to
bring out an aspect of Christianity which is of infinite
interest and importance, and which I think was in the
mind of St. Paul. True Christianity, so far from
limiting or lowering human freedom and personal
activity, raises these to the highest pitch, far beyond
the possibility of any other system of life or action.
It bids us be able, and gives us the abiUty, to be all
things, do all things, endure all things. It raises our
faith, our hope, our desire and will, our purpose, and
our power, up to the standard and goal of the divine
perfection itself. There is nothing that so exalts man's
conception of himself, or that engenders and encour
ages so high and holy an ambition in him — even to
the becoming as God Himself. And yet the more the
Christian covets earnestly the best gifts, and is ambi
tious of the highest that even God can give or make
him, the more modest and humble he grows; because

110 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the more he truly attains or accomplishes, the more con
scious he is that it is all not of himself but of God.
The greatness is indeed aU his own, but the merit and
the praise of it is all Another's. What has he that he
has not received ? It is not he, but God in him. This
explains the anomaly that the most selfless and modest
human being that ever Uved, the meekest and lowUest
in spirit, was He who made and estabUshed for himself
the most unUmited claim. He was what He was —
and He was everything — just because of Himself He
was and could do nothing, because He sought not His
own glory but only that of Him from and of whom
He was.
And we can say something Hke it of St. Paul himself.
He was, as we have said, of all the servants of Christ,
the most abundant in the labours of Christ, and he
was not unconscious of all that he had been and had
done in the service of his Lord. But if any one ever
did, in sincerity and truth, accept for himself all the
grace, and give to God all the merit and the glory, of
his greatness, it was the great Apostle.
One more word before St. Paul has done with his
statement of the Gospel: What have we done with the
law ? Have we made it of none effect through faith ?
On the contrary, we have established it. Not only
have we restored it to its equality with God, by exalting
man's standard of obligation to the height of the divine
perfection, but we have laid open the way by which
man can discharge that obligation by attaining that
perfection.

IX
THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM

What saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was
reckoned to him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh, the
reward is not reckoned as of grace, but as of debt. But to him that
worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his
faith is reckoned for righteousness.
Even as David also pronounceth blessing upon the man, unto
whom God reckoneth righteousness apart from works, saying.
Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are
covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord will not reckon
sin. To Abraham his faith was reckoned for righteousness, — that he
might be the father of all them that beheve.
For not through the law was the promise to Abraham or to his
seed, that he should be heir of the world, but through the righteous
ness of faith. For the law worketh wrath; for where there is no law,
neither is there transgression.
For this cause it is of faith, that it may be according to grace; to
the end that the promise may be sure to all the seed; not to that only
which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham,
who is the father of us all before him whom he believed, even God,
who quickeneth the dead, and calleth the things that are not as though
they were.
Who in hope believed against hope. Without being weakened in
faith he considered his own body now as good as dead (he being an
hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah's womb; yea, looking
unto the promise of God, he wavered not through unbehef, but waxed
strong through faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured
that, what He had promised. He was able also to perform. Where
fore it was reckoned unto him for righteousness.
Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was reckoned
unto him; but for our sake also, unto whom it shall be reckoned, who
beheve on Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. — Romans
IV. 3-8, 9, 11, 13, 15-24.

IX

THE FAITH OF ABRAHAM
St. Paul's position is not merely that the Gospel
was historically prior to the law, but that in principle
it is the normal and only possible true or right status
which man can occupy in his personal relation with
God. The law itself by the inconsistency of its insist
ence and its impotence is a witness for the truth and
necessity of that which has in it the power to produce
that upon which it insists. In illustration and proof
of the evangelical principle before as well as under
the law, examples are given of the moral status before
God especially of Abraham but also of David.
Abraham believed God, and that was accounted to
him for righteousness. He is the type of the nearest
nearness to God, the most accepted and acknowledged
right relation with Him, possible for man, and the
ground upon which he stands in that relation is dis
tinctly stated not to be that of merit, or of a righteous
ness in himself which could justify him before God,
but to be that of faith in God as One who accepts and
justifies the contrite and penitent unrighteous. Now
let us analyze and interpret this faith of Abraham. It
was primarily a general and practical kind of faith;
113

114 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
there are no speculative questions or questionings
involved in it. Abraham believed God; he trusted
and depended upon Him absolutely and without limit
or reserve. But not only did this faith extend in all
directions and to all matters, but there are also distinct
evidences in it of speciaHzation and particular direc
tion. The indefinite begins to become definite when
faith assumes the form of trusting the love and goodness
that God is, even when least conscious of any worthi
ness or most conscious of every unworthiness of that
love and goodness. God accepts that trust and con
fidence on our part, — upon the express and definite
condition of our own right spiritual and moral con
sciousness in the matter. Observe that there is a
condition — and indeed a conditio sine qua non. Why
does not the love and goodness of God go to what
some conceive to be the more complete limit of blessing
us without any condition at all? Why must there be
the absolute condition of repentance and faith on our
part? Because God cannot bless us with the spiritual
and moral blessedness which our own nature demands,
with which alone law and Gospel have to do, in which
our very personality consists, apart from or without
our own consciousness and co-operation in the matter.
Our own attitude and action towards sin and hoUness
must be constituents and co-ordinates in the matter of
the blessing, or the blessing cannot exist. We cannot
be freed from sin save through and by our own putting
away our sin, and we cannot be made holy save through
our own love and will and activity of holiness. God

The Faith of Abraham 115
can do everything in the man, but only in the man
who has the will and the faith to do everything in Him.
He can even give us all the will and the faith necessary
as our part, if only we resist and reject not the grace
that imparts it; and that longs and strives to impart it:
— How would I ! — and ye would not.
When St. Paul describes Abraham as coming to and
being accepted of God, not upon the ground of his
own merit or with claim of his own righteousness, but
with the spiritual insight to trust himself to the divine
grace, he is describing that grace too as the divine in
sight to recognize in Abraham's sense of sin, and faith
in God notwithstanding his sin, the human condition
of its impartation. Abraham went no further, perhaps,
than to see in God the grace that accepts the sinner.
If he could have gone the full length of his own faith,
he would have seen in Christ that God's accepting the
sinner, not as what he is but as what he beUeves in
and would be, is His way, and the only divinely prac
ticable way, of making him, or of his own becoming,
the thing he would and should be. He would have
known too more perfectly, as all the children of his
faith know just in proportion to the perfection of their
faith, that the present peace through faith of those
who are still sinners is only the foretaste and beginning
of the real peace which we shall enjoy when we are no
longer sinners. But it is a foretaste and a beginning,
and God is true and just to recognize in those who as
yet have only the sense of their sin and faith in His
righteousness, not only the necessary condition, but all

116 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the potential and even something of the actual presence
of His own righteousness in Christ.
David's faith, too, in describing the blessedness of
the man whose iniquities are forgiven and his sins
covered, to whom the Lord will not impute or reckon
sin, is thoroughly evangeUcal or on the line of the
perfect salvation through Christ. But he does not see
all the way to the full end actually accompHshed in
Christ. I not only admit that the aphesis described
by him is no more than the paresis which St. Paul
describes as the limit attained by grace before its final
triumph in Christ, but I freely admit that the word
in itself does not necessarily mean anything more than
a putting away by forgiveness, and that actually in the
New Testament it frequently does not go beyond that
restricted meaning. But I hold that impUcit in God's
gift of remission in Jesus Christ, and equally so in
man's acceptance of it, there is involved and included,
out of and beyond the initial grace of acceptance and
pardon, the ultimate and real grace of freedom and
holiness. St. John's teaching does not go beyond St.
Paul's, when he describes, first, the purpose of our
Lord's coming to be the taking away of sin; secondly,
the accomplishment of that purpose in the act and
fact of His own sinlessness or victory in our nature
over sin; and, thirdly, the proper end and result of the
divine purpose and its accompUshment in Christ in our
actual freedom from sin in and through Him.
I am not so much concerned in the actual historical
fact and meaning of Abraham's faith as I am in St.

The Faith of Abraham 117
Paul's understanding and application of it. The Apos
tle's desire is not so much to find in the events of the
New Testament literal proof and confirmation of the
Old, as it is to find in the Old Testament language and
ideas and illustrations with which to express and explain
the independent and indisputable facts of the New.
And it is, at the very least, wonderful to what an ex
tent the entire texture of the Old Testament lends itself
to this use, is capable of being applied to events which
almost as much fulfil as they transcend its meaning.
Let us then review the story of Abraham's faith in
its direct application to St. Paul's exposition of the
faith in Christ that justifies and saves. Abraham's
faith I described as being, first, a general one, and
altogether practical and not speculative. Faith in God
and in the essential verities of religion, it has been said,
is not so much a conclusion of reason as a deed or
achievement of character. The more one's whole mind
and heart and will, one's entire personality and life, are
exalted to unity and harmony with the spiritual and
moral as well as physical or natural truth and order of
the world, the more one is prepared and disposed to
believe in and trust Him who is the Reality of them
all. Abraham is the type of those who are great enough
in themselves to know that God is and that He is the
end and reward of all who seek and find Him.
But immediately, as we saw, St. Paul specializes or
defines Abraham's faith as being in God who accepts
and justifies the ungodly or unrighteous; justifies him,
that is, of course, not on the ground of his being, but

118 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
on the ground of his knowing and feeling himself to
be, ungodly and unrighteous, and coming notwith
standing to Him who, just because He is love and
grace, is the fountain and source of all righteousness.
There is no faith so true and strong as that which
brings us to God in and in spite of, and even because
of, our sins.
Abraham's faith, however, does not stop here. It
attaches itself to a particular and definite promise and
hope, which is at once God's meaning, and its own
more or less conscious and understood meaning, in
the whole matter. The promise of God before and
under the law and its fulfilment in the Gospel, as the
promise made to Abraham, or made to faith in his
person, is the subject-matter of both Testaments.
What is the substance or content of that promise and
fulfilment ? Assuredly it is not only the clearer revela
tion and assurance of the fact that God is faithful and
free to justify the unrighteous, to accept and treat
him as righteous. So much of justification and salva
tion is not all, nor the essence, of the Gospel. Here,
I think, the true application and likeness or analogy
of Abraham's faith to that of and in Christ comes in
and fills out the whole great truth of God's gift of
righteousness to the world.
The promise made to Abraham is the promise made
before the worlds, planted in the very nature and
running through all the history of man, — the promise
to Faith, that it shall inherit and possess the earth,
that through it all races and nations of the earth shall

The Faith of Abraham 119
receive and share the full and final blessing and blessed
ness of God Himself, His righteousness and His Hfe.
We see in this blessed promise and hope the source
and inspiration of the indestructible Hebrew conviction
that, all appearances and contradictions to the contrary
notwithstanding, righteousness shall prevail and the
kingdoms of the world shall become the Kingdom of
God. Now this promise was made to Abraham
through his seed; and the promise was deferred until
it was as impossible for Abraham to beget as for
Sarah to conceive the seed upon which the promise
depended. The power, however, of God's Word to
fuffil itself, and the sufficiency of Abraham's faith for
the fulfilment through it of what God had promised,
triumphed over the natural impossibiUties in the way,
and the seed was given. The proto-fulfilment in Isaac
was itself a Ufe out of death: for, in him. There sprang
of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars
of heaven in multitude, and as the sand which is by
the seashore innumerable. Abraham became physi
cally the father of many nations. But that is not what
St. Paul had chiefly in mind. As Aristotle was said to
be the master of them that think or know, so Abraham
is still the father of all who believe. His spiritual
children have far outnumbered those of his flesh.
Thus Abraham became the father of us all before
Him whom He believed; and thus God, first to him,
manifested Himself as quickener of the dead, and caller
of things that are not as though they were. But how
did God so manifest Himself to Abraham ? Abraham

120 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
did beget and Sarah did conceive and bear the promised
seed. God's power to fulfil His word manifested itself
in their own power to fulfil it. It was in and through
them that God manifested Himself, and the manifes
tation consisted first in a power in them to produce,
and then in their actual production of an issue which
was at once bom of them and yet not bom of them but
of God in them. Herein lay the Ukeness between the
proto-fulfilment in Isaac and the real fulfilment in
Christ of the divine promise made to faith in the
symbolic or representative person of Abraham, of which
we will now attempt the larger interpretation.
AU the Old Testament promises fulfilled in Christ
were primarily promises made to humanity, and to be
fulfilled finally only in the general life and destiny of
man. The interpretation of one such promise, which
wiU do for all, may be studied in the second chapter of
the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is a promise made
to man that, though for a time made lower than the
angels, he shall be exalted above them and to the head
of God's creation. Now as yet we see this promise
very far from fulfilled in man, or in humanity at large,
but we do see it most completely fulfilled in One Man,
Christ Jesus; and fulfilled in Him as head and repre
sentative and forerunner of all. It pleased God, for
and through whom are all things, in bringing many
sons to glory, to perfect (first) the Captain of their
salvation. The promises are made generally to man;
they are fulfilled first in the Son of man; and then
through Him they are fulfilled in all who are in Him.

The Faith of Abraham 121
So the promise made to Abraham is a promise made
to faith in general; it is for his seed, in the sense that
it is for those in all nations of the earth who are the
children and inheritors of his faith. It is tme that the
Apostle says elsewhere that the promise is made not to
Abraham's seeds, meaning many, but to his seed,
meaning one, that is, Christ; but then he goes on imme
diately to say that as many of us as are Christ's, or in
Christ, are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the
promise. What then, coming down at last to the point, was
the distinctive promise made to faith in Abraham and
fulfilled for faith in Christ ? There is to the question,
not a double answer, but a double mode of answering.
In the first place, in the very fact of Jesus Christ in
our humanity we have that which is a quickening of
the dead, a new birth from the dead loins and the
barren womb of our unassisted humanity. That which
was bom into the world in His person was bom of the
world, and yet was not bom of the world but of God
in the world. He was and yet was not son of man,
in that He was son preeminently of God, and son of
man only as Son of God in man. And in the second
place, if we look away from Who Christ is in Himself
to What He is in us, the lesson from Abraham's faith
becomes yet more intelUgible to us. Jesus Christ is
God in us for holiness, righteousness, and Ufe; He is
God our hoUness, righteousness, and Hfe. The right
eousness bom in Him into the world is a righteousness
not of nature, nor of the will of man, but of God.

122 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
It is ours, and yet it is emphatically not ours but God's
in us. And yet God fulfils Himself in us only in that
wliich is ourselves also and our own. Our righteous
ness is as divine as it is human, and as human as it is
divine. It is just precisely as divine-human as our
Lord Himself is, because it is in fact not ourselves
but He in us. Our righteousness, Hke Isaac, is child
not of nature but of grace. It is indeed of ourselves,
in that it is only what we ourselves are and do, but it
is also not of ourselves, because it is only of the power
of God in us to will and to do, and so to be.
The righteousness of God looked at in this way is
not alone that beginning of faith which sees already in
God the power and the promise and so the certitude
of our future righteousness, but it is the same faith
viewed as grown to fruition, God wholly in us and we
wholly in God unto the attainment of an actual com
plete righteousness of God in ourselves.
We can readily now, I hope, go on with St. Paul to
see how Abraham's faith is ours in kind ; and ours is
accounted righteousness to us as his was to him, if, as
he became the father of Isaac and of us all by trans
cending the possibiUties of nature and the powers of
his own flesh and will through faith in God's word,
we too, in the more perfect Word of God, which is
Jesus Christ Himself, see and find all our common
humanity raised from the death of its own unrighteous
ness, and impotence for righteousness, into the divine
power for righteousness which is through the indwell
ing of God Himself in us, our Righteousness.

X
THE STATUS OF THE
CHRISTIAN BELIEVER

Being therefore justified by faith, let us have peace with God
through our Lord Jesus Christ; through whom also we have had
our access by faith into this grace wherein we stand; and let us re
joice in hope of the glory of God; and not only so, but let us also
rejoice in our tribulations: knowing that tribulation worketh pa
tience; and patience, probation; and probation, hope; and hope
putteth not to shame; because the love of God hath been shed abroad
in our hearts through the Holy Ghost which was given unto us. —
Romans V. 1-5.

THE STATUS OF THE CHRISTIAN
BELIEVER
We come now. to describe more practically and par-
ticularly The state or status of the Christian believer
before God. As that status is represented as having
been fixed or determined for us by an act of our Lord,
the act of His death, and as that death is described as
a sacrifice and in general in terms of the ancient ritual
system of the Jews, it is a good time to begin to ask
ourselves to what extent, or whether, we are still to be
bound in the expression of our Christianity by that
obsolete phraseology and circle of ideas. I will answer
the question at present only so far as to endeavour to
determine the use we are going to make just now of
that phraseology. To go no further as yet, I am
convinced that the term sacrifice and the idea or prin
ciple for which it stands can never be dispensed with.
To begin with, it is not Jewish but universal, and
although it has been and still is undergoing the refining
and purifying treatment to which all human thought
and feeling needs to be continuously subject, yet all
future progress in the matter can be only in the direc
tion of its better understanding and fuller appropria-
125

126 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
tion. At the same time it ought to be finally decided
that we are going to interpret the meaning of sacrifice
by the universal and etemal truth of it realized in the
life and death of Christ, and not going to bring that
truth down to fit into the little system of Jewish, or
any other incomplete and imperfect human, thought
or understanding of it. In other words, we shaU
interpret the sacrifice of Christ by itself, or in its
independent and inherent significance, and make use
of all prior meanings or uses of sacrifice as only pointing
to and not at all sufficing to express or explain it.
One other principle of method or procedure I wish
to make plain. As humanity Will never be known
except in the completeness of its exposition in Jesus
Christ, so Jesus Christ cannot be known except in
most essential and universal terms of our humanity.
To understand our Lord in any act or situation of
human life it is necessary to understand what is the
eternally proper or right human attitude or action in
that situation. And so in general I would say that
what Jesus Christ did in our humanity in order to be
our salvation was just precisely what humanity needed
of itself to be and to do in order to be saved. We
exactly express or explain any act of His, and so the
supreme and decisive act, when we say that humanity
did it in His person, and that it was just precisely what
humanity needed to do in order to its own redemption
and completion. In His person humanity righted itself
with God, redeemed itself from sin, raised itself from
death. And how did it do so ? As alone, in the nature

Status of the Christian Believer 127
of the thing and in the nature of the case, it could do
so, — by undergoing that spiritual, moral, and natural
change or transition, from the evil it needed to be
saved from to the good it needed to be saved to, which
was in itself necessary to constitute its salvation. It
needed by a personal act of its own to pass from sin
into hoHness and from death into life, and it could do
so only by such an attitude towards sin as involved a
resistance or denial of it unto death, and such an
attitude towards hoHness as involved an attainment of
it through faith unto life. The death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ was in act and in fact humanity's
death to sin and resurrection to God and holiness and
etemal Ufe. Of course it was so actually to Himself
only in the beginning, but thenceforth it was poten
tially so for all. How it is potentially, and may be
actually so for aU, is a part of the Gospel plan of
which the exposition Ues before us. Up to the present
point I would answer to any question of how we are
saved by the death or the blood or the sacrifice of
Christ simply in the well-known line of the poet:
In His death our sins are dead.
Two features of the above representation require
a Uttle more attention. It involves the tmth that
Jesus Himself in His humanity needed the salvation
which all humanity needs. Salvation for Him, as for
us demanded that conflict with sin and conquest of
sin which was preeminently His experience and His
achievement. Salvation for Him as for us was impos
sible either as a mere fact of nature or as an attainment

128 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of His own human will. The power of God unto
salvation through faith was necessary for Him as for
us, and that power manifested itself in Him, as it must
in us, in the perfection of His human obedience unto
death, even the death of the cross. Through His own
blood He entered into the holiest, having found etemal
redemption. That is to say, through the perfect loss
or offering up of Himself He eternally found or attained
His true Self.
The other point that needed attention is this : Chris
tianity, it may be said, does not involve in fact for us
such an experience and such an achievement as needs
so extreme an expression as is indicated by the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Are we so sure of
that? Of course a thing is properly defined only at
its highest and by its highest. We are doing that
when we define ourselves by Jesus Christ. In His death
and resurrection we are defining repentance and faith,
the right human attitude towards sin and hoHness, at
their Hmit, carried to their very end. But sooner or
later, if we are to be saved to the end, have not we all
to know sin to the very end and holiness to the very
end, — sin to the extreme Hmit of experiencing its
death, and holiness to the similar limit of knowing its
life ? Salvation in the highest is nothing less nor lower
than the actual knowledge, and such a knowledge, of
sin as death, and holiness as Ufe, as will be in us a death
to sin and a life in hoUness.
The above being understood as the ground upon
which we stand, the sure basis of our present and

Status of the Christian Believer 129
future status with God, St. Paul describes with great
cleamess what ought to be our subjective personal
attitude and feeUng in the relation in which it places
us with God: Being therefore justified by faith, let us
have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ;
through whom also we have had our access by faith
into this grace wherein we stand; and let us rejoice in
hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but let
us rejoice also in our tribulations. The first immediate
consequence of the blessedness made ours in Jesus
Christ is the sense of present peace. It is necessary to
make a distinction between this present peace and
what we may term real peace, — if it be only for the
purpose of taking in the gift of God in its entirety, its
end as well as its beginning and progress. We can
have or enjoy real peace only as we are in that state
or condition — or, as Aristotle so insists, in that not
mere state or condition but perfect energizing or per
sonal activity — which alone is the condition of perfect
peace, or of which alone perfect peace is the accom
paniment and the expression. To one who is ill and
about to die it would bring great present peace to know
that he was brought into possession of certain cure
and so of assured recovery and health. But the real
peace to the sick man is health itself, and the wonderful
comfort and peace brought to him by a sure faith in
it and a certain hope of it is, in a large measure at
least, only proleptic or anticipatory. In a large meas
ure, but not wholly so. The patient may find in his
very anticipation and hope a real beginning and pro-

130 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
gress of the return of actual health, and so his possession
and enjoyment may be not all only future; and the
believer not only looks forward in faith and hope to
the actual fruition of God and holiness and life, but
has an ever increasing foretaste of them now. That,
too, is real peace so far as it goes, and is to be classed,
in theological language, rather with the real peace of
sanctification and final glorification than with the
immediate present peace of justification. When St.
Paul says that we are saved by or in hope, he must
mean that the res or substance of our salvation is still
future, although our present assured faith in it and
the earnest or foretaste of it which we already enjoy
are enough to constitute a present salvation, to justify
us in saying that we are saved.
But, however there must be in the earUest beginning
of at least the consciousness of justification something
too of a beginning of sanctification, and so from the
start a mixing of the real peace that comes so slowly
from what we are with that which comes so imme
diately and abundantly from the discovery of what
God is to us, yet must we accept and appreciate the
distinction between them, if we are to have full ex
perience of what the Gospel is to us now as well as
what it has in store for us in the end. If the worst
sinner at this moment in the world could be brought to
an immediate spiritual apprehension of the full meaning
of Christian baptism, what it is that is made all ours
by that divine instmment, assuredly that act of spiritual
apprehension on his part would be the first tremendous

Status of the Christian Believer 131
step in the process of real righteousness, or sanctifica
tion, on his actual way to God. But of real righteous
ness, or righteousness of his own, how little would it
be ! Of real reception or reception by actual participa
tion there could indeed be but a drop from the infinite
ocean ; but on the other hand, by the reception of faith
and hope, or of anticipatory appropriation, it can be
all his in a moment. He may in one ecstatic sweep of
vision behold all God become human, his own, right
eousness and Ufe. In that one happy moment, or in
the longer happy moment of his whole earthly life of
faith and hope, it is not his own paltry attainment of
personal righteousness or life with which God credits
him. Rather is it all that his faith takes in and appro
priates to itself of the infinite and etemal righteousness
of God Himself. All of Jesus Christ, who is God's
promise and gift to us of His own divine righteousness,
— all of Jesus Christ, who is consequently also our
own perfect actual participation in the righteousness
of God — is reckoned, accounted, or imputed to, is as
it were put to the credit of, the worst sinner who by a
true faith accepts and appropriates Him to himself.
The place, therefore, which we are enjoined now to
have and enjoy is what I should call the anticipatory
peace of a perfect faith. It does not rest upon the
existence within ourselves of all the conditions necessary
in ourselves to a real peace. It rests rather upon the
assurance that all those conditions have been realized
in Christ, and through Him are to be realized in us.
Meantime we do not wait for their fuU realization in

132 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
ourselves to have free access to and be at peace with
God, but appropriate to ourselves, as He imputes to
us, in advance, the freeness and fulness of all that He
is to us — not yet in ourselves, but — in Jesus Christ.
In proportion as we rest the terms upon which we are
with God upon real grounds to be found in ourselves,
will our relations with Him, our peace, be weak and
low and fluctuating. In proportion as we rest it upon
what our faith embraces and anticipates of the infinite
all that He is to us in Christ and we are in Him in
Christ, will our peace even now be full of a glory that
may be future in its existence in us but is very present
in its existence for us.
Consequently the Apostle links very closely and
indissolubly with the possession of present peace the
hope or assurance of future glory: Let us know and
enjoy now the peace of being on terms of the most
unrestricted access to and fellowship with God, but
let us know that these terms could not exist if they
did not mean and look forward and lead up to the
final and full glory of a real spiritual oneness with
God, no longer existing only in Another for us, but in
ourselves in The Other. The expression Glory of God,
as that which we are exhorted to rejoice in the hope
of, can, I think have no other meaning than that we
give it in the old saying that glory is only sanctification
completed, as sanctification is glory begun. It is full
participation, no longer only in the divine will and pur
pose and promise to bless us with Himself, but in the
fulness and completion of that blessedness, no longer

Status of the Christian Believer 133
objectively ours in Christ, but subjectively, now, aU our
own through Christ in us.
And here comes in the third point of the Apostle's
exhortation to us as necessary to the practical reaUza
tion of our relation to God in Christ. We are to be as
much at peace with God now as though we actually
fulfilled in ourselves all the real conditions upon which
that peace depends and in which it consists. We may
rightly be so, because in God's Word, which is Christ,
we may rejoice in the certain hope that we shall be in
ourselves all that now we are only in Him. But now
what shall we say as to the passage or transition from
the relation to God in Christ of faith only to that of
real participation and identity ? The one exists only
that it may pass over into the other; how is that passage
to be effected or accompHshed ? How is Christ for us
to become Christ in us, or the divine righteousness
imputed to transmute itself into the same righteousness
imparted? How, in a word, is our present peace to
attain to all the reality of future glory ?
Let me pause for a moment to remark that there
need be, and should be, nothing of mere other-worldli-
ness in what we are now talking about. I am not
thinking of any other place or condition or outward
circumstances of Hfe or activity than those we know.
Here or elsewhere life with its means or ends is prac
tically the same. The only other-world that I am
capable of really thinking about is the world of that
other thing or other self that, wherever I am, it can
but be my sole end or aim to become, if I am to be

134 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
saved from what I am. My glory or my heaven is
nothing to me that I do not supremely want here and
now. And I know not, and do not think about, any
way or means of attaining or securing them other than
those that lie before me. All that I propose to myself
in the furthest future is only the consummation and
fruition of all that is worth striving or Hving for here,
or anywhere else.
The great value of what St. Paul has now to teU us
may be expressed in this truth: that the only way from
faith to fruition, from what we beheve in and aim at
to what we shall attain and be, from life in Christ for
us to the Hfe of Christ in us, is the way of suffering.
The many sons of God can be brought unto glory
only as the One Son, the Author and Captain of their
salvation, was brought — by being made perfect
through sufferings. This is, of course, the tritest
common place of Christianity, but there is that in
St. Paul's treatment of it here which looks more deeply
than we are wont to see into the reason or philosophy
of the matter. Even Christians are in the habit of
speaking of the existence of trial and suffering and of
evil in general as a mystery of which we can have no
understanding on the whole, although in part we may
recognize the uses to which it is actually put in the
discipline of life. But St. Paul's philosophy is not
merely, I think, that, evil existing, we know not why
or how, it is turned to account, overruled as we say,
and made a means of good to us, by the power greater
than itself. Rather is it that, in the very nature of it,

Status of the Christian Believer 135
all real good, natural or spiritual, is won against, is a
victory over, an opposite ill. Pleasure, if it is not
only a survival of or relief from pain, is at least de
veloped in consciousness by contrast with and conquest
of it. Virtue or true manhood is every inch of it not
merely won by but the very product or fruit of conflict
with and conquest of its opposite. The holiness of
Jesus Christ Himself was as much negatively the
denial and annulment of its opposite, sin, as it was
the affirmation and estabUshment of itself through a
positive union with the Spirit and wiU and Ufe of God.
We could not, however we might try, conceive of a
spiritual, personal creation developed otherwise than
through conditions practically identical with those to
which we take the chief exception in the world as it is.
It seems to me, therefore, that St. Paul in the language
we are about to consider selects the very best terms in
which to express the philosophy of pain, temptation,
and trial, not merely as existing and as what we have
to live in spite of, but as necessary to us and what we
have to Uve by means of. It is a vindication or justi
fication of the fact that the divinest as well as most
human act, the most divinely human and humanly
divine act, actual or possible in the history of our
universe, had to be enacted and expressed in terrrrs of
the most inconceivable humiUation, trial, and suffering.
It is an interpretation of the facts and circumstances
of our own existence, in which aU the most extreme
contrasts and contradictions meet and contend, and
for which there is no possible explanation but that it

136 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
is the scene and the condition necessary not only for
the testing or proving but for the determining and
developing of personal character and life.
If, says St. Paul, in the possession of our present
peace we rejoice in the hope of our future glory, then
must we rejoice likewise in the necessary steps or means
by which that glory is to be achieved, in all the passive
and active experiences through which it is to be won.
It is not that the glory of not only believing but being
what Christ is is earned by endurances and acts which
in themselves may be different from and independent
of the end attained by them, but that every trial en
dured and act performed in and for Christ enters
constituently into and forms a part of the glory that is
His and that thus becomes ours. Christ already in us
by faith the hope of glory becomes Christ in us in fact
the substance and reaUty of glory, only in the enduring
with His power of survival and in the acting with His
assurance and certainty of achievement and attainment.
So, says St. Paul, If we rejoice in our glory as it mani
fested itself in Christ, in what He endured and how
He endured, in what He did and how He acted, let us
rejoice in enduring the same things in the same way,
and in accomplishing the same things in and with the
self-same grace and power. That was the glory of
Christ and that is the only sharing in His glory which
we have warrant for rejoicing in the hope of. Let us
rejoice in our tribulations then, first, because tribula
tion worketh, not merely a more passive patience, but
a more active endurance. The word may be made to

Status of the Christian Believer 137
include every high and holy reaction on our part
against every possible assault made upon us from
without; such an attitude towards, such a resistance to,
such a survival of, whatever may assail us, as will in
itself be a victory over every form of evil that the
world can oppose to us. All such opposition to and
power over evil can be nothing else than dependence
in and the power of the opposite and opposing good.
There is no hatred of the devil but the love of God,
and there is no power over evil but the power of good.
The next term expresses yet more clearly the reflex
effect in and upon ourselves of the right withstanding
of the evil without ourselves. The right reaction upon
our environment will produce within ourselves a qual
ity, a settled character, an acquired nature, which can
scarcely be expressed by any single word at our com
mand. Probation will not do, because it designates
rather the process by which the result is reached than
the result itself of the process. Indeed it does not
express so much. The process of our sanctifying, of
our actual righteousing, and final glorifying, is not one
of mere testing or proving or trying, but one of true
determining or making. It is the only possible process
in and by which we may be determined in and through
our own self-determination and be made by our own
becoming. At the same time we can be determined
or determine ourselves only in reaction with our actual
environment, and the result of a right reaction is a
right quaUty, character, or acquired nature of our own.
How may we better designate or describe that than as

138 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
a quaUty of triedness, provedness, and approvedness;
the quality of having stood and vsdthstood all, of having
met all the conditions, tests, and trials of life, and of
having so met them as to have rightly reacted with or
upon them, that is, to have been acted upon and
acted as we ought. This is something of the etymolog
ical meaning and actual force of the word used here
and generally to describe the true and right effect upon
and in us of the divine discipHne of life.
Now, says St. Paul, when we have thus endured,
and been thus disciplined and proved, or in the process
of being thus discipUned and proved, hope is vsTought
in us. Faith is of something in God, hope is of some
thing in ourselves. We have faith in what God is to
us and in us, we have hope in what we shall become
in God. It is only in the stress and trial of our own
actual becoming, it is only as after experience of our
own weakness we have experienced the power of God
in us to become, that we begin really to know what
hope is. When we have tested our resources and found
them sufficient for us, when we have again and again
proved our armour in actual battle and by repeated
victory, above all when we have acquired something
of the facility of use and the habit of victory, then do
we know as we cannot know prior to experience the
joy and assurance of a reasonable, religious, and holy
hope. And this hope maketh not ashamed; it cannot
be defeated or disappointed. Why? Not merely
because what God has promised He is able as well
as faithful and just to perform, but because we have

Status of the Christian Believer 139
placed our hope in that which in itself is as indestructible
as it is satisfying and sufficient, the one only thing in
which we shall not come to permanent spiritual and
moral as well as intellectual confusion.
More specifically, the Apostle says, Hope maketh
not ashamed because the love of God is shed abroad
in our hearts through the Holy Ghost which is given
unto us. This means primarily, of course, the love of
God Himself to us of which experience makes us
constantly more and more both sensible and receptive.
But, if this love of God is shed abroad in our hearts
by the Holy Ghost not only imparting but imparted,
we may be sure that it will be in us a love of God of
which we shall be the subjects as well as the objects,
a love with which we shall ourselves love as well as
be loved. For after all we are really blessed and saved
not so much in that which we have freely received as
in that which we as freely give. God for us and to us
is only in faith our salvation; He is in fact our salvation
only as God in us.

XI
SAINT PAUL'S TERMINOLOGY

Through whom also we have had our access by faith into this
grace wherein we stand. — Romans V. 2.
For through Him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the
Father. — Ephesians II. 18.
In whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our
faith in Him. — Ephesians HI. 12.
Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the
unrighteous, that He might bring us to God; being put to death in
the flesh, but quickened in the spirit. Forasmuch then as Christ
suffered in the flesh, arm ye yourselves also with the same mind; for
he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that ye no
longer should live in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of
God. — 1 Petee III. 18, and 4, 1, 2.
God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justi
fied by His blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God through
Him. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God
through the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we
be saved by His Ufe. — Romans V. 8, 10.

XI

SAINT PAUL'S TERMINOLOGY
I wish in this chapter to illustrate in some typical
instances St. Paul's understanding and use of words,
and especially of the words most characteristic of and
associated with his system of thought. I will select
several in the passage immediately before us in the
order of his own argument.
He speaks of our access to God through Jesus Christ :
Through whom we have had our access by faith into
this grace wherein we stand. He says elsewhere, too.
Through Him we both (Jew and Gentile) have our
access in one Spirit unto the Father. And again, In
whom we have boldness and access in confidence
through our faith in Him. The First Epistle of St.
Peter is very Pauline in its essential positions, and
there is one passage in it which I think throws light
upon the meaning of this access. The word means
literally a bringing to : Christ suffered for sin, the
righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us
to God. Now let us quite independently ask ourselves
what this bringing us to God must mean. For after
all the thing has to be interpreted by itself and nothing
143

144 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
else, or by anything else only as it helps us to under
stand itself. It certainly is not only a local bringing,
and on the other extreme it cannot ultimately mean
anything short of the most real spiritual or personal
bringing. In fact, distance from God is both consti
tuted and measured by sin, and conversely approach
to Him by hoUness. It is our sin that separates us
from Him and our hoUness that approximates us to
Him. We are approximated by becoming assimilated.
And Jesus Christ brought us to God, or reconciled us
to God, or at-one-d us with God, in the first instance,
by actually bringing us — our nature, our life, our
selves, in His person — into personal oneness with
God, and so aboUshing the enmity and annihilating
the distance between us. How did He do this? By
the personal act of His own human holiness. In that
act He, in Himself first, aboUshed sin in humanity,
and created and established holiness. He was not, as
I have frequently said, sinless or holy ju^t so, by neces
sary or simple fact of nature. His hoUness was the one
unbroken act and achievement of His life, the act by
which atonement, redemption, and resurrection, all in
one, were accomplished in Him for us, and by us in
Him. Neither did He accompUsh holiness — humanly,
or in the nature common to Him and us — of or by
Himself, but in the way in which alone human hoUness
is possible, by union through faith of God with Himself
and of Himself with God; and so He opened and
established a way of holiness not for Himself alone
but for all in Him. For we are partakers with Him if

Saint Paul's Terminology 145
we hold fast the beginning of our confidence (in Him)
steadfast unto the end.
More definitely, according to St. Peter, we were
brought to God in Christ by the act which he describes
as a being put to death in the fiesh and being quickened
in the spirit. That death in the flesh and Ufe in the
spirit is, as we shall more and more see, St. Paul's
formula for both what was accompHshed in our Lord
and is to be accompHshed in us if we are to know in
Him the full reality of our salvation. Whether St.
Peter here uses the words in the full sense of St. Paul
may be a question. He certainly seems to include that
sense when, a little farther on, he says : Forasmuch then
as Christ suffered in the flesh, arm ye also yourselves
with the same mind; for he that hath suffered in the
flesh hath ceased from sin; that ye no longer should
live the rest of your time in the flesh to the lusts of
men, but to the will of God. We best, I repeat again
and again, understand our Lord's death and resur
rection when we interpret it in terms of what needs to
take place in ourselves in the completing and com
pleteness of our stand and attitude against sin and for
God and His hoUness and righteousness.
When I say that our bringing to God by and in
Jesus Christ cannot stop short of the fulness of its
meaning, and that that fulness of meaning can be
nothing less than our complete approximation to God
by personal assimilation with Him, I am so far from
affirming that the word implies or expresses all this in
the three passages quoted from St. Paul himself, that

146 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the fact that it does not do so is just what I wish to
call attention to, as not only characteristic of him but
actually constituting the prominent point of his Gospel.
Our access to. God in the sense in which he means it is
immediate and complete, whereas the real access de
scribed above, our real bringing to God, cannot but be
in its very nature processive and progressive and
always in the future. The explanation of this feature
is the key to St. Paul's spiritual position. The inter
pretation which I would urge as best reconciling all
difficulties is as follows:
There is no discrepancy in the meaning of the thing
itself under discussion; the differences are all in our
changing relations to the thing. The thing itself, our
salvation, can have but one meaning ; it is nothing more
nor less nor other than oneness with God, freedom
from sin, resurrection from death. And all these can
be nowhere else for us than in ourselves; nothing else
than these in all their actuality in ourselves will be
re ipsa our salvation, that wliich God proposes to us
as the end of the Gospel. We are very far from seeing
these realized actually in their totality in any one of
ourselves; and yet we know perfectly that that is what
our salvation means with God and cannot but mean
for, as it ought to mean with, us. But, if we do not
see ourselves as yet so exalted, we do see One crowned
and glorified, and in that One we are bidden of God to
see ourselves. For He is God's promise and fulfilment
and revelation to us of us all. The end of God's
Gospel to us all and every one is all that Jesus Christ

Saint Paul's Terminology 147
Himself is in the actuaUzed completeness of our common
humanity. And He is to us the Way as well as the
Truth and the Life. He is the revelation to us not
only of the end but of the process or means of our
salvation. He was perfected as we need to be per
fected, and we can be perfected only as He was, —
through the action upon us of the world as it is and
the manner and character of our own reaction with
and upon and against it.
Now it was St. Paul's pecuUar mission and function
to represent the obligations and claims of faith. The
essence of spiritual action is to know and believe God.
When our Lord said, Man shaU not Hve by bread
alone, but by every word of God shall man Uve, — He
meant, Man shall not live by sense alone, by nature
alone, or himself alone, but by Him of whom all these
and all else are but signs and outward expressions.
Jesus Christ Himself differed from all others and all
things else in that He alone was the direct, immediate
Word Itself or Personal manifestation and expression
of God. To beUeve Him was in a peculiar and abso
lute sense to believe God. As St. John expressed it,
Not to believe Him was directly and absolutely to
make God a liar. Now with St. Paul as much as with
St. John, Jesus Christ was at once God's word and
reality of ourselves, our salvation, our etemal life.
What God so says — to faith is. A tme and right
faith will speak of Christ in terms of ourselves, and of
ourselves in terms of Christ. He is we and we are
He in the meaning and sight of God, and what we are

148 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
in the sight of God we ought to be in the eye of faith;
for what is faith but a taking God at His word, and
seeing and meaning as He sees and means ?
Of course, then, God treats us as being all that Christ
is for us and to us and is to be in us. And taking
ourselves as God takes us, our free and filial access to
Him does not wait until God shall make us, but is
deeply content to come to Him for what He will take
us, in Christ Jesus. It is this immediate access, this
present peace with God, this resting in and upon
Jesus Christ alone as our ground of acceptance and
of loving filial union and communion with God, that
constitutes what St. Paul describes as this state of
grace in which we stand.
Observe, then, what cannot be avoided, this duality
of point of view springing out of our differences of
relation to one and the same thing. When God or
our own faith represents us as in Christ, it is not only
Christ's righteousness that is reckoned or accounted
or imputed to us, but everything else that is Christ's
in His humanity. We are dead with Him, and risen,
ascended, glorified, completed. Not only so, but the
one term which theology reserves to express not what
we are in completion in Christ, but what we are in
process and in present incompleteness, is itself turned
against that use and falls in with the other terms, in
the opposite ranks. Theology says that to righteous or
justify must be used in tenses of completed action, but
to sanctify in those of incomplete or continuing action.
We were, or have been, or are, justified; but we are

Saint Paul's Terminology 149
being, or are in process of becoming, sanctified. But
how does St. Paul look at it ? He describes the Church
at Corinth — not at that time a specially advanced
body in actual spiritual attainment — as those who
had been and were sanctified in Christ Jesus and so
were called to be or to become holy. That is to say,
they were called or treated as being holy in Christ
Jesus, and at the same time were recognized as not
being and called to become holy in themselves. This
iUustrates what I have said about its being a matter
not of difference in the thing but only of our relation
to the thing. When our relation to Christ is real and
complete we shall be holy; as our relation to Christ is
real but not complete, we are becoming holy or are
being sanctified; as our relation to Christ is viewed as
one of faith only, and apart as yet from any actual
sanctification through Him, His holiness, as His right
eousness and everything else that is humanly His, is
accounted or reckoned or treated as ours and conse
quently spoken of as being completed. The more
modem complete distinction of justification and sanc
tification is therefore not as definitely scriptural as
may be thought. At the same time it is useful if not
necessary, and only needs to be guarded and under
stood. The different points of view represented by
the terms cannot but be kept in mind, and as a matter
of fact run all the way through the argument imme
diately before us.
The love of God which is the original source and
cause of aU our salvation or blessedness, as it constitutes

150 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
our present peace with God, so may be reUed upon for
our hope of future glory. The love of God antedates
not only, of course, any response to it, but any desert
or desire of it on our part. If when we were ungodly
and unrighteous, helpless subjects and slaves of our
sins, God so loved us as, altogether of Himself, for the
praise of the glory of His own grace, apart from any
merit or answer or anticipation of love on our part —
nay, while we were yet enemies to Him — if then and
thus God so loved us as, at such a price or cost, to
provide for us so great a salvation ; if upon the ground
of the salvation thus provided, and our acceptance of
it with a faith answering to His grace. He receives us
into a state or status of complete filial relationship
with Himself and takes no account of anything within
us save our need and our will to be saved, — if all this
be so, can or will He fail us in what remains, the task
and attainment of our actual salvation? The distinc
tion is kept up between our salvation in faith and our
salvation in fact, and the argument is that if God so
gave Christ objectively to our faith He may be trusted
to give Him subjectively in our Hves. Whether objec
tively, however, to our faith or subjectively in our
Hves, Christ is always one and the same thing — our
own divine holiness, righteousness, Hfe. We do not
believe in Him at all if we do not believe in Him as
all these not only for us but in us. Justification and
sanctification are not two things in themselves, they are
one and the same thing viewed in different relations
on our part to it. The thing is Jesus Christ our

Saint Paul's Terminology 151
Righteousness, or God our Righteousness in the person
of Jesus Christ. The different relations to it on our
part are, (1) that righteousness apprehended and
appropriated to ourselves by faith, in all its complete
ness; upon which God accepts and treats us as actually
possessing it; this is what is meant by our justification,
or our status of present peace and fellowship with God;
and (2) that righteousness, which is Jesus Christ Him
self, through the constant association and participation
of faith with Him, gradually but actually imparting
Himself to us so as to become to us not only a right
eousness in which we beUeve but one which at least
we begin to possess; this is what in process or progress
we call our sanctification, and when it is completed it
will be our glory or glorification.
Seeing, says St. Paul, that prior to anything whatever
on our part pro, and even despite everything on our
part contra, God has done for us all that was involved
in the death of Jesus Christ, how much more having
been thus justified in His blood shall we be saved
through Him from wrath? Or, to put it in another
way. If when we were enemies we were reconciled to
God by the death of His Son, how much more having
been thus reconciled shall we be saved in His Ufe?
In these two ways of stating it we have, first, the object-
tive relation to Christ and consequent status with God
expressed in the terms justified and reconciled. That
means that God accepts Christ as our righteousness
or as our reconcihation or at-one-ment with Himself,
and consequently accepts us in the person of Christ

152 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
as at one with Him and as righteous. In this God
accepts Christ as what He actually and Uterally is,
humanity actually at one with Himself and actually
righteous; and He accepts us as in faith and hope
wholly at one with Him and become righteous, because
through that faith and hope we are potentially and
shall be actually so.
We are justified in the blood of Christ, or reconciled
through His death; the phrases are identical in meaning.
We shall have much more to say about our Lord's
death or blood; it is enough to say that the meaning
here is that in Christ's death our sins are dead. The
death He died was a death to sin, and the life He Hves
is a life to God. It could not be said that in His
death our sins are dead, if there were not sufficient
grounds for our reckoning ourselves too as dead to
sin in His death and as alive to God in His life. Neither
could we in faith so account ourselves if in fact there
were not a way in which His death may actually
become our death and His Hfe our Ufe. This way we
have to learn more of as we proceed.
Our subjective relation to Christ, in the second place,
or the consequence within ourselves of our objective
relation to Him, is, in St. Paul's two ways of stating it,
the being saved through Him from wrath, or the being
saved in His life. These two phrases again are synony
mous or equivalent. To be saved from wrath means
with St. Paul, as I hope more and more clearly to show,
to be saved from what may as truly be described as
the natural consequences of sin as they are, from the

Saint Paul's Terminology 153
spiritual and moral point of view, represented by him
as the judicial or penal consequences of sin. To say
that the wages of sin is death, or that the soul that
sinneth it shall die, or to speak of the necessary sequence
of sin and death, as cause and consequence, as a law
— may be equally truly the language of scientific fact
and the expression of divine action. Of course some
thing depends upon what we shall see to be St. Paul's
meaning of death. Read again the latter half of the
first chapter of this Epistle to the Romans, to see that
the penalty of sin is sin itself; its curse is that it breeds
more and more of itseff, and the death and hell to
which it is condemned are nothing but itself multiplied
and left to itself. Consequently I say that to be saved
from wrath is identical with being saved in Christ's
life; it is to be saved from the death which sin is in
itseff, in the life which as death to sin is the death of
death itself also.

XII
THE FIRST AND THE LAST
ADAM

As through one man sin entered into the world, and death through
sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned: — for until
the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed where there is
no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even
over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's trans
gression who is a figure of Him that was to come.
So then as through one trespass the Judgment came unto all men
to condemnation; even so through one act of righteousness the free
gift came unto all men to justification of life. For as through the
one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through
the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous. And
the law came in beside, that the trespass might abound; but where
sin abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly: that, as sin
reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness
unto etemal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. — Romans V. 12-14
and 18-21.

XII

THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM
It is not essential to St. Paul's truth or argument
what he thought or what we may think of his iUustra-
tions as historical facts. All we want of them is what
of pertinence or of help there may be in them as iUus-
trations. His object is not to prove them, but some
thing by means of them. It is the something that
concerns us, and not the symbol or parable or example
used to help us understand it. We ourselves within
a generation have undergone revolutions in our tradi
tional beliefs of historical truth and natural fact which
we once thought part of our reUgious faith, and have
made for ourselves the oft-repeated discovery that the
removal of the things that are shaken does not involve
the change of those that may not be shaken. It is
impossible but that St. Paul had his traditional beUefs
that were subject to change, and that he used them in
expression and illustration of the things that cannot
change. I will endeavour to confine myseff to what of
permanent and unchangeable truth is expressed for us
in the comparison and contrast of the two Adams.
The matter now thoroughly brought before us is our
universal interest in an act of Jesus Christ, and. our
157

158 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
universal relation to the person of Jesus Christ. The
act was the Hfelong and death-completed one of His
conquest of sin, or, viewed on its positive side, the
resurrection-completed one of His victory of holiness
and life. The question is, how can that act of His
be the act of us all? The other question involved in
this is one as to His person. How is it not only that
that act of His is the act of us all, but that He Himself
is one with us all; so that all and each of us can speak
or think of our real or true self only in terms of Him;
and that, not merely as the example of what we ought
to be, or the author of our right being, but as in a
deeper and more intimate and real sense our own
Hving, present, better, or best selves ? How in a word
is Christ so universal and etemal in us all?
This is a truth or fact of experience in itseff, and
apart from any resemblance or analogy to be found
elsewhere in our experience; but there is a resemblance
or analogy that may be of help to us in apprehending
or in explaining it. We are speaking of where our
holiness and our life come from, and how they come,
— let us ask ourselves where our sin comes from and
our death, or how they come. Let us observe here, by
the way, that the death and Hfe spoken of, as vital to
the argument, are not natural but spiritual death and
Hfe. The death is the death that sin is, and the Hfe
is that which holiness is. St. Paul describes us as dead
or aUve according to these, and altogether indepen
dently of the physical facts. Now, then, our sin and
our death are not individual facts; they do not originate

The First and the Last Adam 159
with ourselves but are wholly prior to ourselves.
Whence then and how do they come? Sin and death
are not individual but race facts. AU humanity has
sinned, and sins, and dies as one man. If we caU this
act or condition a fall, because not sin and death but
hoUness and Ufe are its true law and Hberty and blessed
ness, then humanity feU or is faUen as one man. Let
us call that one Adam, Man, Humanity. Then we
say that, in Adam aU fell, aU sin, all die. It makes
no difference whether we say that his act was the act
of all, or that, because the act of aU was in fact one,
we merely express that fact by representing it as his
act. The truth is simply this, that our sin in its origin
and in its universaUty is not ours but Adam's, Man's,
Humanity's sin, and we are only recipients and partici
pants of it.
It would remove several difficulties and not at all
alter the truth or force of St. Paul's argument if, in
Rom. V. 12, we should interpret the Apostle as saying,
not that as a matter of fact through one man sin entered
into the world, but that as through one man sin entered
into the world. And when he adds, and death through
sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all
sinned, — I ask, not as yet how much St. Paul meant
to say, but only how much of truth there was in what
he said. He continues. For until the law sin was in
the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no
law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until
Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the
likeness of Adam's transgression. Let us put all this

160 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
to ourselves in a different way. Since Adam, that is,
since man was man, sin has been in the world. And
sin has been universal, reigning in its consequences
or in its ravages even over those who had not them
selves, or personally, committed sin. For, besides that
sin in a sense reigns in us even prior to our own sinning,
as in the case of the very young, many who actually
sin do not really sin, or are not sinners in their acts.
The paradox can be explained only by the old distinc
tion between the matter and the form of a thing. St.
Paul expresses it as follows: sin exists even when and
where there is no law; that is, the matter of sin. But
sin is not imputed when there is no law; that is, the
form of sin. It is the law only that gives form to sin,
or that makes sin sinful. We might say that sin is
not sinful until it is informed, until it knows or under
stands itseff; to him who knows it to be sinful it is
sinful; to him who innocently does not, it is not sinful.
But materially, or in the matter of it, it is the same in
both cases; and the natural consequences, what we
might call the natural penalties, follow all the same
from both. When St. Paul says that, Death reigned
from Adam until Moses (that is, even prior to the
giving of the law), even over them that had not sinned
after the likeness of Adam's transgression, it is not
necessary that he should mean physical death. Sup
pose we take death to mean in this connection nothing
that is mere law of nature but only what is consequence
of sin. As a matter of fact, do not the effects of sin
reign universally, even over those who are innocent of

The First and the Last Adam 161
it, or who are ignorant of it and therefore are not
formally sinful? As I have said elsewhere, I think it
would very much Hghten up St. Paul's whole teaching
and thought if we assumed that generally he does not
mean by death the physical change, but only the spirit
ual quaUty and consequences wliich sin has attached
to it. What else does he mean when he says that the
sting of death is sin. Extract the sting by annulling
the sin, and death ceases to be death in the obnoxious
sense. It becomes a bUssful and blessed change, a
birth or an awakening to something higher and better.
Now it is the office of the law to inform sin in both
ways or senses. It makes sin sinful in the very act of
imparting to the sinner the knowledge of its sinfulness.
When he knows the law — whether in nature or in
himself or in the pubUc conscience or as revealed —
and recognizes its sanctions and obligations, then he
knows sin as sin and becomes not only materially but
formally or really sinful. I say really, because sin as
such is not a matter only of the will or the person, but
it is of the will or person only in relation to a known
and felt standard of being as well as of action. That
sin is not imputed when there is no law means both
that the one committing it cannot take cognizance of
it as sin when there is nothing that reveals it to him
as such, and also that God does not regard it as sin
in the absence of the knowledge or consciousness that
makes it such. But still, to repeat what has been said,
the act in itself or in the matter of it is sinful even
though it be not the sin of the man, and its effects are

162 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
largely the effects of sin, and so it is a fact that sin
reigns through death even over those who have not
been guilty of sin of their own.
Let us then take with us just so much of St. Paul's
simile as we can see and feel the truth of ourselves.
There is a transgression or a fall of which we may
say, if not that the fall of one has been the fall of all,
yet certainly the fall of all is as the fall of one. One
common spiritual and moral catastrophe involves us
all, so that not only without exception do the innocent
share with the guilty the actual effects and penalties
of sin, but sooner or later all share the sin and the
guilt itself. We ought not to carry the simile further
than it actually goes, and we need not carry it further
than we are able to see that it goes. Neither do I
mean to say that in the Ught of later thought or science
the facts and analogies of man's moral condition might
not be differently or better expressed. But the thing
had to be expressed once for all in a particular time,
and it is useless to object that it was viewed and ex
pressed from some of the points of view and through
some of the transient aspects of the time.
There are contrasts as well as comparisons between
the ways in which we stand related to the act and
person of Adam on the one side and those of Christ
on the other. It would make our treatment unneces
sarily difficult if I should attempt to follow St. Paul
through the subtleties and intricacies of one of his
obscurest passages. I will give only the conclusions
which we can all see to be both true in themselves and

The First and the Last Adam 163
necessary to the Apostle's argument. The great all-
inclusive first fact to be brought out by the comparison
is this : All that can be compressed and expressed in that
one term The Fall of Man is potentially reversed by
the more that is meant by the Resurrection or Redemp
tion of Man. By the fall let us understand only what
we loiow to be spiritual matter of fact within our own
experience: our universal subjection to the power and
penalties of sin; death viewed not as an event and a
beneficent event in the necessary order of nature, but
as the sting and the curse belonging not to the thing
in itself but to what sin has made it, just as what we
call the flesh has come to mean not the natural thing
pertaining to us as men, but the sin-affected and per
verted thing into which the reign of sin in it converts
it. Besides these primary features of the fall there are,
of course, other vital aspects, but these are the ones
which enter most visibly and tangibly into even our
sensuous experience. Now just what the fall has been
as a general or universal act and fact — the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ is in reversal. All that
happened to man as Adam or to man in Adam is
reversed or undone by what man has done as Christ
or by what man has done in Christ. The Resurrection
or Redemption means: the power of sin over us de
stroyed; the entail of death broken; the bondage of
sin in the flesh replaced by the freedom of the spirit
of life in Christ Jesus. This general result of the
work of Jesus Christ as the author and representative
of human redemption, as Adam stands for the fall, is

164 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
more elaborately stated in the double aspect we have
been considering.
As the fall was as a single act and our human condi
tion in consequence of it is a single universal fact, so
our redemption by Christ and our altered condition in
Christ are to be viewed as a single act and fact. The
act in Adam brought us into and left us in a state of
spiritual, moral, and natural condemnation. Ungod
liness and unrighteousness reigned supreme, and the
wrath of God was revealed as a just judgment upon
them in the self-inflicted penalties they brought upon
themselves. The law came in with aU its awful
sanctions and demands, not with the expectation or
the effect of working a cure, but only more and more
to reveal and intensify the situation and so to prepare
for the one only effectual remedy and help. That
remedy came in Jesus Christ, and was manifested and
proclaimed as including in Him in all its operation and
consequences all who were involved in Adam's fall.
As this latter constituted in itself a state of universal
condemnation, so its reversal begins with a proclama
tion and status of universal justification or acquittal,
based upon the sole necessary condition of a proper
sense of our sin and death in Adam and of our holiness,
righteousness, and life in Jesus Christ. The proper
sense of the one is repentance and of the other is
faith. These two spiritual attitudes, by the grace of
God working through them, wiU of themselves work
in us the death to sin and the Ufe to God which is the
divine salvation in Christ. But the beginning is an

The First and the Last Adam 165
absolute acceptance with God and an invitation to
appropriate to ourselves and to treat as our own all
that is Christ's or that is Christ Himself, on the ground
that so making it our own in faith and hope will be to
make it our own in reality and fact. How it will do
so will involve fuller explanation which is only touched
upon here, but which will be the subject of the following
chapters. The point touched upon here and to be hereafter
further developed is this: Our relation is not merely to
the act of Christ but to the person of Christ. Whether
or how much that may be the case with Adam also is
another matter; we are certainly not now in personal
relation with a personal Adam in anything like the
same way in which we are so vwth a Hving and personal
Christ. We might make out a case in order to push
the analogy as far as it can be made to go, but surely
the Apostle's essential argument does not depend upon
any such forcing. There is, however, a generic if
there is not an individual Adam. We are all in the
race, and are what the race is, as an individual. We
have participated in all its acts, have shared all its
fortunes, and are involved in all its conditions. It is
the race with all its history behind it that lives in us
in most that we are and acts in us through most that
we do. Our relation to Christ is certainly analogous,
however far it may be from being identical. We are
in Adam naturally and therefore not necessarily per
sonally; we are in Christ spiritually and therefore
personally. We share what we are in Adam quite

166 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
independently of any consciousness or will on our
part in doing so; we can share — actu — anything that
is Christ or Christ's only through an act of our own of
consciousness and will. We must know Christ Him
self in order to become what Christ is, it is not neces
sary to know Adam personally in order to be infallibly
all that Adam is. In a word, Christ must needs be to
us and in us a living Person; Adam is in us as an
impersonal nature. Something of this sort, though
just precisely what is hard to define, is contained in
St. Paul's distinction: The first man Adam was made
a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening
spirit. The soul is primarily an impersonal principle,
although it may as in man become personal. So we
speak, at least in Greek, of the vegetable or the animal
soul, as well as of the rational or human soul. But
the spirit is essentially and necessarily personal.
Christ's act, therefore, of resurrection or redemption,
the act by which humanity in His person was freed
through freeing itself from sin and was raised in
raising itself out of death, — that act could be accounted
the act of us all only because of our relation not only
to it but to Him. Because we were potentially in Him
in His resurrection and redemption, in His human
personal attainment of righteousness and Hfe, and
because He is in us in our entering into His redemption
and resurrection, into the likeness of His death and
the power of His resurrection, therefore His initial act
could be, accounted as our act, even as our final act of
perfect oneness with Him will be accounted by us as

The First and the Last Adam 167
His act. The one act of righteousness was imputed
to all men for righteousness, because the one man's
obedience or righteousness was to make the many men
righteous. The way in which our Lord's obedience is spoken
of here and elsewhere brings out the fact that it was as
the author and finisher of our own righteousness that
He redeemed and saved us, and not by undergoing or
performing anything whatsoever in the stead of us or
as a mere substitute for us.

XIII
THE CHRISTIAN IN CHRIST

What shall we say then ? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may
abound ? God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer
live therein ? Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into
Christ Jesus were baptized into His death ? We were biiried there
fore with Him through baptism into death: that like as Christ was
raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also
might walk in newness of hfe. For if we have become united with
Him by the likeness of His death, we shall be also by the likeness of
His resurrection; knowing this, that our old man was crucified with
Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no
longer be in bondage to sin; for he that hath died is justified from
sin. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live
with Him; knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no
more; death no more hath dominion over Him. For the death that
He died. He died unto sin once: but the Ufe that He liveth. He liveth
unto God. Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin
but alive unto God in Christ Jesus. — Romans VI. 1-11.

xm
THE CHRISTIAN IN CHRIST
Our relation to the act of Christ as our redemption
has been practically resolved into our relation to the
person of Christ as our actual redeemer. It is He in
us, and not merely an act of His once performed for us,
that is our real salvation. It is true that in consequence
of that act and through our faith in it we are in a
status or state of grace which is the condition of salva
tion ; but the condition of salvation is not yet salvation.
It is on'y as the act of Christ becomes not only imputa-
tively our act through faith, but also really our act
through participation, that we are actually saved.
That Christ died for us is everything to us if it means
our dying with Him; it is less than nothing at all to
us if His death and ours. He and we, are not, or are
not to be, so conjoined. To stop between the What
Christ did for us and the What Christ is in us is a
fatal halt. The co-crucifixion, co-resurrection, and
co-eternal -Ufe, is just the gist of the matter of our
salvation. Now how are we to apprehend this con
junction of Christ and ourselves, and — what is the
focal point of the relation — how are we so to conjoin
His death and resurrection with our own as that He
171

172 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
shall be to us, not only a salvation provided for us as
the object of our faith, but a salvation effected in us
as the attainment and end of our faith ? In order that
we may the better reaUze the meaning of our part not
only in Christ Himself but in His distinctive act of
death and resurrection, it will be necessary to reflect
a Uttle further upon St. Paul's interpretation of our
Lord's death and resurrection in themselves first.
The death that He Himself died, what was it? It
was, the Apostle repUes, a death to sin. Now what
would be on our own part, and what was actually on
Christ's part, the death to sin? It could not be a
mere physical fact; it must be a moral, spiritual, per
sonal act. I will endeavour to analyze and construe
that act in terms used by St.Paul himseff and by St.
Peter after him. St. Peter, we will remember, speaks
of Christ's having brought us to God through His own
death in the flesh and life in the spirit. Now the more
we think of it the more we know that we were not
brought to God by the mere fact of Christ's having
been put to death in the body and having Uved again
after the body, or in a resurrection body. But St.
Peter himself makes it plain for us by going on to say :
Christ then having suffered (or died) in the flesh, do
you arm yourself with the same mind. To go no
further, it is the mind of our Lord and not merely the
bodily expression of its acts or sufferings or achieve
ments that is the main point and the essential thing.
Moreover, and what is of more consequence still, the
mind of Christ in the matter is that which ought to be

The Christian in Christ 173
our own, it is the universal right mind of humanity
under the conditions in which He is its divine repre
sentative. What that right mind is the Apostle goes
on further to specify: For he who hath suffered — or,
that suffering carried to its limit, hath died — in the
flesh hath ceased from sin. Christ has reached that
limit of suffering in the flesh or for sin, and humanity
in His person has ceased from sin. The thing to be
further explicated is the meaning and character of that
suffering, and consequently of that death. Jesus Christ
was one with us in our nature, our conditions, our
temptations, with the sole difference from us of having
been sinless in them all; which He could be only
through a human victory over sin in them. The sin
lessness or holiness of Jesus could no more than ours
be a painless experience. Given human nature, human
condition, and human temptation, and the possibiUties,
the solicitations, the deceptions of sin, the toil, the
difficulties, the pains of holiness are not to be met and
overcome without suffering. The Scriptures do not
only directly state that our Lord's immunity from sin
was a painful victory over sin, that He was perfected
by means of the things He suffered and through suc
cessful suffering of the things, — they no less distinctly
testify that there was that in Him which He needed to
deny, to mortify, to crucify; He had to resist unto
blood striving against sin; He had to call as we with
strong crying and tears upon Him that was able to
save from death, and was heard for His godly faith
and fear; He needed to be obedient unto the bitter

174 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
limit o" death, and that the most painful and shameful
death of the cross. More expUcitly than in all these
details of His human subjection to the human condi
tions of holiness and life, we have here in the passage
now before us the comprehensive statement that
Christ's death was the crucifixion of that old man of
sin whose death in Him and in us is alike the condition
and the very act and fact of all human salvation and
life. It will appear impossible to object to the existence
of these necessities in our Lord Himself as in all us
whose common humanity He shared, when we remem
ber not alone that He did thus share our humanity, but
no less that this subjection to outward and inward
conditions and circumstances and possibilities of sin
are as necessary to the existence of human holiness
and righteousness as they are the conditions and causes
of human sinfulness and unrighteousness. Just as
truly as the universal existence as well as possibility
of sin, the strength of its allurement and the power of
its hold upon us, is the explanation and account of our
human sinfulness, just so truly is it the fact that our
Lord's own human subjection to all these circumstances
of sin and His triumph in them and over them is the
only conceivable and the only possible explanation or
account of human holiness. If our holiness must be
alone our own victory over our conditions as to sin, as
our sin is a yielding to and being subjected by those
conditions, then Christ's act, in order to become our
act, must have been just the reverse and the reversal
of what our own had been: it was a not yielding to or

The Christian in Christ 175
being subjected by our conditions as to sin, a victory
in and over those conditions.
Going then only so far as St. Peter's words, we might
say that Christ so suffered in our flesh of sin — the
flesh in which we all are sinful — and so suffered for
or because of sin in the flesh, as to have overcome and
destroyed sin and been Himself sinless in the flesh.
The flesh which is called sinful not only because it is
the place of the possibiUty of sin, but because of its
actual subjection to sin in all us the rest, was actually
without sin in Him because in it He broke that sub
jection and aboUshed that sin. He did this, moreover,
precisely as we must do it, not by the will of the flesh
or by the will of man — not even by the will of His
own matchless manhood — but by that grace which
is the power of God working in us through faith to the
overcoming of sin in the production of holiness. But
St. Paul's choice of a word carries us further than
St. Peter's. According to the latter, to have died in
the flesh, as he means it, is to have ceased from sin.
We only conjecture when we undertake to say how
much further his meaning goes than simply that of
physical death. I have carried it the whole length
of a spiritual death to sin in the flesh. St. Paul's
language is less open to uncertainty. He says that
he who has died is justified from sin. The death
which is not merely a cessation from sin but a jus
tification from sin must with much more expHcit or
expressed necessity be a distinctively spiritual and
moral death. The ground and meaning of that ne-

176 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
cessity it will be profitable to analyze and endeavour
to understand.
It is impossible that we should be justified except
for something in ourselves which can be in us a ground
of our justification, or at least can justify our justifica
tion. The freest justification that even St. Paul can
preach is not an absolutely gratuitous one, for it is a
justification of us upon the ground of our faith — which
means, taking it negatively as well as positively, upon
the ground of our repentance and faith. When I say
that God cannot do a thing I mean simply that He
cannot contradict Himself; He cannot, for example, do
what is absurd or immoral. One who is insensible of
either sin or hoUness is incapable of justification; one
who through the law knows what they are but neither
hates the one nor loves the other is in the nature of the
thing morally unjustifiable, and therefore cannot by
God be justified. He who however sinful comes to
anything whatever of a sense and hatred of his sin
and the beginning of a love and want of hoHness can
be justified, because he has arrived at the point of
becoming, not worthy or deserving, but susceptible of
it. Now whether it be the initial justification with
which God invests even our beginning of repentance
and faith, or invests us prior to these even upon con
dition of them later; or whether it be the great final
justification when God shall recognize all Christ in us
and ourselves all in Christ, — one thing from beginning
to end is the inseparable condition and ground of our
justification, and that is our own personal attitude or

The Christian in Christ 177
posture towards sin and hoUness. From the beginning
it must mean and in the end it must be that which in
its totaUty and completion cannot be expressed other
wise than as a death to sin and a new life in and to
God. There is the sin and the sinner in every one of
us to be resisted unto extinction, to be denied, mortified,
crucified. There is, potential if not actual, in every
one of us a spirit, a nature, a Hfe of hoHness, a personal
sonship to God, which needs to be quickened, con
firmed, and brought to perfection. There is no justi
fication whatsoever, either possible or promised, wliich
is any more separable than sanctification itseff from
the express condition of that repentance and faith
which mean from the beginning the death to sin and
the life to God. The definition of any thing whatever
is that which defines it not in its process or progress
alone but in its end or completeness. The death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ is the very definition of
justification, because it is not only the human condition
of all justification brought to perfection — that is, re
pentance and faith carried to their Hmit — but it is the
divine investiture of that condition manifested in a
reaUzed righteousness and life. He that has reaUzed
his own death and resurrection in Jesus Christ, in the
true meaning of it for himseff, though it be as yet only
in faith, is justified in his faith, is as though already
dead to sin and aUve to God. He that shall reaUze
his own death and resurrection in Jesus, in the fuUer
and truer sense of having brought it to the actual
reaUty of an accompHshed and finished death to sin

178 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
and Hfe to God, will know the greater truth and joy
of a higher justification; but the merit and the glory
of the righteousness in fact will be as much Christ's
and not his own as those of the righteousness in faith.
In either sense, however, whether in faith only or in
fact also, he who has died with Christ, who has died
Christ's death, has in the meaning and measure of
that act not only ceased naturally from sin but been
justified morally and at the bar of etemal justice from
his sin.
St. Paul had fully reaUzed the danger, then and
always, inseparable from the conception of an objective
salvation. If our salvation is complete in Christ, and
we are already upon right terms with God upon faith
in that, then there is a natural disposition in us to rest
in that as though it were all. If we are saved we are
saved, and we have only to go on beUeving that we are
saved, and continuing otherwise as we are. The
general answer to all such mental fallacies is the
insistence upon an obUteration of anything more than
a mere logical distinction between a grace of God
which is objective to and for us and one which is
subjective in and with us. There is no Christ for us
really separate or separable from Christ in us. Baptism
into His death and resurrection for us is nothing except
as it is also and equaUy baptism into our own dying
and rising with Him. We must not conceive of the
possibility of any real difference in the things, however
it may be possible or even necessary to separate them
in thought. The root principle of it all is the fact that

The Christian in Christ 179
nothing can be really ours, spiritually or personally,
that is not ourselves not only potentia but actu. Our
virtue, righteousness, life, salvation, blessedness, cannot
be things without us; they are determined and con
stituted solely by ourselves and our personal activities.
Not my righteousness but Christ's must mean insep
arably and identically Christ's and mine. Not I but
Christ in me, is really — I only in Christ; for Christ is
not another instead of myself, but is only my true,
divine, selfhood and self. It is impossible to under
stand St. Paul without entering into his conception of
Christ as our universal spiritual humanity, ourselves
in God, as Adam is ourselves in nature. The first man
is of the earth, earthy; the second man is of heaven.
As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall
also bear the image of the heavenly. For that which
is bom of the flesh is flesh, and that which is bom of
the spirit is spirit. As we are one with Adam, and
what he is, by fact of nature; so by God's grace, which
means through God and His activity in us, are we one
with Christ, and what He is, by act of spirit.
The essential matter is of course our relation to
Christ in His death and resurrection, but we shall
certainly understand this better by considering what
Baptism has to do vidth it. And it may be worth our
observation, in passing, that St. Paul makes as Uttle
distinction between baptism and the reaUty it stands
for as He does between our righteousness as Christ's
and as our own. When Luther made Christianity to
consist in the reaUzing our baptism, it has occurred to

180 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
me that his meaning might be, that if we could really
take our baptism as being actually both for us and in
us all that it means, we should know and possess for
and in ourselves all that Christ is as our righteousness
and our salvation. Baptism doth represent unto us
our profession, which is — to be made like unto our
Saviour Christ; that as He died and rose again for us,
so should we who are baptized die from sin and rise
again unto righteousness. Baptism does indeed repre
sent unto us our profession, but it does much more
than represent, according to St. Paul. It is God's
own anointing and endowing us with the grace of that
profession; it is our birth from Himself with the Spirit
and into the life of that profession; it is consequently a
burial with Christ not only into His death but into a
fellowship with His dying, and a resurrection with
Christ not only into the fact of His life but into the
power of His living.
It is surely the least that we can say of the two
sacraments of His life ordained by Christ Himseff, that
they were instituted to be conveyances to us of Himself.
This they are to us, to begin with, as expressions to us
of what He is to us and what we are in Him; represen
tations to us of our Christian profession. They are
the contents of our faith, moulds as it were, into which
our faith is to be cast and to be given shape. They
are God's specific and distinctive Word to us of Him
self in us and ourselves in Him in Christ. But let us
remember what a Word of God is. It not only means,
but in itself and to faith is, what it means. If the

The Christian in Christ 181
sacraments are direct Words of God, what they mean
they are, and what they are in themselves they ought
to be to our faith and to ourselves. It is only the
proper response of faith to God's direct Word to say,
that baptism not only means but is what it means; that
in it we are not only declared but made members of
Christ and children of God. It is only a similar
language of faith to say, that the Lord's Supper is to
us, not only a sign of something, but the thing itself
of which it is the sign; that what we offer to God in it
and receive from God in it is not a memory or memorial
only of Christ, but is Christ Himseff alike the object
of our faith and the substance of our Ufe. As a word
of man cannot do more than represent, a word of God
on the contrary cannot do less than be. That which
from any one else could not be more than figurative,
from God cannot be only figurative. Suppose that all
Christians could and would in the truest and best sense
simply and sincerely take God at His word; that their
faith could take His gifts as being what His word
makes them. Suppose that every baptized man should
know himself to be, and by the power of God in Him
through that knowledge truly undertake to be, one
with Christ Himself in all the realify of His divine
Sonship, what would be the consequence ? Would not
all the truth now too much lost to the Christian Church,
and so much sought after outside her pale, be at once
restored to her? Men want a Gospel which is indeed
the power of God unto salvation. They need indeed
to know first what salvation means, but that rightly

182 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
understood, they have a right to an experience of
salvation which will leave them in no doubt that it is
from God. Why have they not that assurance in the
Church? Is it not because we do not believe God?
Not that we do not believe in God, but that professing
to believe in Him we do not believe Him. If Christ
means anything at all to us as the Word of God, He
means God in us as in Him, He means God our own
actual righteousness and our own actual Ufe. If
Baptism means anything at all to us, it means the
oneness of Christ with ourselves and of ourselves with
Christ. It means the reaUty of Christ's death as ours
and of ours in Him, the reaUty of His resurrection as
ours and of ours with Him. If it means all this, how
much of all this is it with us and in us? Why the
immense difference and distance between what our
Christianity is and what Christianify means?. Is not
the fault all, not in what God is to us in Christ, but in
the response which our faith makes to Him in Christ?
Now if we are to begin to take God at His Word —
that is to say, to beUeve in Christ in ourselves and
ourselves in Christ — what are we to take as the exact
content of God's word, as the substance of what is
ours to be and to do in Christ? Surely not what any
one may individually and of himself conceive Chris
tianity to be, but what our Lord Himself has given
and gives in the sacraments as divine conveyances to
us of Himself and His life. This is what St. Paul sets
us the example of doing. Baptism into Christ not only
means to him but is to him that personal incorporation

The Christian in Christ 183
into Christ which actually makes what is Christ's his
own, which is in him too the very power and reaUty
of Christ's death to sin and Christ's resurrection from
the dead. Let one make this entire sixth chapter his
own, not merely to appreciate the cleamess of its
theoretical conception of the real and vital relation of
the Christian to Christ, but to feel and share its practical
sense and actual experience of the Hving results of
that relation in his own quickened and risen seff.

XIV
NOT UNDER THE LAW BUT
UNDER GRACE

Are ye ignorant, brethren, how that the law hath dominion over a
man so long as he liveth ? For the woman that hath a husband is
bound by law to the husband while he hveth; but if the husband die
she is discharged from the law of the husband. So then if, while the
husband hveth, she be joined to another man, she shall be called an
adulteress, but if the husband die, she is free from the law, so that she
is no adulteress, though she be joined to another man. Wherefore,
my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law through the body of
Christ; that ye should be joined to another, even to Him who was
raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God. For
when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were through
the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But
now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that where
in we were holden; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not
in oldness of the letter. — Romans VH, 1-6,

XIV
NOT UNDER THE LAW BUT UNDER
GRACE
Is it possiblcj and if so, how is it possible for a moral
being not to be under the law ? How can it be possible
for one like ourselves to be released from the natural
personal obligation of being his own true, right self?
And the law to a man is nothing but the expression to
him of that obUgation, — of what he ought to be and
the moral necessity upon him of being it. There is an
additional feature or element in the law; it not only
declares to us what we ought to be, and impresses upon
us the moral obligation of being it, but it emphasizes
the fact that the being it must be our own. It is our
own conscious, voluntary, and actual being ourselves
that constitutes us persons and that attaches any value
or worth to our being such. There is no better place
to insist upon this highest and purest conception of
law than in the part of the Apostle's argument that
Ues just before us. Elsewhere and in certain connec
tions St. Paul speaks of the law in lower and more
partial senses, as Jewish, ritual, or ceremonial, formal
or literal, etc. ; but here it is the law pure, essential, and
universal. And indeed with St. Paul there is but one
187

188 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
law — the law of God, the law of things, the law of
persons. There are many more or less partial aspects,
expressions, forms of law — mental, ritual, moral
forms — but at bottom or in themselves all these
mean one and the same thing, and it is only our misuse
or perversions of them that rob them of the deeper
understanding and higher respect that properly belong
to them. There is no single aspect, or form, or even
letter of law that our Lord Himself and St. Paul after
him did not reverence, for there is not one wliich
does not in itself mean what all law means — right
being, right doing, rightness, righteousness. But here
at least, I repeat, we shall see that St. Paul cuts himseff
loose from all partial forms of law, and has in his mind
only the universal, the essential. How then is it pos
sible that we shall be released from the obligation
which every moral being cannot but be under to his
own law, the law of his own true and right seff?
Let us remember that it is that very law — and the
more in proportion as it is conceived by us in its highest
purity and truth, and in the inviolabiUty of its absolute
claim upon us — that is the author of our curse and
the minister of our death. It and it alone is the
instrument of our judgment, condemnation, sentence,
execution. That which in itself, if fulfiUed, is the most
inherently essential condition and constituent of Ufe,
cannot but be, if unfulfilled, the cause and condition
of death. And this is the more so the more distinc
tively the Ufe and death in question are personal,
spiritual, moral; that is to say, the more consciously.

Not Under the Law 189
freely, feeUngly, the law of life or death is but the
mode of the self-activify of their subject.
In the illustration which the Apostle is about to
give, let us keep in mind that the point to be specially
elucidated is. In what sense and in what way may we
be released from the natural action, or the natural
reaction in ourselves, of our own personal law of
righteousness; seeing that that action or reaction is
within ourselves sin and all its fatal consequences,
spiritual, moral, natural or physical? The duaUty
more or less latent or patent in every moral personaUty
which the argument before us now begins to unfold is
neither an invention nor a discovery of St. Paul. It
has been in one way or another taken into account by
every deepest thinker upon human nature and human
life. It exists in us in natural potentiaUty prior to any
fact or experience of sin. So far, therefore, from being
sin in itseff, it is the ground and condition, as of sin
too, so no less of hoUness; for it is the ground of the
possibiUfy of any personal or moral activity and char
acter in us at all. St. Paul's distinction between the
natural and the spiritual man in us is not one in itself
of sinfulness or hoUness. If there were not the spiritual
man we should of course be incapable of holiness,
because the spirit is the organ of holiness, or of God
in us. But if there were not the natural man we should
be incapable of either sin or hoUness, for the natural
man is the organ of the law, by which alone moral
distinctions exist for us at all. The original — not
fault but — fact of nature or of what we call the

190 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
natural man, what St. John calls the will of the flesh
or the will of man, is its deficiency or insufficiency.
It is not a sin of the flesh, or of our nature, or of our
selves in the flesh or in our nature alone, that while we
can conceive our law, or form ideals of ourselves, we
cannot fulfil our law or realize our ideals. It was not
intended that our law should of itself be able to make
us perfect or our ideals to realize themselves in us.
They are intentionally deficient or insufficient in them
selves, because they are neither all nor final. One
might say, then, that it is a fallacy of the moral conscious
ness to hold ourselves accountable or to charge our
selves with transgression or sin. But we do do so, and
cannot but do so; and so far from any even true theory
or conception of the deficiency or insufficiency of our
own powers excusing or absolving us to ourselves, the
true progress of the spirit is both to deeper experiences
of human inability and to higher conceptions and sense
of human obligation. If there is paradox in this, it is
a paradox which is our dignify and our glory. The
Christian explanation is, that our nature is deficient
because it is made for the supernatural, to be more
than it can become of itself; that our wills are both
necessary and insufficient, because while we can be
ourselves, or moral, or personal at all, only through
our own wills, yet we can be any of these in the truest
or highest or best only through something infinitely
other and more than our own wills; that, therefore,
however paradoxical it may be, the necessity not only
of being ourselves but of ourselves so being must,

Not Under the Law 191
because it does, coexist and be consistent with the
truth of our experienced impotence of ourselves to be
ourselves. Let it be paradox, or antimony, or contra
diction, or what not, — whatever is essential to the
highest actual facts of our freedom, our personality,
and our spirituaUfy, or our transcendence of our
nature and ourselves through union with God in
Christ, that God has made possible, whether or no it
is so in itself or we can see it to be so.
Nature, the flesh, ourselves, are ordinarily spoken
of by St. Paul as sinful — not, therefore, because they
are essentially or in themselves so, but because they
are so actually and in us all. It is with us now not
only ourselves and God, but our sinful selves and
God. But as within every natural man there is a
spiritual man, potential or actual; so in every sinner
there is a saint, in possibility if not in actuaUty. And
every man, developed up to the point, and not sunk
below the point, of spiritual sensation and perception,
may be and is more or less conscious of the two men
within him — in both stages, of natural and spiritual
and of sinful and holy. For as there is no man without
the possibility of God in him, so let us hope there is
no man without something of the actuality of God in
him. The man who is unconscious not only of the
coexistence but of the conffict of the two selves within
him has not entered upon the realify of human life,
for it is just that conflict that gives reality to Hfe.
There can be no human Ufe at least that is not a choice,
a probation, a decision, a renunciation of one thing for

192 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
another, a victory of one thing over another, a Hfe of
one thing through the death of another. And the one
thing or another is one self or another, one or the
other of the two men in each one of us. There are
always two masters of whom only one can be served,
two lives of which only one can finally live, two men,
one or other of whom must die for the sake of the
other. This is so universally and necessarily the case, is so
much the very essentia of human life, that our Lord
Himself was not truly man if He were an exception to
the rule. And that He was any such exception is the
thing of all things most contradicted by the whole
tenour of New Testament record or interpretation of
him. He was in express terms the transcendence of
the natural in us by the spiritual; the victory of the
spirit over the flesh; the reversal of the law and over
throw of the reign of sin and death, through the estab
lishment of the kingdom of God and Heaven, of holiness
and life. All such expressions of the human signifi
cance of Jesus Christ can be understood only by
acceptance of the following principle of interpretation:
As it is impossible for any man to know himseff except
in the light of the divine revelation of him to himself
in Christ Jesus, so is it impossible for Jesus Christ to
be known by us except in exact terms of ourselves as
revealed in Him. To know Christ as the spiritual
man must be identical with knowing the meaning and
truth of our own spiritual manhood; to know the process
or way of spiritual manhood in Him, we must know

Not Under the Law 193
precisely what we must go through, must suffer and
do and become, in order to be spiritual men; what He
went through and accompHshed in becoming what He
is, is in exact terms what humanify needs to go through
with and accomplish in becoming Hke Him. This
mutual interpretation of ourselves by Christ and of
Christ by ourselves is the simplest key to the under
standing of our salvation in Him. When we say that
He was that in our common humanity, the being which
was its justification, its sanctification, and its glorifica
tion, its redemption, completion, and perfection, we
have said enough to satisfy all possible conceptions
both of His person and His work; and we have at the
same time so expressed it in terms of ourselves and in
language of our own — ideal but realizable — expe
rience and spiritual possibilities, that He becomes to
us the comprehensible truth of our ovwi salvation, be
cause of our actual human life and destiny.
We may proceed now to St. Paul's illustration of the
point for which we have been preparing, the crucial
question of our possible release from the natural action
or operation of our own law. The law, we are re
minded, has dominion over a man as long as he lives.
How can a man be absolved from his highest obliga
tion, or be divested of his highest characteristic, in the
fact of that obhgation? How can it cease to be his
dufy to attain and exercise his highest manhood, or
can he be relieved of accountabiUfy or responsibiUty
for failing to do so? How can that which reveals to
him and calls him to his highest activity and life not

194 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
judge and condemn him when he fails to accept the
revelation or respond to the call? If obedience and
reaUzation and fulfilment by himself of his law is the
condition, constituent, and content of Hfe and blessed
ness for him, how can disobedience, non-reaUzation,
and defeat of his law be or be made anything else to
him than death and a curse? All these are questions
involved in the nature of things and not of mere arbi
trary suggestion or solution. How may a man stand
both acquitted and released in the presence of his own
inviolable and violated law?
The only possible way is the one which begins with
a distinct consciousness of the facts as they are. The
knowledge of sin is the only beginning of salvation.
The knowledge of sin as sin is a moral and not only
an intellectual conception; it is an attitude not only of
the mind but of the affections and of the will with re
spect to it; it is a hatred of sin. But there is no such
thing or possibiUfy as a mere negative hatred of sin;
there can be no hatred of sin that is not a positive and
definite love of holiness. The sole and indispensable
condition of human salvation Ues in the only right
attitude possible for man towards the two things that
are his personal alternatives, the matters of his moral
choice, the determiners of his spiritual destiny, the
makers and the make-up of his heaven or his hell.
God and Heaven are a Spirit, a Law, a Life; the Devil
and Hell cannot be done away with, as at least symbols
of an indisputable actuaUfy, — a counter spirit and
law, not of life but of death. Now I repeat that the

Not Under the Law 195
only right attitude towards sin possible for man in his
present condition is that whose beginning is repentance
and whose end is the putting away of sin, and that the
only possible attitude towards hoUness or God is that
whose beginning is only faith but whose promise and
fulfilment is the " God in us and we in God " of Jesus
Christ. How are these beginnings to attain their
actual ends in us; how is repentance to be an actual
putting away of sin, and faith to be indeed the life
and hoUness of Christ?
The law has dominion over a man as long as he
Hves. Only death can release him from it. A woman
who is married to a husband is bound by the law of
her union and oneness with him as long as the husband
is alive. Only the death of the husband could release
her from that bond and justify her in uniting herself
with another man. In our first or natural manhood
we are indissolubly united with and under the law of
the natural man. It is only in him, subject to all his
conditions, bound by his natural necessities and his
moral obligations, that we are men at all or can Hve
human Hves. The moral obligation to obey or fulfil
our law is the most imperative and inviolable of all
the conditions of human life. Obedience to it is in
itself Hfe, and violation of it is death. When we say
that nothing but death can deliver us from the dominion
and operation of that law, it is manifest that the death
which can so release us cannot be the simple natural
fact of physical dissolution; it therefore devolves upon
us to define what that death is. The death of the

196 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
first husband is the deatt in us of the natural man;
and the natural man is regarded in his special and
highest relation to the moral law. What is that rela
tion, both in what it ought to be, and in what it actuaUy
is ? Is he living in it, — in the sense in which it not
only is said but is true that. He who doeth the law
shall Hve in and by it? If not, then there is but the
one alternative, — he must die by it. But, while it is
impossible that we shall be saved in the life, or by the
obedience of the law, there is a way in which we may
be saved by its death, or by the death which it inflicts.
Suppose that the law, while it has failed to secure
obedience and so to confer Ufe, has nevertheless, in the
very act and by the very fact of convincing and con
victing us of sin, taught us the meaning and the obUga
tion of holiness; suppose that it has so brought us into
the foretaste and experience of sin and its consequences,
as to impart at least a suggestion and prevision of
holiness with its immunities and rewards; suppose it
has gone yet further and has nursed and nurtured in
us the sense of need and the ardent longing for hoHness
and life, — if the law should go no further, will it not
have already put us upon the road and created in us
the necessary condition of salvation ? But suppose it
should have gone further, — have gone as far as it can,
and have accompHshed its perfect work; suppose that
under the discipline and experience of the law we shall
have been brought to the extremest knowledge of the
completest consequences of our condition under the
law; the very end of our natural resources and Hmit of

Not Under the Law 197
our natural powers and possibiUties; — how then shall
we characterize or describe the point we shaU. have
reached? To have come to the end of ourselves and
of all potentiaUty within ourselves; to have made full
experiment of our law and of the principle of our own
personal obedience to it; to have been tried by it and
found wanting, to have sought life by it and found
death, — does not this bring us fairly up to that death
of the old man, the death in ourselves, which is the one
opportunity of divine grace, the one condition of human
release and redemption? To have learned the lesson
the law was commissioned to teach; to have been
brought to the point nature and ourselves were pre
destined to reach; to have been thus prepared for God's
part and our own eternally predetermined activify in
Him, this is the way in which the law, not through its
life but through its death, has performed its part in
bringing us Hfe.
What we mean, then, by the death of the old man,
the first husband in us, is this : As long as we were in
our old selves, or our own selves, we were under the
dominion of a single moral alternative — either to live
by our law or to die by it. That is to say, we were
under the moral necessify either of reaUzing, fulfilUng
ourselves in accordance with the principles and con
ditions of our moral perfection and blessedness, or else
of experiencing the consequences and suffering the
penalties of something more and worse than merely
having failed in and lost these. For moral failure or
loss is something different from mere natural failure

198 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
or loss; and its penalties are different. It is a failure
that brings with it condemnation and a loss that in
volves in it guilt. The death of the old man in us
consists in part in our full realization of our faUure
and loss in him; but it consists in yet greater part in
our full sense of sin and guilt in him. Fellowship or
participation in the death of Jesus Christ, the reaUza
tion within ourselves of the meaning and reaUty of
His death, is an actual experience of the deadness of
ourselves in ourselves alone, in union with mere nature,
the old man or Adam, the first husband, the flesh. It
is something more, however, than that mere sense of
impotency or deadness to the requirements and activi
ties of the real Hfe of the spirit. The impotence or
deadness is not of our mere condition, it is of our
selves. Consequently, the death of which we are
made conscious in Christ is the death not of mere
deadness but the death of sin and sinfulness. The
adequate consciousness of that death in ourselves to
which we are brought in Christ, the fellowship it gives
us in His attitude towards it, is the beginning and the
condition of our deliverance from it. The conscious
ness and sense of being sinful is an experience of the
death that sin is; but that very knowledge or experience
that sin is death is already such a death in itself for
sin as carries in it the death to and from sin. Jesus
Christ Himself encountered, came face to face with,
experienced, not only all the deadness of humanity in
itself, the flesh, for the life that is higher than itseff;
but all the sin necessarily involved in a Ufe Hved only

Not Under the Law 199
in it. His human immunify from the sin of the flesh
was purchased only by that perfect sense of the sin
and death necessarily involved in a Hfe in the flesh,
which I have described as being such a death in con
sequence of as to be a death to and from it. He felt
himself in his humanity involved in the sin and death
of humanify; He saved Himseff from sinning and
dying with it by so dying to its sin as to rise out of its
death. That death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was an
act not only in humanify but of humanify. If our
faith can meet and answer to God's grace; if we can
see in the act of Him the act of us, because the act of
God in us, — then not only may we, but must we, say
that with Him our old selves, the old husband, in
union with whom we sinned, is crucified, dead, and
buried. It is not only that he has died from us, but
we died in him; for in him we have felt and known the
full weight of his sin and his death; we have expe
rienced the death for what we were in him, which is
the only way to the death to and from what we were in
and with him.
As the wife can marry a new husband only if the old
husband is dead, and her union with him and Ufe in
him have come to a lawful and rightful end, — so we
can be in lawful and gracious union with Christ only
as we are dead in ourselves, only as in the old seff
we have known his sin as sin and have suffered his
death as death. But if we have truly known the
meaning of Christ's death to the flesh or old man of

200 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
sin, then indeed are we no longer under the dominion
of the law. We are no longer under its condemnation
or subject to its penalties; for have we not already in
and with Christ endured the one and suffered the
other? Have we not already died not only for but to
and from our sins, and been raised out of and from
our death ? We have died in the old man and the old
life of the law and of sin and death, and we are alive
now in the new man which is Christ and which is
hoHness and etemal Hfe.

XV
LAW, SIN, AND REDEMPTION

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. How-
beit, I had not known sin, except through the law: for I had not
known lust, except the law had said. Thou shalt not lust: but sin,
finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all man
ner of lust. The commandment, which was unto hfe, this I found to
be unto death. The law is holy, and the commandment holy and
righteous and good. Did then that which is good become death
unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might be shown to be sin,
by working death to me through that which is good; — that through
the commandment sin might become exceeding sinful. For we know
that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that
which I do I know not: for not what I would, that do I practise;
but what I hate, that I do. But if what I would not, that I do, I con
sent unto the law that it is good. So now it is no more I that do it, but
sin which dwelleth in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh,
dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to do that
which is good is not. For the good which I would I do not: but the
evil which I would not, that I practise. But if what I would not,
that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. I
find then the law, that, to me who would do good, evil is present.
For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a
different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind
and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my
members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of
the body of this death? — 1 thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord. — Romans VH. 7-25.

XV

LAW, SIN, AND REDEMPTION
In all St. Paul's writings the passage next before us
is the one which gives us most clearly his conception
of the law and its operation in human Ufe. As we
have said, he uses the term in lower and partial senses
and even sometimes with opprobrium; but in the main
it is with St. Paul as it is with our Lord; the trouble
with the law is not in the law but in us in our relation
to the law. The law is not only right and good in
itself, it is the very essence of rightness and goodness,
or at any rate its identical expression. We can con
ceive of various kinds of partial good, the goods of
outward condition, of the body, of the mind, of the
affections, of the will, or of the person or personal
activity. Only one of these several forms of good do
we dignify with the higher designation of goodness.
And in the highest sense only this one, if we listen to
even philosophy on the subject, is real good : — there is
nothing good but the good will. The good of the will
— by which I mean the person, and the properly per
sonal activify and Hfe — is goodness, which manifests
itself only in love, service, and sacrifice. On the other
hand, goodness is the good of the will, or of the person ;
it is the only true personal good, the only perfectness
203

204 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
or blessedness of human activify and life. This radical
connection of the two words good and goodness is a
subconscious indication of the oneness and insepara-
biUfy of the things. There is nothing in consciousness
so egoistic or individual as the sense of that primary
thing which we call good, our good or our goods. It
is simply that which gives us pleasure, all pleasures
from the lowest up to the highest. What else are the
goods of outward condition, of the body, of the mind,
the heart, the will ? How simply and easily the word
good passes into the word goodness, and yet what a
double chasm yawns between the two things ? In the
first place goodness is not the further pursuit and
attainment of our good, but the voluntary sacrifice
and loss of it. It is a passage over from purest egoism
to purest altruism, from thought and pursuit of our
selves to thinking of the things and seeking the life of
others. And then, in the second place, this goodness
reveals and verifies itself as the good will, not only in
the sense of the goodness of the will but in that of the
good of the will; that is, not only as its rightness or
righteousness, but as its truest pleasure, its happiness
or blessedness. This is the genesis or evolution not
so much of the law itself as of its matter or content.
The law itself might be conceived as having passed
through stages something like the following: The law
appears first simply as the rule established by expe
rience for securing the most of individual or selfish
good. It quickly, however, passes into the larger rule
of securing the general or pubUc good against the

Law, Sin, and Redemption 205
invasions and encroachments of the individual. It
next manifests itself in the increasing sanctities of the
family and social life, in the care and protection of
the weak by the strong. Among Greek peoples the
law expressed the ideal of social Hfe and order, not
only material or physical, but also esthetic and cultural,
and to a certain extent ethical or moral. With the
Hebrews and the more truly developed religious con
sciousness and life, the law was the expression of the
will and character and purpose of God, revealed in all
the workings of things, but manifested more particu
larly in the life of men as a law of righteousness.
With Jesus Christ the law becomes more distinctly
spiritual in both origin and nature. It is not only
the rule or mode of the divine acting and of all personal
acting in union and harmony with it. The law is not
a code or a mode, but a spirit and a life. There is all
the difference between law and life that there was
between the tables of stone and the Spirit of Jesus, or
between the prophets commanding, condemning, and
announcing death, and the Lord proclaiming liberty
and imparting life. Now there is not one of these
stages or forms of law that is not legitimate and neces
sary in its place and order, or that is not taken up
and included in the one working of the one only and
universal law of God, of persons, and of things. Take,
for example, the first and lowest law of our own indi
vidual good and egoistic pleasure. The only good as
such we can know at all is our own immediate good;
if we did not know that, how could we know the good

206 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of another, or of aU, or of God ? Christianity requires
of us to love others as we love ourselves, and to do to
them as we would have them do to us. It builds all
the forms of good as material into the final structure;
and does not hesitate to exhibit in that structure not
only the highest good as goodness, but equaUy goodness
as the highest good. We must lose ourselves in good
ness ; but when we have truly done so, then in goodness
we find again ourselves in our own highest good. It
is not an utterance of sentimentaUty but the true voice
of God and the true ultimate experience of humanity,
that the only final good of man is goodness. Chris
tianity is the divine science of life.
That law thus in its supreme and universal sense
was in the mind of St. Paul is easy enough to prove in
the passage at present before us. The law, he says,
which was unto life was found by me to be unto death;
its end is life; in itself it is life; but its actual effect
upon and in me is death. The law is holy, and the
commandment holy, righteous, and good; yet it is the
occasion if not the cause in me of sin; but for the law
I should not be sinful. The law is spiritual, but I am
carnal, sold under sin; that is to say, in myself or in
my flesh I am so little the subject of my true law of
holiness and life, that, on the contrary, I am as much
subject to the counter-law of sin and death as the
slave sold in the market is to the master who has
bought him. Even in the flesh, or in our natural
condition, we cannot but know our law, in lower or
higher if not in the highest meaning or conception of

Law, Sin, and Redemption 207
it. If we do not as yet know it as the spirit and per
sonality of God in us, yet we may know it as the ideal,
the truth, beauty, and worth of ourselves. Or, if we
do not know it so high as that, we may know it as the
rule of the greatest good to ourselves, to others, and
to all. In whatever lower or higher form we may
know our law, we know that it is only an expression
of what we ought to be or do, and not at aU of what
we actually are. Not at all what we would be are we;
on the contrary, we are very much what we would
not be. We consent then to the law; we recognize
and acknowledge it, admit its claims and confess its
authority; more than that, I approve, admire, and
desire the law; I may say that I delight in the law —
after the inward man, in that true best self which lies
at the root of us all ; in fact I do actually and at bottom
will the law, — who does not ? who would not, if he
could, be his most perfect self and enjoy his most
complete blessedness ? — but do I ever fulfil the law ?
Everything but that — but just the one thing that is
the meaning and end and life of the law! And why
do I not? The difficulty is in me, in myself, in my
flesh; for in mere nature or in my natural condition,
and under the law alone, I and my flesh are one; in
the old man or the first husband I am nothing but he
and know nothing but him. Though with my reason
I may apprehend a higher law of him, or of myself
in him, and with my wiU may desire and intend and
attempt its reaUzation, yet in my flesh I discover and
know full well another law that runs directly counter

208 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
to that higher law of the right reason and the true
will. This other law or counter-law we have now to
consider. What is sin, and what is the genesis or origin of it
in ourselves individually or personally? To begin
with, it is in its actual operation certainly not an
individual but a collective thing; it is in us as one
man, in our solidarity as a race. As in the race so in
the individual it is not, in one sense, in us prior to the
law; and in another sense it is in us prior to the law-
We have explained that by saying, that in the matter
or material of it it is in us all prior to any consciousness
or knowledge of it, and therefore prior to any personal
part in it of our own; but that, since sin is essentially
a personal thing, and cannot properly be said to exist
outside of the consciousness and the will, that wliich
within these would be sin, vsdthout these is not so and
cannot be so accounted. St. Paul declared, as we saw,
that sin was universal in the world in its ravages and
its natural consequences before the law even, in those
therefore to whom it could not be imputed as sin,
because in them it was antecedent to knowledge or
vidll. How is the case with ourselves now? As it
was with the race so is it with the individual, — that
there is a stage or state in which ignorance of sin is
innocence of sin. St. Paul says of that state, I was
aUve once; it may have been a very natural and a
very joyous life, but it was the life of an animal, or
at best of a child, and not that of a man. The plea
is sometimes made for primitive or immature races

Law, Sin, and Redemption 209
that they be left in their innocence, or in their ignorance
of sin. Not that sins, that are materially such, and
such in excess, do not exist among them, but that
they are much less dreadful done in ignorance than
they would be done consciously and in violation of
law. I do not purpose to discuss any such special
plea, but how would the principle do as a universal
maxim? Would it be better to leave all races and
individuals in ignorance and so in innocence of sin?
There is a state, then, before the law; or before that
which in any way reveals to us the difference and the
opposition between that which we are and that which
we ought to be. When that revelation comes, and
however else it comes, it comes to us always as a law,
— then sin comes to its birth in us ; that which was in
us before and was not sin, is none the less in us still
and is sin. Before, sin was dead, or dormant, and I
was aUve; now sin is alive and I am dead. Not that
I at once reaUze my condition as death; we speak of
things as they are in the end, not as they seem at the
beginning. Once having conceived the law, there is
no deUverance from its final condemnation and death
but in an act of divine redemption and salvation.
The law is there aUke for us all; it may appear very
differently to us severally and individually, but the
difference is in us and our apprehensions of it — not in
itself and in its claims upon us; and just in proportion
as we have been brought by it out of the innocence of
mere ignorance, do we see and know that the issues of
it with us are the one alternative, Hfe or death.

210 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
Was it well for us that sin should thus be born in
us? The law came to be — not the cause certainly,
but — the occasion of sin ; it came, in revealing right,
to disclose and expose wrong; in imparting the con
ception and ideal of holiness, to uncover the meaning
and actuality of sin; by showing the way of Hfe, to
awaken the consciousness and quicken the sense of
death. Everything that belongs to or constitutes
human life originates in the moment in which the law
reveals itself to the man. If his animal or infantile
happiness or Ufe dies in that moment, his reason and
his will, as his own and himself, come to birth and begin
to live in it. The end of the law is the evolution of
selfhood or personality. Formal freedom, choice, de
cision, accountability or responsibiUty, the awful task
or business of making Ufe and determining destiny,
the act of coming of age or attaining manhood and
taking into our own hands the questions and issues
of true or false, right or wrong, good or bad, happiness
or misery, blessedness or curse, life or death, — all
these, and how much more, are the creations of the
law, are bom in us with its first utterance to us, and
grow in us with its clearer revelations and higher
claims and demands upon us. Nature is good, but
the goodness of nature is neither the distinctivegoodness
nor the proper good of man. His goodness and good
come only in his own reaction upon things, and not in
their action in or upon him. Those things are best
for him which, however difficult or painful or trying,
or just because they are so, call out the truest, strongest.

Law, Sin, and Redemption 211
best reactions from himself. Viewing sin as the power
against us the most prevalent; the most directly antag
onistic to our personality, to our true being and our
right acting; the one thing that most inevitably con
fronts us and affects our nature and destiny; and
remembering that as surely as our own sinfulness and
death come from yielding to its activity in and upon
us, so surely do our holiness and Ufe come in and
through or from our meeting, overcoming, and putting
it away from us, it may well appear that the law has
conferred upon us, not indeed the highest boon — that
it is inadequate to bestow — but the next truest benefit,
in awakening in us the knowledge of sin. For the
knowledge of sin is the condition and the beginning of
holiness, as the conquest of sin is certainly for us the
only way, if not the very truth and life, of holiness.
The two points with regard to sin upon which St.
Paul here dwells are : First, that, when through the law
we awake to or come to the consciousness of sin, we
find it already existent. It has not as yet been sin in
the form of it, but it has already been sin in the matter
of it. We have been sinning materially long before
we have been doing so formally. That is, we have
contradicted the spirit and transgressed the law of
true and right being and living, long before the doing
so was our own, or the sin of it was our sin. In that
sense and to that extent we may say that sin is in us
but not of us. When we come into moral being, when
our own action begins, and our quality or character is
ready to differentiate itself into good or bad, that in

212 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
reaction with which it is to do so is ready at hand.
We have not to make or to go to find sin. The material
of our choice is already with us; we have only to say
whether we will make sin our own by accepting it, or
by rejecting it make holiness our own. Sin, in a word,
is something not ourselves, in relation with which, in
reaction with or against which, we ourselves become
sinful, or else holy. In contrary ways, through oppo
site reactions with it, all our spiritual character is
determined through our own attitude and activity with
regard to sin. This relation to sin, as something
through the most vital dealing with which we become
ourselves, and yet as something not essentially our
selves, and which therefore in putting away we do not
cease to be but rather truly begin to be ourselves, is
the condition of the Apostle's conception of redemp
tion. The other point with regard to sin here dwelt upon
is this: That so far from the law of itself putting an
end to sin, it aggravates it and makes it more exceeding
sinful. Sin, or the sinful thing, committed ignorantly
and therefore innocently, is nothing in comparison
with the same thing committed knowingly and guiltily.
The errors and excesses of mere nature, of animals
or children or savages, or of those types of civilization
where the mere natural impulses have the maximum
of play with the minimum of self-consciousness, are
not only comparatively harmless but even tend to
balance and moderate and correct themselves. On
the contrary, in the communities where there is the

Law, Sin, and Redem.ption 213
most of moral thoughtfulness and reflection, where
reason and conscience and the strong and free will
are made the most of, there not only is the exceeding
sinfulness of sin the most clearly conceived in thought,
the most intensely realized in consciousness, the most
thoroughly reprobated by both judgment and senti
ment, but there also sin actuaUy exists in its most
exceeding sinful manffestations. Where law, not only
in its outward sanctions but in its inward real antago
nism to sin, most exists, there sin in its worst forms
most prevails. Not only this, but the law where most
sincerely intended and most earnestly insisted upon
has another even more hateful reflex tendency and
effect. It tends inevitably to the production and
cultivation of hypocrisy. Modem England like ancient
Judaea, the home of the moral law and of the moral
consciousness, has not been least amenable to the
charge of national hypocrisy. Paris may make out a
true bUl against London for its ugUer immoraUty and
less refined sensuaUfy, and worse stfll for its con
stitutional hypocrisy, but is the law to be condemed
because in its war against sin it makes sin not only
theoretically but actually blacker and more sinful ?
Would it be better, then, to go back from the moral to
the natural, to give up the law and take again to the
instincts and impulses ? At any rate St. Paul's con
viction was that the end as the effect of the law was
to reveal sin by developing it, to expose it by showing
it, and to prepare the way for its extinction by making
it offensive to the consciousness and exhibiting it in

214 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
its true nature and consequences in knowledge and
experience. What, then, m one word of anticipation of fuller
treatment, is redemption? It is, first, to know what
sin is, and to feel it for what it is. It is to know that
sin and death and hell are all synonymous terms. It
is to realize with St. Paul, in the second place, that sin
is a separate and a separable thing from ourselves.
Though it is in us it is not of us, except in so far as
we ourselves make it our own by taking it into our
selves. And as it is ours only by our taking it into
ourselves, so it may be made not ours through our
putting it out of ourselves. In the third place, we
may of ourselves go so far at least as this: Of the two
men within us, with which one shall we identify our
selves ? St. Paul recognized as we may an inner man
within himself who was unequivocally on the side of
the law and against sin. ItJs true that he confessed
also to an outer man, of whom he says — or rather,
in whom he says of himself: The law is spiritual, but
I am carnal, sold under sin. In me, that is, in my
flesh, dwelleth no good thing. For I deUght in the
law of God after the inward man ; but I see a different
law in my members, warring against the law of my
mind, and bringing me into captivify under the law of
sin which is in my members. Now the vital point with
St. Paul was. Which of those two men was he ? It is a
question with each one of us, and a question in which,
above all others, the deadly issue between realify and
hypocrisy depends upon the sincerity and the thor-

Law, Sin, and Redemption 215
oughness with which we decide it. For even under the
law a man, though he be unable to separate or divorce
himself from his sin, can set himself against it. This
is what St. Paul does. He deliberately and deter
minedly disclaims and disowns the sinful seff in him,
and identifies himseff and takes his stand with that
other self which deUghts in the law and repudiates the
deeds of the flesh. That which I do I know not; I
was doing it before I knew, and I do it now not with
but against my will; for not what I would that do I,
but what I hate that I do. But if what I would not,
that I do, then I consent unto the law that it is good;
and then it is not I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in
me. In my divided self, the true, real I is in and
with the seff that hates, not in that which lusts after
and does sin. If I cannot wholly separate myseff in
act or fact from the flesh of sin, I can at least repudiate
and disclaim it as being the real seff of my love or
will or meaning. If I cannot effect a divorce from the
first husband a vinculo, I can at least do so a mensa
et toro. This is as far as St. Paul could go under the
law, but he could and would go so far; and so far is
a very important step towards our going farther. For
the divorce a vinculo from the old man and from
under the law is impossible for God without myseff.
We cannot too much insist that God cannot put away
sin from a man who does not put away sin from him
self. With the soul its marriages and divorces are
nothing if not its own acts. And there is a divorce
for the soul, but it is only through death; only in the

216 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
death of that from wliich it is divorced, only in its
own death in that from which it is divorced.
Blessed be God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
There is a divorce a vinculo from the body of this
death, — from sin, because from our old selves of sin.
In Jesus Christ not only is there a death for and from
sin, but there is a death for us for and from sin.
Through Him we have been enabled to know and
feel sin for what it is — so to know and feel it for
what it is, as, in knowing the death it is, to enter into
the feUowship of Christ's death and to know the power
and reaUty of His resurrection.

XVI
THE CONDEMNATION OF SIN
IN THE FLESH

What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh,
God sending his own Son in the Ukeness of sinful flesh and for sia
(or, as an offering for sin), condemned sin in the flesh: that the re
quirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the
flesh, but after the spirit. — Romans VIII. 3, 4.

XVI
THE CONDEMNATION OF SIN IN THE
FLESH
There is, first, the simple fact of our Redemption.
In Christ Jesus we are no longer under the condemna
tion of sin; and because we are no longer under its
condemnation, therefore also we are no longer under
its power and dominion. In our faith we see ourselves
as God in His grace sees us. It is the function and
measure of faith to answer to the divine grace, as the
reflection in the mirror answers to the object before it.
It is our Christianity to see ourselves in Christ. But
we must see Him, if we would see ourselves in Him;
as per contra we must see ourselves in Him, if we would
see Him. We must see Christ and ourselves mutually
and identically dead for and from sin, and alive to
and with God. Grace and faith must realize themselves
each in the other, and become one in the act, as God
and man are one in Christ.
Before we enter into the subject of our redemption
in Christ we must first review the subject of Christ's
redemption of us, and endeavour to bring to a head
all that has been previously said on the subject. We
may do that in a careful study of a passage immediately
219

f f

220 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
before us, and some kindred passages. What the law
could not do, says the Apostle, in that it was weak
through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the
Ukeness of sinful flesh, and as an offering for sin,
condemned sin in the flesh; that the requirement of
the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after
the flesh but after the spirit. What could the law not
do? The absolutely only thing that it could do was
to condemn us and to subject us to the penalties
inherent in and inseparable from its transgression. It
could neither not do this, nor do anything else. This
is not an arbitrary fiat but a necessary fact. To make
sin not death, if holiness is life, or to intervene between
the sin and the death which it is, is no less a natural
impossibility than a spiritual contradiction.
What the law could not do it could not do because
of the inherent weakness of the flesh, or man in him
self, to obey the law, to achieve the righteousness which
is the necessary requirement of the law. The law is
unable to present man righteous, or to justify him before
God, because it is unable to bring or to make him
righteous. If it cannot present him righteous or justify
him, it can only present him unrighteous or condemn
him. What the law could not do, God, sending His own
Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, condemned sin
in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement,
or the righteousness, of the law might be fulfiUed in us.
There are here several very great questions, not all of
which are to be considered quite yet. Greatest of all

Condemnation of Sin in the Flesh 221
is the christological question of what or whom we
mean by His own Son. Next greatest is what we
understand by God's sending His own Son in the
likeness of the flesh of sin. The second we wfll con
sider now and leave the first for separate and fuUer
discussion. For the present let us assume the highest
(which I believe to be also the truest) sense in which
we can take the words in question, God's own Son.
We have then to inquire into the meaning of our
Lord's having come in the likeness of sinful flesh, or
of the flesh of sin. From the longest and most careful
reflection upon the language and the matter of the
New Testament, I am unable to accept the words as
containing in themselves the impUcation that our Lord
came into a nature or condition which was like but
was not the flesh of sin. I feel the theological or doc
trinal difficulty, but I also feel that that, and that alone,
is the reason or excuse for modffying the meaning of
words which are nowhere else so modified. I should
much rather meet the real difficulty some other way;
or, ff I cannot fairly do so, then face it squarely. Like
and Ukeness in the New Testament do not mean " Hke
but different "; they mean Hke in the sense of identical.
When our Lord was made, or became, in the Ukeness
of men. He did not become something similar to but not
the same as man; He became man. When He was
tempted in aU points Hke as we are. His temptations
were not in some points only and not in others like our
own; they were essentiaUy and identically our own, with
the sole additional circumstance, which does not affect

222 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the nature or character of the temptations, that whereas
all we are overcome by them. He overcame them,
And, humanly speaking, that is all the difference
between sin and holiness. Sin or holiness cannot be
in mere nature or condition; they can be only in what
we are or do in the nature or the condition. In the
identical nature and condition in which all we the
rest without exception are sinners, because sin through
the nature or condition overcomes and enslaves us, in
that precise nature and condition, with no further
difference than this, Jesus Christ overcame sin and in
doing so redeemed our nature from it and its conse
quences. His own utter and absolute sinlessness or
holiness was just the essence of all Christianity, but
that sinlessness, I can never tire of repeating, was no
mere fact of His nature, human or divine, it was His
work in our nature, the work of our salvation. And
that it might be a work in our nature, it was necessary
it should be our nature, precisely as' it is, in which the
work was done. When we call the flesh sinful, or speak
of it as the flesh of sin, we do not mean that it is sin
ful, but only that it is that through which we are sinful.
The flesh was only not sinful in Jesus because He was
not sinful in it. His holiness in the flesh was the de
struction of sin in the flesh. At the same time He Him
self was holy in the flesh only by not being in the flesh;
that is to say, by dying in it and to it, and living in and
to God. This is the critical and crucial act in Him
which requires fuller explanation, at the same time that
it will always defy or transcend full understanding.

Condemnation of Sin in the Flesh 223
Our Lord is said to have come not only in the like
ness of the flesh of sin but also for or about sin. The
well-known elliptical Greek expression is legitimately
expanded into as an offering, or sacrifice, for sin, but
the meaning of it need not be limited to that. Jesus
Christ was indeed, in the most perfect sense, an offering
or sacrifice for sin; but in a yet wider sense it is right
to say that His whole business or work in the world
had to do with sin, was conceming or about sin. This
is so only because the life of man in the world is mainly
if not wholly concerned about sin, is mainly if not
wholly determined by his attitude or relation to sin.
A man is only what he personally accomplishes and
becomes; and his accomplishment and becoming con
sist in and are measured by what he overcomes. For
us at least, whatever of positive or actual holiness
there is in us is negatively so much sin met and sur
mounted. It is not with us that holiness comes first,
as a fact or matter of nature, and then sin ensues as a
falling away from that; but, on the contrary, the matter
at least of sin first presents itself to us and with us,
and holiness originates and consists in the resisting,
denying, mortifying, and finally crucifying it in our
selves, — and, so far as it has become part of ourselves,
ourselves in it. Whether we make real manhood to
consist in virtue, or the fulfilling of the law of nature;
or in righteousness, or the fulfilling of the law of God;
or in hoUness, or sharing the personal spirit and nature
and life of God ; — in any case the positive quaUfy
which distinguishes and constitutes manhood is acquired

224 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
in overcoming its opposite, and is not itself antecedent
to and independent of its opposite. Jesus Christ came
into the world, Jesus Christ is in the world, to accom
pUsh the work of the world, which is the task of hu
manity. The Father's business which He must needs
be about is the business that concerns us all, the busi
ness of becoming ourselves through performing our
parts under the actual conditions of human life. With
Him as with us the most characteristic and distinctive
condition of human life was temptation, probation,
trial; and this comes, or can come, only through the
varied assaults of the various forms of evil, natural,
moral, and above all spiritual evil, or sin. It is rational,
then, and true to say that Jesus Christ was sent into
the world, and that His business here was, about sin.
As St. John expresses it. He was manifested that He
might take away sin. And this He did, — first, by
the divine grace in Himself to overcome and destroy
sin in our nature; and then by imparting to us the
selfsame divine grace to die with Him to sin and live
with Him to God.
I have said that our Lord's own death to sin could
only in a very secondary sense have been the mere
natural removal from it by physical death. It must
have consisted essentially in a spiritual attitude and
act in which sin was met, overcome, and extinguished
by its spiritual opposite. It is scarcely enough to say
that the spiritual opposite is holiness, without saying
what holiness is. It is the distinctively spiritual qualify
or character, what we are in and through a right per-

Condemnation of Sin in the Flesh 225
sonal relation with God. In this world the states and
activities of that right relation are Faith, through
which God is what He is to us; Hope, through which
we are what we are in God; and Love, which is what
God is to and in us and what we are in Him. But if
faith, hope, and love are the activities of the spirit
which constitute hoUness, righteousness, and Hfe, what
are the spiritual opposites of faith, hope, and love?
And how can faith, hope, and love prosper and triumph
save over these opposites? Our Lord's triumph over
sin and death was a victory of the essential attributes
and attitudes and activities of the spirit as manifested
in human Hfe and under human conditions. It was
the perfection of human faith, human hope, and human
love; it was the complete realization of the spirit and
nature and life of God in us.
This, however, does not yet sound the depths of the
meaning of our Lord's personal death to sin, and we
must venture to extend a little further our explorations
into the sacred circle of that most holy experience.
If there has been any consistent principle or philosophy
in the method of interpretation which we have been
pursuing, it must be found in the following particulars :
The whole work of Jesus Christ in humanify must be
expressible, whether or no we may succeed in expressing
it, in terms of distinctively human activify and expe
rience, human effort and attainment, human predesti
nation and realization. Jesus Christ accomplished
and became precisely what it was the proper and
predestined task of humanify in Him to accompUsh

226 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
and become. This is not to say that the work of
Christ is not equally expressible in terms of the divine
activify. Jesus Christ means to us. What God is, and
has done, and is doing in humanity. God was and is
in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himseff, imparting
Himseff to us and taking us up into participation with
Himself. But God is in us only what we are in Him;
and God does in us only what we do in Him; and
what that is, must be as perfectly expressible in terms
of us as of Him. That is all the mystery or the truth
of Jesus Christ; He is perfect God in man only as He
is perfect man in God. His atonement was God's
at-one-ing Himself with man in and through the
responsive act of man at-one-ing himseff with God;
God's putting away our sin in us is accompHshed only
through our putting away our sin in God. What He
does He does in our doing, and what we do we do
through His doing in us. God nowhere and nohow
manifests Himself save in what things or persons are
in and through Him. He manifests Himseff so in
natural creation, and equally only so in spiritual
creation. God is naturally in us immanentally or
in ourselves; He is spiritually in us transcendentally
or in Christ; in either case. He is in us as, and in the
way and degree in which, we are in Him. In Jesus
Christ God is perfectly in man and man perfectly in
God, each because the other.
In describing our Lord's attitude and activity. His
business in the world with regard to sin, we must
foUow the above principle of interpretation. We must

Condemnation of Sin in the Flesh 227
try to conceive of it as man's or humanify's proper
business, right attitude and action, with regard to sin.
As our representative, as absolutely one with us and
like us in all our nature and in all our condition. He
as God has done in us and He as man has done in
God that which would constitute in us and does con
stitute in Him our salvation, — precisely as we should
have to do it, and should do it, in working out our own
salvation. Let us follow ourselves then, as far as we
can, in Him, and see ourselves in the act and process
of our own salvation. Jesus Christ then — describing
Him in terms of ourselves — knew all the limitations
of our nature; He knew better than we, because He
tried its powers more faithfully than we, its inability
to go or reach beyond itself. He knew that we are
but dust, that that which is born of the flesh is flesh
and can be nothing more than flesh. He experienced
to the Hmit the impotence of the human vdll, the will
of man, to attain the ends and accompUsh the require
ments of manhood. He uttered the universal expe
rience and voice of humanity when He said, I can of
myself do nothing. More and further than that, —
we must not begin here or at any future point to make
our Lord's human experience essentially different from
our own, or in any respect different except in the fact
that He was humanly enabled to transcend our human
inabiUty and overcome the sin that overcomes us.
But how did He overcome it ? Only on the Une of our
own only possible overcoming it, the way which God's
love and grace and fellowship have made possible for

228 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
us in Him. Jesus Christ not only knew our nature and
its natural limitations; He not only knew in Himseff
our inabilities and insufficiencies in ourselves; He
knew in Himself too our universal actual condition as
regards sin. In taking upon Himself not only our
nature but our nature in its actual condition. He took
upon Him its universal actual condition of subjection to
sin and death. He knew in Himself that the humanity
in which He took part, which He shared with all us the
rest, was under the actual curse of sin and death.
By no mere fiction of imputing or reckoning or account
ing, but in most blessed actuaUty and fact. He took
our sin, our curse, our death, upon Him. As man
our Lord was subject with us all to sin and death, and
as man He could no more have saved Himseff from
sin and death than we can. As man, God sent Him
and He came into the world to reveal and impart to
us a divine salvation in which like Him as man we as
men might be saved. Jesus Christ was not saved by
any difference of nature from ours; nor from any
difference of actual condition from ours. He was
saved to the uttermost by knowing to the uttermost
wherein His salvation lay — not in His nature, not in
Himself, but in God; not in the power of a human
obedience to the law, but in the power of a divine
grace in Him, working through faith, through hope,
and in love. Jesus Christ knew in Himself, as in aU
the humanity with which He made Himself one, that
what we call the flesh, human nature by actual condi
tion, was sinful — in the sense, and only in the sense,

Condemnation of Sin in the Flesh 229
that it was unable in and of itself to be otherwise than
sinful. More exactly, it was sinful in the sense that
no one in the flesh, not even He, could be sinless. No
one more than Jesus experienced and felt the fact that
for the flesh that was in Himself there was nothing to
be done but resist, deny, mortffy, crucify it — to die
in it and so from it. It was our own old man, the
flesh of sin, the whole body of sin, with all its curse
upon it, that He took upon Himself, and put off and
abolished for us all by His death under and from it.
Let us come back to the words of the text of this
chapter, and close with a brief exegesis of them. God
sent His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin.
That means identically, no more and no less, what is
meant elsewhere by our Lord's being made, or becom
ing, in the likeness of men. St. Paul says again: Him
who knew no sin God made to be sin for us, or in our
behalf, that we might become the righteousness of
God in Him. Either before or in the flesh our Lord
knew no sin. But in the flesh He entered into that
relation, of nature and condition, to sin in which He
found the flesh. He took upon Him in it its subjection
to sin, its curse, its death. I say its subjection : — that
does not mean or involve or imply His subjection.
On the contrary, His taking was the breaking of that
subjection ; in the flesh of our sinfulness He was sinless.
— How so ? Jesus Christ had come for or about sin,
and as an offering or sacrifice for sin. That which
He offered up in sacrifice to God, that which He
carried back with Him to God from His divine mission

230 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
to men, was humanity in His person dead in its old
self and dead to its old seff in the flesh, and alive to
God in the spirit. In that act God condemned sin in
the flesh, but He condemned it how? By bringing
humanity itself to condemn it in itseff, by bringing
humanity to die in itself to itself, and to Uve in and to
Him. It was the woman's seed, after all, that bruised
the serpent's head. It was humanity in Christ that
condemned and abolished sin. Our Lord took our
flesh of sin only that in it He might accompUsh that
death to sin which is our own and only salvation from
sin. And so the Apostle goes on to say: He condemned
sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement,
or the righteousness, of the law might be fulfilled in us,
who walk not after the flesh (in which we are now
dead), but after the spirit (in which we are now alive).

XVII
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT

There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ
Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free
from the law of sin and of death. — Romans VIII. 1, 2.

XVII
THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT
From this point on we may be occupied with the
more positive and detailed construction of that life in
Christ which, according to St. Paul, constitutes, or is,
human salvation. There is but one truth of the being
in Christ, but there are stages or degrees in the realiza
tion or actualization of that truth. There is an object
ive being in Christ even prior to faith, which is indeed
the condition and content of faith; for how shall we
reaUze or actualize by faith our being in Christ, unless
our being in Christ is already a fact to be so reaUzed ?
Faith does not create a fact, it only accepts one; the
effecting or creative cause in our salvation is in God's
act, which comes first and consists in His placing us
in Christ for salvation. Our act of faith is only the
apprehending or realizing cause, and could not take
place at all if there were not already in God's act the
thing to be apprehended and realized. In the tmest
sense of distinctively Christian faith. Baptism may be
said to properly precede Faith; just as in every case the
act of adoption, or the active adopting, is prior to the
passive or acceptive being adopted. The act and
truth of Christian Baptism furnishes from God the

234 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
matter or content of Christian Faith, whose sole func
tion is to reaUze, to make actual or real, our baptism.
Not only is there a being in Christ prior even to our
faith, which faith does not effect but only accepts, but
even in the very first act of faith, or of spiritual appre
hension and appropriation on our part, there is already
the beginning of a subjective real, or reaUzed, being in
Christ, which, as St. Paul holds, is the earnest and
pledge to us of our complete real being in Him. But
these earlier stages of being in Christ will themselves
be better understood if we follow our principle of
defining the thing at once by what it is not in its pro
gress but in its completion. The complete being in
Christ means the complete being of Christ in us. The
branch is completely in the vine only when the Ufe of
the vine is completely in the branch. The life of
Christ, or the life in Christ, is best understood in its
perfection in Christ Himself, or in us conceived as
complete in Him.
In Christ Himseff, then, or in ourselves as we shall
be complete in Him, we come to study the law of
spiritual manhood. St. Paul calls it The law of the
spirit of life in Christ Jesus. He might equally well
have said The law of the life of the spirit in Christ
Jesus. There may be this difference: The law of the
Spirit of life, or The law of the life-giving Spirit, em
phasizes the universalify and the divine personaUty of
the One source and substance of all life, the Spirit
of God; whereas when we speak of The law of the Hfe
of the spirit — especially as, in the case of ourselves,

The Law of the Spirit 235
involving a contrast with the Hfe of the flesh — we
mean more immediately and emphatically the spirit as
our own. But what is our own spirit but the organ
of the universal or divine Spirit in us; and what is the
law of that Hfe-giving Spirit in us but the law of the Ufe
of our own spirit in Him ?
By the law of a thing we mean the mode of the
thing's own proper operation or activity, — how it acts
or operates when it is true to itself, or to its appointed
nature and function. The true activify or function
of the spirit is spiritual Ufe. We cannot define ontolog-
ically the what of the spirit or of spiritual Hfe, any
more than we can define that of natural life. What
we can do, and all that we need to do, in both cases,
is to define the mode or law of their actual or phenom-
enial action; that is to say, we can determine and
express the particular activities in which Hfe spiritual,
as well as Ufe natural, normally and properly manifests
itself, and in doing so we are stating its law. The
law of the Spirit of life, then, as it is revealed in actual
operation in Christ, or as it is manifested in an accom
pHshed human salvation, is the exact and actual form
or mode of God's activity in us in making us spiritual
men. Or, putting it the other way, the law of the life
of the spirit in us, as manifested in our salvation in
Christ, is the form or forms which our spirituaUfy
assumes in union with Christ and in the actual process
of our salvation in Him. We are dealing thus only
with the observable phenomena of spiritual Ufe; as to
the essential matter or substance of the Ufe of the

236 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
spirit, I have only to say, that as it is the Hfe of the
Spirit of God in us, so we only know that it is the Hfe
of our spirit in God. The Ufe of God as a Spirit is
communicable to aU beings who, by virtue of spirit
uality in themselves, are capable of relationship or
participation with His spiritual nature or personal
disposition and character.
I am more and more convinced that St. Paul gives
an exhaustive as well as exact inventory of the proper
activities or functions of the human spirit under the
famiUar terms. Faith, Hope, and Love. A perfect
faith would perfectly relate man to God, and the Hfe
of man to the life of God, as the objective perfect
cause of all perfection in himself. A perfect hope
would furnish the necessary subjective condition of
man's adequate or complete self-comprehension and
self-realization in God. A perfect love would con
tribute all the substance, or matter, or content of the
entire life of God in man, and the entire life of man in
God. The perfection of God in man, which is the
object of faith; the perfection of man in God, which is
the object of hope; and, in the third place, not alone
the perfect being of God Himself in man, or of man
himself in God, — but, by consequence of that, the
perfection in man of that which is most essentially
God, and the realization in God of all that is most
distinctively man, which is the divine principle and
ultimate reality of love or goodness, — what outside
of or more than this can constitute or dignify or bless
the true life of the spirit of man!

The Law of the Spirit 237
What has been said thus succinctly, and somewhat
mystically, of faith, hope, and love, as comprehending
all the proper functions or activities of the life of the
spirit of man here upon earth, is capable of being said
not only more in practical detail but in more scientific
form and in terms of more common experience. And
first with regard to the principle of Faith: There is no
disposition in general to underrate the part and power
of faith in the business of life. In one sense or another,
under one form or another, all of us recognize and
admit that the pith of enterprise and success in action
comes from the faith with which we act. Giving it at
once the widest application, he who has the most
faith in things as they are in the world is in the condi
tion and attitude to make the most of, and to derive
the most from, things as they are in the world. In
the application of this practical principle we are dis
posed to emphasize one side of it to the extent of
saying that, for the effectiveness of Ufe, it is a secondary
matter what we believe; the point is, how we believe it.
But, when again we look at the matter in its largest
view, no one surely will deny that it is more effective
for life to have faith in the true ends, or end, of life
than to have never so complete a faith in those ends
that are false and delusive. And surely, too, to have
a perfect faith in and to work with things as they are
in the world, as they are in reality friendly and assistant
to the true ends of life, differs by the whole heavens
from taking and using them, with all possible convic
tion, as they are not. I conceive the function of faith

238 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
to be, to bring the personality of man — his mind,
affections, and will, and so his life — into understand
ing, sympathizing, and co-operating attitude and rela
tion with the truth and beauty and goodness of things
as they are. I think we should cease from trying to
prove the unprovable, and take to knowing the
entirely knowable fact that the universe in which we
are is a personal universe. The realities of it are not
the mere elements or rudiments of matter and mechan
ism, but the highest activities of spirit and Ufe. Like
everything else, the universe itself is to be defined by
itseff at its highest and not at its lowest, not by its
lowest constituent elements but by its highest constituted
whole of divinest worth and value. The ultimate
reality of things as they are is the highest good of the
spirit, which is identical with the highest spiritual good
of goodness, or love.
Now, then, let us look at the distinctively Christian
faith as it is portrayed for us in this great eighth chapter
of the Epistle to the Romans. We are brought in the
faith of Jesus Christ into the most complete not only
understanding but unity with the entire working of aU
things as they are in the world. We see the meaning,
purpose, and glorious end of things; the painful but
necessary and salutary process of things; the seeming
and superficial enmity but deeper and real friendship
of the things of life for all who understand; the actual
working together for good of all things to those who
enter into the divine purpose and unite themselves with
the divine co-operation; the already assured more than

The Law of the Spirit 239
victory for those who, however deeply and darkly
involved for the present in things as they are, yet
know themselves to be one and at one with the spirit
and reason and issue of things as they are. Quite
apart from the question of the objective correspondence
of reality with the contents of such a subjective faith,
one must feel the advantage and power of such a feeling,
ff not knowing, ourselves upon such terms of amity
with the world with which we have all to do. Such a
faith in itself, apart from its warrant in fact, is assuredly
the best equipment for doing the most in the world
and making the most out of it. But how would the
power and advantage be multiplied by the addition,
that the subjective conviction of faith is, in the spiritual
order of the world, the ordinary and necessary means
and condition of the personal acting in it of a world
or kingdom of actual objective spiritual reaUty and
fact! More important to us than even the power and
advantage that comes from faith in the truth of things,
is that which comes from the truth and reaUty and
actual operation in us of the things of faith.
As to the question of the objective vaUdity in fact
of the subjective contents of faith, I can only repeat
words already used: for the things of the spirit we need
a more distinct and separate method of their own.
The things of sense experience are all without us and
need to be brought and proved to us in order to be
known. If we make the kingdom of God similarly an
order without us, Hke that of nature, then similarly,
too, it win depend upon proofs or verifications to us

240 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
of the same kind. But the kingdom of God is made
up altogether of what we ourselves are; not of what
things are to us or in their action upon us, but of what
we are to things and in our reaction with them. It is
the kingdom of our own attitude towards and relations
with our world of environment. The revelation of
God in Christ is not designed to add anything to our
natural or scientific knowledge. It is a revelation of
nothing to man, but of everything in man. We see all
God, all truth, all beauty, all good and goodness, in
Him, in man — and that is all we see. No more in
Jesus Christ than in us is God visible otherwise than
within Him, in the quality and character of His visible
manhood and consummate personalify. These things
of the life of the spirit itseff can never be proved to
the spirit; they can only be proved in it. They cannot
be known by proofs ; they can be proved only by know
ing. When our Lord says to us, I speak that I do
know and testify that I have seen; or when St. John
after Him says, What we have ourselves seen and
known of the Word of life that declare we unto you,
here is the testimony of spirit to spirit of the supreme
reaUty of things which are true only in the kingdom
or world of spirit. Knowing beyond all peradventure
and with the only immediate certainfy possible for
man — the certainty of his own interior personaUfy —
the essential things of the spirit, we may infer and
deduce connections of it with the things of external
and natural fact, — but the moment we do so we
must, in the sphere of the natural, submit ourselves

The Law of the Spirit 241
loyaUy to the principles and laws and tests of natural
knowledge. If the spiritual man is sole judge in things
exclusively of the spirit, so in the realm of natural
fact around us there must be no spiritual interference
with the autonomy of natural observation and con
clusion. Let us sum up the true spiritual contents of our faith
in Christ. First, there is the unqualified truth of the
perfect being of God in man, — not an immanental
being in him which is as true of one man as another
and as true of things as of men, but a transcendental
being in him, realized first in Christ and through Him
to be realized in us, a being in us in union of persons
and not mere relatedness of nature. This is the
primary truth of the kingdom of God within us, and
it is as verifiable by us from within as it is unprovable
or undisprovable to us from without. The Life that
was manifested to the world in Jesus Christ is a life
in which we are called to share, and just in proportion
as we do share it, as we approximate to His own
perfect participation in it, can we too say Hke Him,
I speak that I do know and testify that I have seen.
The second truth of our faith in Christ is the revela
tion and realization we have in him of ourselves in God.
Christianity reveals God not merely as love, but in
the highest personal form of love, as universal and
perfect Father. As the supreme perfection and bless
edness of God consists in what He is, in the unsurpass
able limit of His divine selfhood or personalify, so the
supreme activify of God in the world which He has

242 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
made not Himseff is that of His divine Self-communi
cation. To other Himself in others than Himseff, that
is the highest work, the divinest act of love, of which
even God Himself, or Love itseff, is capable. So
Christianify, without ever adequately saying or knowing
why, yet forever reiterates and insists, that God in the
Godhead itseff is essentiaUy and eternally Father,
and in the Kosmos, in all the infinite creation, is
everywhere Father, and in the nature and destinature
of man is at last and forever to be known and crowned
Father. Fatherhood is love concrete and etemal in
God Himself. It is love ivhiAderty; — love inherent
and essential in the divine nature and action. Sonship
is love irpo^opiKO'; — self -reproduced, no longer in itself
but in another, — the other, a veritable other-seff, with
whom it is one not in a numerical, natural unify, but
a new, personal and spiritual unify. The etemal
Sonship which is divine in Christ becomes human
through Him. It extends and imparts itseff to em
brace and include humanify, and in humanify the whole
creation of which it is the head and end. To know
ourselves in Christ, then, and in Christ to know our
selves sons of God and heirs of His own etemal life,
is indeed to know ourselves with a knowledge that
transcends all human science and of which faith is
the only possible human vehicle or expression. The
difference between fatherhood and sonship is extended
into that between love and grace; sonship is the father
in the son, grace is love in its object — what we might
call applied love, love in energy or actuaUfy. We

The Law of the Spirit 243
speak, therefore, of the love of the Father and the
grace of the Son, the one standing for what God is to
us, the other for what God is in us. The one is love
in itself, in its source or origin, the eternal divine
disposition toward us ; the other is love with us, in act,
in divine operation within us.
As the first two tmths of our faith in Christ might
be called simply those of the Father and the Son, so
the third may be designated that of the Spirit. Or,
to put it in the other way, as the first two may be
called those of the divine love and the divine grace, so
the third may be named that of the divine koinonia.
This word is not adequately represented by communion
or fellowship. St. Paul objects to the word mediator
in the phraseology of Christianity, because a mediator
is not of one but of two; whereas God and man are
not two but one in Christ, and there is nothing, not
even a mediator, between them. So I object to the
words communion and fellowship simply as not going
all the way of that unity of God and man in Christ
which is the truth of the Holy Ghost. The truth of
the Spirit of God is the truth of the spirit of man.
The koinonia is not real or complete so long as the
spirits are two and not one. We have it in its complete
ness only as the eternal, personal Spirit of God is the
actual personal spirit of the man. We have it at all,
in its beginnings and growth, only to the extent to
which the Spirit of God has become our own spirit.
God is indeed in the truest sense with us; but without
us or within us no man hath seen or can see God

244 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
otherwise than in what God is in himself and as him
seff — that is, in what he himself is and the spirit he
is of in God. The truths of faith, then, are these three:
the truth of God Himself in us, the truth of ourselves
in God, and the truth of the perfected not merely
external relation but internal unity or oneness of God
and ourselves.
Having given so much attention to the principle of
faith as the first great function of the spirit, we may
deal more briefly with the other two. I make the
great point of distinguishing the action and part of
hope from those of faith because the meaning of the
one has been too much lost in the overshadowing Ught
of the other. Faith has to do with the infinite not-
ourselves or about-ourselves that is without us; hope
is properly concerned about ourselves. It is a just
charge against Christianity that it has been made too
much a doing for humanity from without, and too
little the doing of humanity from within. It is a waiting
upon other powers to take the place of our own and
determine our nature and destiny, if not independently
of ourselves, yet with only a negative and passive part
in it of our own. Nothing is more necessary for our
Christianity than to make it clear to us that there is no
such thing as a grace for, which is not also a grace in,
us; that God works in us to will and to do in the matter
of our salvation not in mere co-operation but only in
actual identity with our own working out every jot
and tittle of our own salvation, through His grace
working not merely with but in us. As faith is not

The Law of the Spirit 245
enough in itself or alone, and apart from the objective
reality of its objects, so hope is a real power only in
conjunction with the inherent and essential truth of
its object. The only proper object and end of Christian
hope is what we ourselves may be and do and become
in Christ, that is to say, in God. We do indeed dis
card or lose ourselves in and for God in Christ, but it
is only to re-find ourselves in all God is in us and we
in consequence are in Him. Christianity does indeed
say, with Christ Himself, I can do nothing of myself,
— but only to add. Because not of myself, because of
God in me, therefore I can be all things and do all
things and endure and overcome and become all
things. It is a right and a great thing, as to beUeve
that God is all things to and for us, so to hope that in
response we can be all things to and for God. We do
not in Christianity reduce our hopes and desires to
zero for their vanity and futility; rather, for the glory
and the certainty of them, do we raise them to infinity
in Christ. We enter upon a career which means in
the end that is assured to us — perfect as our Father
in heaven is perfect. St. Paul says: If God be for us,
— there is his faith; if God is for us, all is for us, and
all things are in reality, no matter what the appearance,
working together for our good. What then? Why,
if God is for us then what can be against us ? What
can separate us from Him or defeat us in Him? In
all that can possibly befall us we are already more
than conquerors through Him that loved us. There
is his hope — a hope assuredly not in all things done

246 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
only for him, but equally in all things to be done in
him and by him.
The permanent, essential, and eternal function of
the spirit is of course that to which faith and hope
are but the entrance and introduction. To know God
in ourselves, to know ourselves in God, is but the
beginning of knowing what God is in Himself and us.
Unhappily there is here again a practical divorce —
not indeed between the knowing and loving God and
the knowing and loving what God is, because that
were impossible, but — between very much supposed
knowledge and love of God, and any real knowledge
and love of what He is. Is it not something more than
a theoretical inquiry — a serious question indeed of
practical fact and import — which of two men is more
personally acceptable with God, the man who not
having faith in God as a Person, nor knowledge of
the hope set before us in Christ, nevertheless sincerely
loves the Thing that God is and gives himself to it, or
the man who, devoted to the Person of God, and
zealous in His cause, does not love nor live the Thing
that alone God is and that alone is God either in
Himself or in us ? Surely it is neither amiss nor un
necessary to insist, as St. Paul for Christ and Chris
tianity so much insists, that not a true faith in the
truth of God, nor a true hope in the truth of ourselves,
is after all the ultimate thing and function of the
spirit, but that reaUty alone which is the truth of God
and of ourselves.

XVIII
THE MIND OF THE SPIRIT

For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are after the spirit the things of the spirit. For the
mind of the flesh is death; but the mind of the spirit is hfe and peace:
because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not sub
ject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be : and they that are in
the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the
spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man
hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His. — Romans VIII. 5-9.

xvin
THE MIND OF THE SPIRIT
What has been said of the law of the spirit's activity,
both as the law of the divine Spirit of Hfe in us and
as the law of the Hfe of our own spirit in God, may
seem to be beside the immediate course of the Apostle's
reasoning which we profess to be foUowing. I return
to it in the analysis of that mind of the spirit which the
Apostle describes as being life and peace. The mind
of the spirit, which St. Paul contrasts with that of the
flesh, is in the first place, according to him, based upon
the reaUty of an objective fact, — the fact of a con
summated and accompHshed act in Jesus Christ.
When just before he had summed up his vivid account
of man's natural condition in the exclamation, O
wretched man that I am! who shaU deUver me out of
the body of this death ? — the great change of mental
attitude and feeUng found instantaneous and decisive
expression in the words, I thank God through Jesus
Christ our Lord. The new spiritual status is accepted
as soUdly founded and completely established in an
act or fact which has existence as yet solely in the
personal experience of the One Man who before God
represents all men. Jesus Christ had in Himself, in
249

250 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
the unique achievement of His individual manhood,
broken the bands and abolished the slavery of sin and
death. The second point in the mind of the spirit is neces
sarily the recognition of the significance of that objective
act or fact for ourselves, or the relation of our spirit
or spiritual status to the deliverance or redemption
wrought in our common humanity by the individual
act of Jesus Christ. The truth of the relation in
question may be expressed as follows: The act of
divine redemption wrought in Jesus Christ is — rep
resentatively, potentially, and really — an act of God
wrought in humanity; and conversely the act of self-
redemption accompHshed by our Lord in His humanity
is in all respects similarly an act of humanity wrought
in God ; that is to say, in the love and grace and feUow
ship of God, as reaUzed and manifested in the person
of Jesus Christ. This relation of Christ and His act
of redemption to us, and of us to Him and it, is, accord
ing to St. Paul, the divinely significant truth of Baptism.
Baptism is an act of God relating us to Christ and to
Christ's redemptive act. It not only makes us one
with Him, but it makes His death to sin our death to
sin and His life to God our Iffe to God. This, one
might say, is only representative. But God never
merely represents; His representation is always at the
very least potential of reality; and in this case aU it
wants and awaits is our realization through faith to
make it reality in ourselves. St. Paul knows himself
after his baptism only in Christ; but he knows no

The Mind of the Spirit 251
Christ but Him crucified, — Christ's death not only
the representation but the power and the reality of
his own death to sin, as Christ's Ufe is of his own risen
Ufe to God. The substance of Christianity is indeed
to realize our baptism.
The mind of the spirit cannot but recognize two
senses, or at any rate two vndely separated stages of
meaning, in that word to realize. In its entirety, and
in its fulness of meaning even here, it means to bring
to reality or to make real. What a truth it is that
we realize ourselves, accomplish our end and destiny,
in Jesus Christ! What a meaning it gives to faith to
know that there is positively no Hmit to its function
and power to realize or actuaUze God's Word to us;
that God's Word to us, which is Christ Himself, is not
only as full of meaning, but as full of power, and not
only as full of power or potentiality, but as full of
actuality or reality to us and in us, as our faith will
make it, or will suffer it to be! It is Uterally true that
in the things and Hfe of the spirit it is with us precisely
and exactly according to our faith. Our faith is the
measure of ourselves. There would be no impossibility
in an instantaneous sanctification or even glorification,
if there were none in an instantaneous perfection of
faith. But faith like every other human faculty is a
thing of growth and progress. We might be made like
Christ in a moment, if we could know Christ in a
moment or a day. But to know Christ is to know our
selves and sin, and God and hoHness. To reaUze, then,
our baptism in the fuUest sense would be to bring to

252 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
reality through faith all God's grace to us in Christ,
not only a representative or potential but an actual
and completed death to sin and Hfe to God; nothing
less than that can be the meaning and end of all true
repentance and faith. But seeing, in the thing itself
and in ourselves, the impossibiUty of such an imme
diate realization of God's gift of life in Jesus Christ,
we fall back necessarily upon a lower form of realiza
tion, a reaUzation, as I have expressed it, not in the
attainment of fact but in the proleptic appropriation of
faith. To know oneself is not necessarily to know oneself
unto perfection. There is none of us who does not
know himself, as himself, although the best of us
knows but little of his whole self. So any one of us
may not only know his life in Christ, but may know
that his life is complete in Christ, although as yet he
may know very little of all that is to be known of either
Christ or himseff. It is not a spiritual impossibiUty,
or even difficulty, to know this much; that the change
from spiritual death to spiritual life has got to take
place in ourselves and to be an act of ourselves; that
it has to be an attitude on our part towards sin whose
meaning and end can be nothing less than a death of
sin to ourselves or of ourselves to sin, or on the positive
side an attitude towards God and holiness whose only
end can be the Ufe of holiness in ourselves; that that is
just precisely what Jesus Christ not only means but is;
and that Jesus Christ is not only God's revelation to
us but God's realization in us of all that He is in Him-

The Mind of the Spirit 253
self. What do we mean when we say that repentance
and remission of sin are preached to us in His name,
or in Him? Is it not, that we see in Him a divine
grace and power of repentance unto the death to sin,
and of faith unto the life of holiness? What do we
mean when we speak of Him as the Baptizer with the
Holy Ghost? Is it not that we are baptized in Him
with a divine grace and power to die His death to sin
and live His Hfe to holiness and God? What though
an eternity may be profitably occupied with bringing
this truth to its full reality, to being perfect as our
Father in heaven is perfect, to knowing Christ as He
is and being made like Him, — what we may be thus
forever realizing in fact may we not at once realize in
at least implicit and ever unfolding thought, in a faith
that shall be forever shining brighter and brighter unto
the perfect day? It is this forereaching power of
faith, to see the end already in the beginning and to
possess the gfft in the promise, that religion makes
such valuable use of. What ff we had to wait for the
possession and enjoyment of its gffts until the end!
On the contrary it is only thi-ough foreknowledge and
desire and pursuit and assured confidence and ultimate
attainment of it, in other words it is only as it has
been from the beginning an end of faith and hope,
that the end itseff can become to us at last one of
actual realization in fact. So it is that our present
spiritual status is one of faith and hope, and that not
alone our justification, or perfect acceptance in Christ
for aU He is, but everytliing that is to be ours in fact

254 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
in Christ is already ours in faith in Him; and in the
confident faith of man as in the assured grace of God,
whatever may be predicated as true of him is predicable
as though true of us. God's Word to faith and God's
Spirit working in and through faith will as assuredly
fuffil themselves in the realm of spirit, as when in that of
nature God said. Let there be light, and there was light.
The mind of the spirit rests upon an objective fact,
upon an act of life which has been accomplished before
it and for it, and which carries in it not only the fuU
meaning but the efficient potentiality and the ultimate
realization and reaUfy of its own actual Hfe in God.
The relation of the human spirit to that act of Ufe in
Christ is one primarily of faith. It is the privilege
and province of faith to see in Christ God revealed in
the life of man and man realized in the life of God.
There is nothing that can intervene between the spirit
and that fact, except the spirit's own want of faith in
it. Where the faith exists, nothing separates it in
degree or in time even from the completeness of the
fact but its own finite limitation and its need of growth
from finitude to infinity. But faith is already fact,
where it rests upon fact however at present above and
beyond it. We are partakers with Christ, we are
partakers of Christ, ff we hold the beginning of our
hope steadfast unto the end. But the mind of the
spirit is no mere quiescent or acquiescent state; it is
no resting still and satisfied in a condition of objective
salvation, a salvation for or instead of its own. It is
the highest energy or activity of the spirit itself. It is.

The Mind of the Spirit 255
as the Apostle describes it, the actual working within
us of the law of the Spirit of Ufe, or of the law of the
Ufe of the spirit. Life is the busiest and most active
thing in the world, and the Ufe of God in the spirit of
man has a great and endless task before it, — nothing
less than to know Christ and be like Him, perfect as
God Himself is perfect.
However inchoate and imperfect the present Ufe of
the spirit, it is already not only Ufe but peace, when it
knows that it is working straight along the Hues as
well of the perfect truth of itself as of the etemal truth
of God. Faith, as we have seen, is then indeed the
greatest power when it rests in that which is itself the
greatest power to the tmest ends of life. And not only
such a power but the only such power is the power of
God working through human faith unto human salva
tion. And human salvation is nothing else or less than
living the life of God and working the work of God.
It may be very pertinently asked. What is the Hfe of
the spirit here apart from the life of the flesh ? — using
the flesh, as I think we may, not in its acquired bad
sense, but as St. Paul himself, for example, uses it
when he says. The Hfe I now live in the flesh I live in
the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave
Himself for me. I think we may illustrate how we
may Uve the life of the spirit without withdrawing from
the flesh, or from the world, in their truer and normal
sense, or without taking refuge in so-called other-
worldUness. Is there anything overstrained in our
Lord's demand that in all things we shall seek first

256 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
God's kingdom and righteousness, and in His promise
that then all things else shall be added to us ? There
are in every act in the flesh or in the world, in their
indifferent or colorless sense, two parts — the act itself
and the spirit of the act, or what the act is and what
the man is in the act. Now surely no one will deny
that in any act or human activify the important thing
is the man himself, or what spirit, or spiritual quaUfy
and character, he is of. Can any other greatness or
success in the act really compensate for its not being
a right act, or for the man being unrighteous in it?
So far from Ufe in the spirit, while we are where and
as we are, meaning a Ufe of abstraction from Ufe in
the flesh and in the world, I hold that any such Ufe
is for us as inconceivable as it is impossible. Lffe in
the spirit means abstraction from the flesh and the
world precisely in the sense and in the degree in which
these are actually sinful, or are contradictory of the
real and true life of the spirit or of the man himseff.
To go yet further, I have contended that as we are
constituted and placed in the world our hoHness or
divine Hfe are as much conditioned by one actual atti
tude, as our sin and spiritual death consist in another
and the opposite attitude, towards the flesh and the
world as they are. In other words, so far as our ex
perience and knowledge can yet go, our present rela
tion to the flesh and the world is as necessary to our
hoHness or our life of the spirit, as it is the cause or
occasion of our sinfulness or our indulgence in the
lusts of the flesh.

The Mind of the Spirit 257
How Hfe in the spirit is in itseff Ufe and peace wiU
perhaps better appear if we consider how Ufe in the
flesh is in itseff death. That Ufe in the flesh is sin
does not mean that the flesh in itseff is sinful. This
may be made clear by an analogy. Men of modem
scientific mind speak of what we have caUed original
sin as "our brute inheritance." Accepting, for the
sake of illustration, the phrase and what it denotes, —
what of brute or animal nature man inherits as the
raw material of his earthly Ufe is not in itseff evil.
On the contrary, it is quite the proper stuff out of
which to make himseff or his manhood. Whether one
makes a man or a beast of himseff depends upon the
use he makes of identically the same material. Just
the same appetites, desires, affections, and passions
which controUed by freedom and conformed to reason
make the man and invest him with all his virtues, not
so controUed and conformed keep him back in the
Hfe of his brute ancestry and constitute what we call
his bestiaUty. Our vice does not consist in the fact
that we are first animals, but in the fact that we do
not become afterwards men. Virtue consists in the
addition or appHcation of reason and freedom to the
lffe and activities of the animal nature. Quite in
analogy with this, Christianity stands to us for a yet
higher reach or stage of human Hfe. As our natural
manhood consists in our no longer Hving in or according
to our lower animal nature but in or in accordance
with the higher human endowment of reason and free
will, so the spiritual manhood imparted to us in Jesus

258 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
Christ consists in our no longer living in ourselves, in
our natural or mere human power, but in the com
pleteness of personal oneness with God into which in
Christ we are admitted. The natural manhood which
we thus renounce for the spiritual one is no more sinful
in itself or in its order than the animal nature that
preceded it. We do not say that the flesh, in the
sense of our natural manhood, is sinful, but only that
no man can in the flesh be sinless. However blameless
an animal is in doing so, the man who abides in his
animal nature cannot be other than a vicious being;
and however necessary and high a thing man may be
in himself and in the exercise of his human endowments
and powers, the man who remains in these and wiU
not go up higher into personal union and alliance with
the divine and universal Source of all holiness, right
eousness, and eternal Ufe, condemns himseff to Hve in
a lower world of sin and death. The mind of the
flesh is death, for the simple reason that the things
that make for and that constitute life are not in or of
or by the flesh but come from beyond or above it.
The soul that knows nothing of faith or prayer or
grace, of that union and communion with God which
becomes visible to us and participable by us in Christ,
of the holiness which is God's own Spirit and nature
and breath of life in us, — knows not all that of which,
as the knowing is in itself life and peace, so the not
knowing is of itself sin and death. To know God is
the only real life as to serve Him is the only trae free
dom.

XIX
THE REDEMPTION OF THE
BODY

And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the
spirit is hfe because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that
raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you. He that raised up
Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies
through His Spirit that dwelleth in you.
So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the
flesh: for if ye Uve after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the spirit ye
mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led
by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For ye received not
the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of
adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself
beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: and if
children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if
so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with
Him. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy
to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed to usward. For
the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of
the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of
its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the
creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption
into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now. And not only so, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits
of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for
our adoption, to w^, the redemption of our body. — Romans VHI.
10-23.

XIX
THE REDEMPTION OF THE BODY
The Apostle begins a discussion in which the body
is the leading subject with the words. If Christ is in
you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is
life because of righteousness; and ends it thus. We who
have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves
groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption (the
consummation of our sonship), to wit, the redemption
of our body.
However real and thorough one's spiritual appre
hension and acceptance of Jesus Christ, however com
plete one's spiritual self-identffication with Christ, the
new divine Hfe of the spirit is not ipso facto or at once
communicated to and made that of the body. A man
may be full of an initial faith, hope, and love, which
are the signs and activities of the Spirit of God and
of the new life of his own spiritual self; he may have
so appropriated to himself the righteousness of God
in Jesus Christ as to be before God justified through
Him; and still he not only may but will long be aware
that the new life of his spirit is very far as yet from
being correspondingly the life of his body. On the
coiitrary, he will, and the more in proportion to his
361

262 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
earnestness and sincerity, discover to his cost that
however the spirit in him may be Hfe because of right
eousness (because as yet of the righteousness of Christ,
not his own), the body in him is stiU dead because of
sin. But, the Apostle goes on to say, ff the Spirit of
Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dweUeth in
you. He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead
shall quicken also your mortal bodies through His
Spirit that dwelleth in you. We cannot exclude from
the ultimate operation of this promise the physical
resurrection of our bodies in a future Ufe; but the
promise has a much more immediate appUcation than
that to the spiritual business of our Ufe now and here.
Taken in its narrower bearing within ourselves it is a
promise to the natural in us too that it shaU be taken
up into the glory of the spiritual. And taken in its
wider sweep of prophecy it means that the whole
natural order of which man is the head, in what we
caU Adam, was predestined and is destined to be
taken up and included in the higher spiritual order of
which man is still the head in Christ.
With regard to the narrower view indicated above,
or the assurance that if Christ is in us spiritually He
will also be in us naturaUy, or in other words that He
who has given us spiritual life in Christ wiU also
quicken us into natural or bodily Hfe in Him, it is to be
observed that the agent in both these acts or opera
tions is the Spirit of God and of Christ. This would
seem to indicate that the pronrise to the body is, pri
marily at least, not th&t of mere physical continuance

The Redemption of the Body 263
of life after death but that of spiritual participation,
here and more perfectly there, in the higher Hfe of the
spirit. In other words, the promise is that the Ufe of
God revealed and communicated to us in Christ, into
which the spirit of man may enter at once through
faith and hope, or what we call justification, shall by
another and slower process, which we shall have to
describe as sanctification, become the life of the body
also. And the body thus sanctified or spiritualized
will be the spiritual body, — any physical change or
progress to ensue in "the body that shall be" being
intimately associated with the spiritual change that
has preceded and induced it.
There is an older analogy which may assist our
understanding of the process just described. There
is nothing of rationality or of moraUty in itself in our
animal nature, and yet by the exercise in it and upon
it of the higher human reason and freedom the animal
nature may be rationalized and moraUzed. According
to Aristotle the reason and the free personal will are
or constitute the man, as such, or as differentiated from
his lower, vegetable and animal, natures. There is a
pure or intellectual, dianoetic, virtue of the reason
itself — the rational faculty, by means of which we
see and know things as they are and as they ought to
be — and this pure virtue of the reason we may call
Wisdom. But there is another, practical or applied,
virtue which does not reside in the reason itself, al
though that is its origin and source, but within the
animal appetites, desires, and passions, to which it

264 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
has been communicated by discipline and habit. So
that in the truly virtuous man not only is the reason
itself a right reason, and the wiU a strong and free will,
but the very animal nature itself has become, as I said,
rationalized and moralized, or made virtuous. Such
a man has not by the continuous exercise of his reason
and wiU to make or keep himself moral or virtuous.
The animal in him has itself become so, and is so of
itseff. And that process is the making of the man.
The animal nature is the stuff or material out of which
in the exercise of his personal endowments of reason
and freedom he constructs himseff, he molds and
shapes his life, his character, his destiny.
Let us apply a similar reasoning to the matter before
us. As it is the function of the reason to rationaUze
or moralize the animal in us, so is it the function of
the spirit to spirituaUze or sanctify the natural in us.
The right reason or wise man sees and knows things
as they are and ought to be, but the man is actuaUy
rational or wise only as he has impressed his reason
or wisdom upon the raw material of his animal nature,
that is, upon his appetites, desires, affections, and
passions. The reason is the man, — but not so long
as it is with him only the abstract or theoretical reason.
It is the man in proportion as it has become concrete
and practical in all his body, pa]i:s, and passions, for
apart from these the man has no real existence. The
meaning of the spiritual in us is well expressed by the
poet, whose language we take the Hbei1;y of extending
or generalizing a Uttle: Ourselves are ours, we know

The Redemption of thp Body 265
not how; ourselves are ours to make them God's.
Through reason and freedom we become ourselves
and our own. Through the Spirit and our own
spirits we make ourselves and our own — God's; arid
so make God our own and ourselves. It is necessary
that we shall become ourselves; but it is then no less
necessary that we shall transcend ourselves, for in fact
we never become ourselves until we have grown up
from ourselves into oneness with God. The spirit,
or the spiritual, in man sees and apprehends iji Jesus
Christ God in himself and himself in God. Jesus
Christ is to him God his righteousness, God his life.
Yet more truly than that the reason is the man, may
we say that the spirit of the man is the man; the reason
is the man in himself, the spirit is the man in Gofi-
What the spirit of the man is, the man is; and when
the man in spirit, or in faith, truly sees and knows
himself in Christ, God sees and knows him in Christ.
But a mere ideal or theoretical faith or being in Christ
goes no further than a mere intellectual wisdom or
pure reason. It is only applied faith, as it is only
appUed reason, that is of any practical account. The
faith that holds Christ in itseff but cannot impart or
impress Christ to and upon the nature and the life is
not a real faith. And what is the nature or the Ufe
of man? Is it not all the animal and the natural or
what St. Paul calls the psychical in him? We know
nothing of a purely or abstractly spiritual manhood.
The spiritual man is a spiritual wan, not a spiritual
something else. He is a man whose manhood, whose

266 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
animal and human constitution and nature, have
become spiritualized by the indwelUng and sanctifying
Spirit of God and of Christ, and in them of ourselves.
If God in Christ is truly in our faith, and so in our
spirit, then He wiU be in our bodies and in all the
motions and activities of our natural lives. It is not
in being holy outside and apart from our bodies and
bodily Uves that we are spiritual men; it is only by
becoming holy in and through these that we act by
act and step by step become spiritual men. Our
bodies, parts, and passions are stiU the stuff out of
which we shape and fashion ourselves. Saints and
sinners are made, by opposite processes, out of the
same material. Whatever our future bodies are to be,
the part which the Holy Spirit has to perform in
determining them takes place largely here, and it
consists in the daily discipUne of spirituaUzing our
natural affections, our bodily Hves, our earthly and
human selves. We look for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus
Christ, who shaU fashion anew the body of our humiUa
tion, that it may be conformed to the body of His
glory, according to the working whereby He is able to
subject aU things unto Himseff. But the fashioning
anew of our bodies into the likeness of His is not a
future act of physical new-creation, but an ever present
act of spiritual new-creation.
We are at once then, psychical or natural men and
spiritual men — just as we are at the same time both
animal and rational men, however the two may puU
apart in us — and the function of the spiritual is not

The Redemption of the Body 267
to sever itseff by scission from the natural but to
subdue the natural to itseff and take it up into its
own higher activities and Hfe. Our bodies, too, are
members of Christ and temples of the Holy Ghost.
The business of human Hfe is to compose the strifes
which are not orrly incident to it but are determinative
and constitutive of it. Whether a man shaU be animal,
or rational and free and human; whether a man wiU
be natural and earthly and of himseff only, or spiritual,
of God, and divine also, — these are not merely ques
tions, they are the essential and determining issues of
human nature, Hfe, and destiny. Man is made to be
ever going up higher, taking with him his whole seff
and leaving behind only the temporary, the accidental,
the incomplete, abnormal, or sinful. The natural, the
body, in a true sense the flesh, are part of us, and the
sin in them consists only in their non-subjection to
the spirit. There is no spiritual step, no new breath of
the Spirit, no participation of the Hfe of God, no access
of holiness, no act or attainment of divine righteousness,
that does not require and exact of us some submission
or sacrifice of the body, the flesh, our natural selves.
This must needs be so, for the reason already given:
As sin consists for us only in yielding to the lusts of
our fleshly natures or the desires of our earthly selves,
so holiness or spirituaUfy originates or exists or acts
for us at all only in subduing these lower passions in
the interest of higher and hoUer affections. There is
KteraUy no rising for us into our higher selves except
over the bodies of our dead lower selves.

268 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
The question with any man is not whether the spirit
ual and the natural man do not coexist and strive for
the mastery in him, but only this, which part he him
self is of in the strffe. Of many, let us hope, there is
no doubt of their being on the right side. God knoweth
them that are His, and we are encouraged to beUeve
knows many more than are visible to us. Of many,
alas, there is too much doubt, or too Uttle doubt, on
the wrong side. There can be no question but that
in the inevitable issues that so vitally determine our
very selves a man must be definitely of one part or the
other. If we are in doubt, God knows, and as it is
with us so it cannot but be for us; we are the deter
miners of ourselves and our destinies. To be on the
one side or the other of that question is to be in the
flesh or in the spirit. If we are in the flesh or are Hving
according to the flesh, we are, the Apostle says, going to
die, — because the lffe he speaks of is only in the
spirit and through the Spirit of God. If, on the con
trary, we are, in the spirit and by the Spirit of God,
subduing the flesh or the body, and when necessary
mortifying its evil deeds and extirpating its sinful lusts,
then we shall live, — because it is in just such victories
of our higher over our lower selves that our Ufe affirms
and accomplishes itself.
To be ever so little in the spirit must m£an to be aU.
If it does so mean, then in God's sight it is all. The
least of the Spirit of God in us is earnest and pledge
of the whole. The first word of the Spirit to us is
assurance of the fact of our sonship to God: Thje

The Redemption of the Body 269
Spirit beareth witness with our Spirit that we are
children of God. The earUest consciousness and utter
ance of that fact is properly an infantile one — a cry —
Abba, Father! Thank God, we have not to wait to
know aU it is going to mean and to involve to be son
of God in the end in order to be already sons of God
in the very beginning. It is through being sons of
God that we are enabled to become sons of God; if,
on the contrary, we had to become in order to be, we
should never be sons of God. For it is a far and a
long cry from the Abba, Father of our infancy in
Christ to our maturity in Him, from the smaU begin
ning of our faith to the final attainment of our fruition.
But if we are children, we shall be heirs. AU that we
are in faith only we shall be no less in fact also. AU
that sonship now only means to us it shall completely
be to us. The inheritance which now is Christ's orrly,
but shall be no less ours also when we shall have learned
to know Him as He is and been made like Him, — it is
no mere participation in any outward state or condition,
it is no physical transformation wrought from without in
ourselves or our environment; it is what we ourselves
shaU be when Christ shaU be no longer faith to us but
fact in us, when God shaU have wrought in us what He
has wrought in Him — in Him as only the first-fruits of
ourselves, the first-begotten from the dead, our forerun
ner and leader. For observe carefuUy the condition upon
which we shaU inherit: If children, then heirs; heirs of
God and joint-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer
with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him.

270 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
As to the sufferings with Christ which are not only
the conditions but the means of our being glorified
with Him, we are to remember that it is only in the
light of our Lord's own sufferings, and of the new
meaning and virtue He gives them, that they are
spoken of as they are in the Gospel. As the sufferings
of Christ abound unto us, even so our comfort also
aboundeth through Christ. Sufferings are not in them
selves, and by no means to all, means of exaltation.
Only in one way or event do they become or are they
made so, — when they are used by God and received
by ourselves in the direct line of their final cause or
purpose. The difficult or painful or variously trying
experiences inseparable from human life are the sole
conceivable, if not the sole possible, means of deter
mining as well as of testing or proving the personal or
spiritual quality of human life. As has been more
than once said, so far as our own spiritual characters
are concerned, as touching the vital issues of vice or
virtue, sin or holiness, the conditions of one are identi
cally those of the other. Virtue and vice, or holiness
and sin, are opposite attitudes and actions towards the
same things, and it is only in relation with the things
which occasion them that, for us at least, they can
originate or exist. If there were no occasion for
cowardice there would be none for courage, and there
could be no courage. If there were no powerful
temptation to sin there would be no powerful incentive
to hoHness, and we should not know what holiness
means. To Christ, and to the spiritual man, all the

The Redemption of the Body 271
experiences of Hfe, so far as they are trials at all, are
simply parts of the one question of sin or hoHness,
which is the question of Ufe or death. The so-caUed
mystery of evil precisely as it is in the world is the
only solution, because it is the necessary condition, of
all the true good of the world. For good, spiritual,
moral, or personal, is the overcoming of evil. We shall
not know Jesus Christ or ourselves, until we learn for
ourselves that all the comfort of life, all its strength,
victory, and blessedness, comes only through the
sufferings of Christ.
The sufferings of this present time are indeed not
worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be
revealed. The affiiction seems light and but for a
moment which is working for us more and more
exceedingly an eternal weight of glory. But this is so
only as, with our Lord, we are looking not at the things
that are seen, but at things that are not seen. That
is to say, as we are seeing deep into the meaning and
looking far to the end of human experience. For —
the Apostle goes on to say — the earnest expectation of
the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of
God. The creation here is the natural creation, or
what we caU nature, meaning primarily at least the
natural part in ourselves. We ourselves, which have
the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan
within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the
redemption of our body. Our adoption, meaning here
the completion or consummation of our divine sonship,
waits upon the final release of the body too, the admis-

272 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
sion of all our natural selves into the liberty of the hoU
ness and life of God. Christ in faith, or in the spiritual
man, waits upon and is only complete in Christ in
fmition or fact, in the natural man, — meaning by
the natural man all that is essential and permanent in
our natural selves, the reason made right and the will
become free, the desires all purified and the affections
refined and sanctified. For I repeat that we shall be
no longer ourselves or men, if to be spiritual means to
cease to be natural, and is not rather the spiritualizing
or divinizing and so the glorifying or spiritually per
fecting of the natural, which is ourselves.
The natural in us, our nature, became subject to
vanify not of itseff but through us, or by our act. Sin
originates not in our nature, or in our body, but in
ourselves. It is distinctively not a thing or quaUty of
the nature but of the person. But sin immediately
and deeply involves the nature or the body, because
while it is not of these it is in and through them. They
are the sole means and instruments of it, and reap the
corriiption and curse of it. The prorrrise and the hope
is that as the body or nature was subjected to sin and
made the instrument of it, not of itseff or its own wiU,
so by being subdued to and made the instmment and
Servant of holiness it shall be delivered from the bond
age of cormption into the liberty of the glory of the
sons of God. That is the burden of the Apostle's
earnest exhortation to us. Let not sin therefore reign
in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts
thereof; neither present your members unto sin as

The Redemption of the Body 273
instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves
unto God, as aUve from the dead, and your members
as instruments of righteousness unto God.
St. Paul would seem to teach that what the spiritual
is to the natural in ourselves, spiritual humanity is to
nature in general. The whole natural order is but
the body and organ of a spiritual order which it exists
in order to serve. Even what we caU natural evil,
the seeming sin of nature, exists not for itseff but for
spiritual ends beyond and above itseff, of which we
can see enough to divine ff not always interpret the
rest. Spiritual good would be impossible in a world
in which there was nothing of natural evil; that is, of
what we caU natural evil, for natural evil is often the
truest spiritual good, ff not the condition and means of
aU spiritual good. Suppose that instead of things as
they are, or as they appear, there were on the contrary
not only no evil in fact but — what one would then
suppose ought to and would be the case — none in
semblance. Would there then be any virtue or any
righteousness ? And ff it is answered that there must
always be the semblance, ff not the possibiUfy or
actuaUfy, of evil, — then I say that that semblance is
itself the evil and a very real one.
But in realify there is nothing evil but spiritual evil,
but evil in the spirit or in the wiU. The whole world
of nature, of natural creation, becomes evil or good
with ourselves. It is all evil because we are all evil,
and it wiU become aU good when we are all good.
As long as we are siimers, it is the condition and

274 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
occasion and instmment of our sin; when we change
our attitude and relation to it, it becomes not one
whit less the condition and opportunify and instmment
to us of aU our holiness and righteousness and life.
Let us be indeed children of God, and all nature and
the whole natural creation shall in due time be deUvered
from the bondage of corruption into the Hberfy of the
glory of the children of God.

XX
THE PROCESS OF DIVINE
GRACE

By hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for who
hopeth for that which he seeth ? But if we hope for that which we
see not, then do we with patience wait for it.
In like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know
not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh inter
cession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered; and He that
searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because
He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
And we know that to them that love God all things work together for
good, even to them that are called according to His purpose. For
whom He foreknew/ He also foreordained to be conformed to the
image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many breth
ren: and whom He foreordained, them He also called: and whom
He called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He
also glorified.
What then shall we say to these things ? If God is for us, who is
against us ? He that spared not His own Son, but dehvered Him up
for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things ?
Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect ? it is God that
justifieth; who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ Jesus that
died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right
hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall sep
arate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or anguish, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword ? Even as
it is written. For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we were
accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we
are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am
persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principaUties,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor
depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the
love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans VHI.
24-39.

XX

THE PROCESS OF DIVINE GRACE
We cannot know the Spirit of God otherwise than in
ourselves, as our own spirit, — any more than we can
know the divinity in Christ otherwise than as it is
revealed in the quaUty and character of His humanity.
We have seen that the first evidence or expression of
the presence in us of that Holy Spirit which is the spirit
at once of God, of Christ, and, however inchoately,
of ourselves, consists in the sense or consciousness of
our sonship to God as reaUzed and revealed to us in
Christ. We have also seen, however, that there is a great
distance between the initial relationship of sons as it
begins to exist in faith, and the final consummation of
the character of sons as it needs to exist in fact. Every
where the business or function of spiritual or personal
life is to convert meaning into reaUfy, potentiaUfy into
actuaUfy. Because we are in a sense rational and
free by nature, we have in another sense to become
rational and free by act and character. The having
been made sons of God does not absolve us from the
Hfelong task of becoming, or making ourselves, sons
of God. The task of realizing ourselves presupposes
selves in us to realize, but we shall never be ourselves
without the seff-realization. 277

278 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
The process of realizing our sonship to God, through
the grace of God working with us both objectively and
subjectively, is portrayed in the chapter we are studying.
On our part there is first the incipient act of faith, the
apprehending that for which we were apprehended by
Jesus Christ, the seizing in advance by faith aU that
is to be made ours by act and in fact. However clear
and real this first-fruit of the Spirit is in us — indeed
just in proportion as it is clear and real — we at once
begin to groan within ourselves, desiring and expecting
the reaUzing and consummation of our sonship, to
wit, the redemption of our bodies. We have entered
upon the rightfully difficult task of making our bodies as
well as our spirits members of Christ and temples of
the Holy Ghost, — that is to say, of becoming, through
all our natural selves de facto as well as de jure, sons
of God. It is rightiy a difficult and a painful task,
because the difficulty and the pain are a necessary
part of the process. We become persons at all, we
attain all the virtue, the holiness, the glory and the
blessedness, of personaUfy, only through pain and
difficulty. St. Paul does not exaggerate the necessify,
the wisdom, the power, the glory of the Cross. He
does not insist too constantly or too strongly that we
shall only be glorified with Christ as we know here
how to suffer with Christ. He only declares that aU
the possible suffering of this present time is not worthy
of consideration when compared with the glory that
shall be revealed in us; that these Ught afflictions which
are for a moment are working out in us a far more

The Process of Divine Grace 279
exceeding and etemal weight of glory. As long as we
are here we are necessarily under stress of the process
of becoming, of making ourselves even as we are being
made, sons of God. We are saved in hope, by faith
not by sight. But if we really beUeve in and hope for
that which we cannot see, then can we with patience
wait for it.
Meantime, with us as with our Lord before us, the
gloom that shuts out sight and throws us back upon
faith and hope will often so thicken as to obscure even
the immediate next step. We will not know so much
as what to pray for as we ought. Our voice will be
incapable of uttering anything more than inarticulate
groanings. But the darkness that is so dark to us
is no darkness with God. The soul of the believer is
sometimes in heaven and sometimes in hell, but it is
as safe in one as in the other: If I go down into hell,
behold. Thou art there also! The point is that the
process of our redemption is not all our own, and it
goes on by methods not all or always understood by
ourselves. We are often nearest when we think our
selves farthest off, and farthest off when we think
ourselves nearest. God reads order where we see only
confusion; our groanings that cannot be uttered are
the intercessions of the Holy Ghost to Him for us, and
however unintelligible to us it is all clear to Him whose,
after all, are all the wisdom and the power of our
salvation. The function of the Holy Ghost is to bring the soul
to God, to prepare it to enter into His love and purpose

280 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
concerning it. The soul thus touched with divine love
and admitted into the etemal meaning and purpose
of God and itself, all things else must of necessity work
vnth it for good. From the subjective preparation by
the Spirit the Apostle passes to the objective array of
the all things that from without work together for
etemal life with the soul so prepared to work with
them. And first of all there is the great objective fact
of God Himself eternally and infinitely for it and with
it. From the eternity of the past stands first on our
side the fact of the divine foreknowledge. The creation
of which Man is the manifest head and end exists
from and for Intelligence, Reason. We may trust God
equally for having known what He was about from
the beginning and for having entered upon nothing
inconsistent with Himself. His foreknowledge or wis
dom was not divorced from His love.
Next, therefore, for us and with us stands the divine
forepurpose. Whom God foreknew them He also
foreordained or predestinated. Their end was as
clear before Him as their beginning and was just as
much the concern of the etemal love which is Himself.
We are no more objects than we were products of
chance. Human personalify is too great and precious
a thing to have been brought into existence through
the travail of the ages without a definite and predeter
mined purpose, without a destiny commensurate with
its acquired and inherent possibilities and promises.
Jesus Christ is the sole adequate expression of the
divine reason, meaning, and end of human personaUfy.

The Process of Divine Grace 281
Whom God foreknew. He also foreordained to be
conformed to the image of His Son. He is in Himself
the realization and revelation of the divine sonship
which is the meaning and proper destination of us all,
the heavenly pattern shown us in the mount after
which our common humanity is to be builded into the
tabernacle of the etemal divine presence and indwelUng.
But Jesus Christ is revelation to us not only of the fact
of our divine sonship but of the process by which that
sonship is realized. His death and resurrection is the
necessary baptism of that new birth; through it alone
is He the first-bom among many brethren, and through
it alone can they share His new birth and life.
Whom God thus foreknew and foreordained, them
He also called. There is a deep significance in the
fact of the divine call as a necessary moment in the pro
cess of human salvation. It is the reference of the
matter of etemal life to the action upon it of the man
himself. Salvation must needs come to us as a divine
invitation or call; it must needs be subject to our own
acceptance. Our part, however secondary and sub
ordinate to the divine part, is nevertheless the deter
mining factor. But both parts, in all the necessify and
importance of each, are emphasized in the nature of
the call. With St. Paul Christianify is in every moment
of it a call — a call from God and a call upon our
selves. Not only was he himself called to be an apostle,
but every believer is called to be a saint. As there is
no official apostleship so there is no personal sanctity
except such as comes from God, that to which God

282 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
calls and appoints or admits us. But equally there is
none for us which we do not ourselves accept and
assume. The called according to St. Paul are only
those in whom both these conditions have been ful
filled, who have been not only called of God to Ufe or
office or task but have heard and responded and are
in possession or in discharge of that to which they
are called. There is no word of God, in the strict or
proper sense, except such as is addressed to inteUigence
or wUl. A word, properly as such, must be not only
an expression of these but an expression to these. The
Gospel, which is Jesus Christ Himself, is the final and
complete word of God to us, because it is the perfect
call, the perfect address and appeal, to everything that
is within us, reason, affection, will, character, life,
destiny. How all these may be our own, to determine
for good or ill, may be incomprehensible to us, but the
fact remains. Every true call of nature or of grace is
a call to the self that is in us, and a call in respect to
which all depends upon the how we hear.
It is only the highest instance and iUustration of this,
that our Lord is said not to have taken His high-
priesthood upon Himself, but only as He was called
of God to it. We glorified not Himself to be made a
high priest, but He that spake unto Him, Thou art my
Son, This day have I begotten thee. His glorification
to the highest honour and exaltation of our humanity
was indeed His own act and achievement. But, if we
may express so glaring a paradox, it was His own act
only because of the fact that it was not His own act.

The Process of Divine Grace 283
but the act of God in Him. His achievement or attain
ment in our nature of the perfection of holiness and
Ufe was an act only possible for even TTim in our
nature — first because He was caUed to it of God, and,
secondly, because He perfectly heard and perfectiy
obeyed the call. It was humanify's supreme act, in
Him, of perfect faith and perfect obedience — the act
by which it at once was made and made itseff one with
God. The caU of God to us in Jesus Christ is a caU first to
something immediate and secondly to something ulti
mate and final. The first is a present status or relation
to God which St. Paul describes as this grace wherein
we stand, our access or entrance into which, he says,
we have had through our Lord Jesus Christ by faith,
and the expression of which on our part he describes
as a present peace with God. The truth which St.
Paul's own use warrants us in designating justification
by faith turns upon two points — the first being that
God's act of human redemption and completion in
Jesus Christ is revealed to our faith as potentiaUy the
redemption and completion of us aU; and the second
being that it is the function and obUgation of faith to
see ourselves so redeemed and completed in Jesus
Christ. God's Word, which is expHcitly Jesus Christ
Himseff, is the aU-sufficient ground of the obligation
of faith to see and accept what God reveals and gives
in Him. \Miat is true of us in Christ, who is the truth
of us all, is to us as though it were already true of us
in ourselves. The irrrmediate effect of this is that

284 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
where our faith truly answers to the divine grace, we
are to God even as Jesus Christ Himself is, in whom
He already sees us. Or rather in Jesus Christ Himself
even prior to our faith God already sees us, and we
have only to open the eyes of our faith to see ourselves
there also. He who has this divine vision, whatever
the warfare of present condition with him, enjoys
already the peace of the faith which brings distant
things near and makes future things present. We are
not to God only what we have first made ourselves,
but what God has by His own grace first made us in
Christ, that we are thereby in Him enabled to make
ourselves. We are not accepted as sons and righteous
through being so, but are enabled to become sons and
righteous through being made and treated as such.
Of all that is Christ or is Christ's we have divine
warrant for saying that we have only truly to beUeve
or to know that it is ours and it is ours. As truly as
our Lord could say. All that the Father hath is mine,
so truly have we the right to say that all that He Him
self has or is is ours.
As whom God calls He justifies, so whom He justifies
He glorifies. St Paul knows only, in this positive ac
count of the process of our salvation, the call that is
effectual, that is both given and accepted. Consequently
he knows of only an effectual justification, where the
sonship or righteousness is, in Jesus Christ, equally
given and received. Where we truly by faith know our
selves in Christ sons of God, there we cannot but truly in
fact and in ourselves become sons of God. Tme

The Process of Divine Grace 285
justification cannot but result in true sanctffication.
Sanctification is the making ours in actuaUty aU that
justffication has made ours in potentiaUty. It is the
becoming in ourselves aU that God has made us in
Christ. That which once for all was made ours and us
in Him we need time and process to appropriate and
convert to ourselves. Salvation can operate in us only
through the natural and spiritual organs and activities
of ourselves, our reason or intelUgence, our affections
and desires, our will, our acts and habits and character
and Ufe. The law of the action of aU these requires
all that time and environment have actually to offer
to human experience in human Hfe as it is. Our actual
experience is just what we need to become all ourselves
in Christ, and our actual environment is just what we
need for that experience. There is a divine fitness and
propriefy, not to say necessify, in all that our Lord had
to undergo in order to be perfected in our humanify,
and that fitness and necessify appUed to Him simply
because they pertain to us who were perfected in Him.
St. Paul is describing the successive steps or moments
in the long process of our salvation in absolute or
finished terms, and so he speaks not of our sanctification
but of our glorification. But it is an old and true
interpretation of the words as used by him to define
sanctification as glory begun, or in progress, and glory
or glorification as sanctification completed. The whole
drama of human spiritual destiny as reaUzed and
revealed in Jesus Christ may recall the words of Irenseus
with regard to our Lord, Longam expositionem hominis

286 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
in se recapitulat. In Him the whole course or process
is covered, beginning with the divine foreknowledge in
the past and ending in the aU-accomplished predestina
tion in the future.
What, then, shall we say to these things ? The new
light that God sheds upon the divine purpose in Christ
Jesus reveals the whole creation a connected and
consistent scheme having for its end the spiritual
evolution and destination of humanity. If God be for
us, who or what can be against us? Instructed and
enlisted in the divine meaning and purpose of things,
there can be nothing that does not definitely and
positively work with us and for us. The need is that
we be so instructed and enlisted. And the prime
difficulty is encountered in the divine mode of human
exaltation, — in other words, in the offence or stumbling-
block of the cross. If the mystery of wisdom and
love, the meaning and process of divine fatherhood and
human sonship, has its expression for us in Jesus
Christ, how can we account for it that He who is the
revelation to us all of the way, the tmth, and the Ufe
should have been subjected to all, should have been
spared naught, of such a human experience as was
actually His. The point of the mystery Hes just in
the fact that God spared not and spares not. That
God spares us nothing of all that the actuaUty of the
world has to subject us to is the supreme act and
expression of the divine love and wisdom. That there
is no real good but personal good, the good of per
sonality, and that, for us at least, there is no personal.

The Process of Divine Grace 287
spiritual or moral, good that is not the actual conquest
and survival of evil — that is the revelation in Jesus
Christ with regard to human life and destiny. For
our Lord to have been spared the least of all He en
dured and overcame, would have been to abridge by
just so much the completeness and perfection of His
attainment and exaltation. And it was the truth for
Him because it is the truth for us, of whom He is the
way, the truth, and the lffe.
The answer to the question of the cross for Jesus
Christ, is the answer for us of all questions of the no
longer dark or insoluble mysteries of human Ufe. The
love that spares not, means on our part the faith and
the grace that can endure all and overcome all. With
out the former we should never attain the latter, and
it is the attaining the latter that is the divine process
and test and measure of our human exaltation. He
that spared not His Son, and through not sparing
glorified and exalted Him, how shall He not, in and
with Him, by the seffsame process of unsparing love,
bestow upon us all real, spiritual, and etemal good?
Jesus Christ is the only and the all-sufficient theodicy.
In Him aU meanings are revealed, and aU divine means
justffied. There are two further questions pertaining one to
the beginning, the other to the end of God's method
and process of grace with us. Who shall lay anything
to the charge of God's elect ? What if God in His love
takes sinners, and the chief of sinners, to Himseff?
The answer is not merely that God in His sovereign

288 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
choice justffies whom He will; He reveals more of His
secret to us than that. His elect are those who in the
exigency of their own hopeless strife with sin and
death come to find in Him His grace sufficient for them.
Because His grace is sufficient, because in the new rela
tion of their present attitude towards Himself He is
become their righteousness and their Ufe, therefore He
not only sovereignly pronounces them, but potentially
makes, and actually will make, them righteous. His
justification of them is justified not merely by His
arbitrary will, but by all the gracious facts.
And who shall condemn those whom God has so
chosen and taken to Himself? Has not Christ died,
and risen again ? And does not that mean their own
death to sin, and their own Hfe to God and hoUness?
Is not Christ's presence at the right hand of God as
their representative and advocate God's pledge and
assurance that sin in them as in Him has been con
demned and aboUshed and that there is no longer any
ground of condemnation to them that are in Christ
Jesus ?
One further thought concludes the Apostle's survey
of the etemal and infinite grace of God in Jesus Christ.
There is no hint or suggestion that the earthly expe
riences, the cross, of Christ are something instead of
their own, and not also their own. The hope and
assurance is only that in experiences that are His and
ours, ours as well as His, nothing shall separate us
from Him; that in His temptations we shaU know His
power and victory; that having suffered with Him in

The Process of Divine Grace 289
His death we may be raised up and reign with Him
in His life. Who or what shall separate us from the
love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ? The
promise is not exemption from His experiences but
salvation and exaltation through His experiences.

XXI
THE CHRIST OF SAINT PAUL

XXI
THE CHRIST OF SAINT PAUL
That St. Paul realizes profoundly the truth of the
pre-existence and the deity of our Lord there can be
no question. The conviction of it runs through the
whole texture of the Apostle's thought and knowledge
of Jesus Christ, and is involved in the entire conception
of his own and all men's personal relation to Him.
Our Lord, according to St. John, expresses His own
personal consciousness of oneness with God in the
words. My Father worketh and I work. I and my
Father are one. Taken alone, this may affirm nothing
more than a perfect moral unity of spirit and activity
with God. But it is on the direct Une of a deeper
truth which finds abundant and definite expression in
the life and consciousness of all thg^te%ch^^ Qf ^th^
Gospel in the New TestameiTfir It is contained in the
formula so common in the mouth of St. Paul, Grace to
you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ. Here and always God and Christ are
so united and identified in the common act of divine
reconciliation and human redemption that the act of
each is the act of the other.
But we cannot limit St^-JLohn's or ,St. Paul's or St.

294 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
Eetei^ direct sense of the oneness of Jesus Christ with
Go{i to any particular set or sets of words. It fills aU
theii" mind and informs all theit thoughts or words
about Him. Jesus Qiriat is the eternal spiritual and
personal truth of ti*efe%lves and of all things; the
living creative cause as well as the personal final cause
of the universe. He is God in energy or actuaUty, in
nature as well as in grace, in natural creation as well
as in spiritual new or higher creation. T^fy go to
Jesus Christ after His resjirrection as to God; and God
has come^d comes to'tffein in Jesus Christ as nowhere
else. TtrarLord is a living Lord, and they themselves
are in Him, and He is in them as only God can be.
The best evidence of our Lord's deify lies in the fact
of what I think we may rightly call His human univer
sality. The expression is in need of fuller explanation
and justification. Our Lord was a man as real and
actual as any other in all that constitutes human nature
or that makes up human life and experience. The
only difference in His case, on the human side, was one
of personal action, in the same nature and under
identical conditions, different from that of any other
man. This difference consists primarily in the fact of
a personal holiness so transcending in degree that of
all others that in itself it demands a divine explanation.
But that is by no means the sole feature in our Lord's
humanity which can be only divinely explained. Here,
in Him, is a human holiness, righteousness, life, which
at once possesses a significance and a value which we
can only describe as universal. This is the hoUness,

The Christ of Saint Paul 295
the righteousness, the Ufe, not of one man but of aU
men. The one man is become aU men, just as Adam
was not only one but all men. As in Adam we aU sin
and die, so in Christ we are aU made aUve, from sin
and so from death. By Christ's humanify I mean a
humanity now risen, redeemed, united with God and
sharing with Him the divinify of which it is capable,
the divinity of perfect love, which is hoUness and
righteousness and etemal lffe. Things are what they
are, independently of any question of how they are so.
Christianify is the ultimate and supreme fact of hu
manify. The life has been manifested and is with us.
By that we mean the divine-human life of Jesus Christ;
and that Hfe is in the world not the individual life of
one man but the universal Ufe of all men. If this be
so, then He can be nothing less than God our holiness,
our righteousness, our life. For no individual human
being can be all that He is to all men. I have some
where described the New Testament representation of
our universal relation to Jesus Christ somewhat as
follows :
The life of Jesus Christ is in the New Testament
described as ours, in three senses or stages : In the first
place it is exemplarily or representatively ours; it is in
all points like unto ours, or what ours would be if it
were completed according to its divine idea. Under
this head it is not only legitimate but necessary to
describe the incarnate life of our Lord in the consistently
human terms in which we have done so. In the second
place, the Hfe of our Lord is ours not only representa-

296 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
tively but causally; as He Himseff says. Because I Uve,
ye shall Uve also. He is not only example but cause
of Ufe to us all who believe. We see, brought to bear
upon humanity in Him, the divine causes and condi
tions which are alone productive of etemal life; and
we are made to experience in ourselves in Him the
actual operation of the seffsame causes and conditions
which operated humanly in Him. Let anyone read
and ponder the description (Eph. i. 19, 20) of the
exceeding greatness of the power of God to usward
who believe, according to that working of the strength
of His might which He wrought in Christ, when He
raised Him from the dead. But, in the third place,
Jesus Christ is even more generally described as not
merely causally or virtually but really and personally
our Life; and we cannot overstate or overvalue the
sense or extent in which that is tme. Christ is always
described as being personally and creatively present in
the believer, taking him up into Himself and making
Himself his higher personalify and Ufe. It is not too
much to say with St. Paul that Jesus Christ is not
only the divine tmth of every man but is the higher
and diviner self of every man. So that there is no
exaggeration in his. No longer I but Christ; I am dead
and Christ lives in me; the lower I of mere nature and
self has been lost in the higher I of God. And this
higher I of God, which is Christ in me, is the eternally
true I; in losing myself I have found myself. When
Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall we also
appear with Him in glory. Christ in us is the hope.

The Christ of Saint Paul 297
as He will be the consummation, of our glory; which
means our self-realization and completion.
Let us consider a little further this universalify of
the humanity of our Lord. One says, " You lay great
stress upon the view that our Lord was not a man,
but man. I find this a difficult conception; does it
mean that humanity has a concrete real existence apart
from the individual persons who are human, and that
this Universal becomes visible in Christ? If this be
so, does it not lead us to a metaphysical Realism, not
now generally held ? " The universality of our Lord's
humanity is only explicable upon the fact that His
personalify is a divine one. It is only God in it that
can make it applicable to all or the truth of all. And
since, according to St. Paul, it is always Christ Himself
who brings Himself to us and makes all that is His
our own, it follows that, according to St. Paul, Jesus
Christ can be to us nothing less than divine. The
concrete universal of humanify which may be found
in Jesus Christ belongs to it not as humanity but as
God in humanity. It is God in it which makes that
particular humanity of our Lord, His holiness. His
righteousness. His life, valid and available for all; so
that every man may find himself in Christ, and in
Christ find himself. But, to go further — may we not
say, that the only true realism or idealism, the doctrine
that the ideal is the real, is to be found in the New
Testament doctrine of Jesus Christ ? He is the etemal
creative idea, the ideal principle, as of everything else
so especially of man as the end and heir of all. In

298 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
that sense He is humanity from before the foundation
of the earth, the Man from Heaven, the Son of man,
in whom in the end all humanity and all else in human
ify is to come to itself and to be fulfilled. The etemal
final cause is first cause as well as finis; the divine
ideal is the only certain and true real.
I may say a single word in explanation of the act of
Christianity in not only identifying Jesus Christ with
God, but at the same time distinguishing Him in the
Godhead. We do not say ordinarily that Jesus Christ
is God, but that He is the Logos or Word or Son of
God. No one can enter into the meaning and truth
of Christ and Christianity and admit that our Lord
is anything less than God. Yet we cannot but feel
the difference and the choice between saying that
Christ is God in the absolute sense, and saying, more
qualifiedly, that He is the Logos or Word of God. He
is 6w, but He is not o ^cds. The divine Word can
never be other than personal or less than God; but
neither is He absolutely or exclusively God, in a
Monarchian or Sabellian sense.
After all that has been said in the preceding chapters
of the necessity of a thoroughgoing acceptance of the
humanness of our Lord's earthly life and experiences,
it is impossible to pass by the question of the difficulty
of combining with that, or even maintaining together
with that, the view of His Godhead here no less insisted
upon. This may best be realized and considered in a
concrete instance of actual experience. One says,
" My difficulty is as follows : The agony in the Garden

The Christ of Saint Paul 299
and the cry of My God, my God, why hast Thou
forsaken me? seem to show that our Lord was as
personally distinct from God as we ourselves are; that
His personaUty, His self-consciousness and wiU, was
not a divine PersonaUfy, but a human ; so human as to
be capable of losing its hold upon God, just as we may
lose our hold upon God. We might take refuge in the
thought that this may have been only a later putting
into our Lord's mouth of the supposed prophetic
language of Ps. xxii. But the cry of dereUction seems
to be the most certain of the Words from the Cross,
more certain than the Word in which the sufferer
regained His hold upon God — Father, into thy hand
I commend my spirit."
There is no doubt that we have here expressed a very
real difficulfy; perhaps an insoluble one, the insoluble
one. But let us see what it means or impUes. If the
extreme experience of our Lord, in the Garden and
upon the Cross, was not a veritably human one, what
else was it or how else shall we explain it? If we
could, with the aid of criticism, get rid of the words in
question, would we then be able, and do we want to
be able, to construe these experiences of our Lord into
some other, non-human experiences ? If this was His
last and probably greatest temptation, would we wish
to prove that He was not here, too, tempted in all points
like as we are? TMiat would there be to gain in the
being able to feel that this was not a really human
temptation and victory, was not the victory, in fine, in
which His task of redemption was finished, the victory

300 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
in which humanity in His person had overcome the
world? In what other terms then should we be able
more satisfactorily to construe the meaning of the Hfe
and the cross of Jesus Christ ?
Yet, assuming, as we must, that our Lord's tempta
tions were to their utmost Hmit our own temptations
and not those of one other than ourselves, are we not
involved in the difficulty of a double personaUty in
our one Lord; a divine personality in which He is the
very Word of God Himseff uttered or expressed in
humanify, God self-fulfilled and self-fuffilUng in the
nature and under the conditions of us all; and on the
other hand, too, a human personaUty which alone can
be the real and perfect expression of God humanly
seff-reaUzed and manffested ? We find ourselves under
a necessity of seeing in Jesus Christ from beginning to
end an act of God in nature and in humanity. In Him
God comes to us and is in us, and we come to God
and are in Him; all that humanity is in Him is the
work of God in humanity, and our part in that work
is only what He does and is in us. And at the same
time we are under an equal necessity of recognizing in
our Lord as in ourselves a human activify the freest
and most personal possible, the most determinative
and constitutive of our own very selves. The time may
come when we shall better state to ourselves this
paradox or seeming contradiction, and better too
perhaps adapt and fit ourselves to its acceptance; it
can never come when we shaU be able either to solve
it or to reject it.

The Christ of Saint Paul 301
Is not, however, the whole difficulty already expressed
for us in the very word Incarnation; a difficulty which
the most of us evade by simply not taking the word
seriously, in the fulness and reaUty of its meaning?
In the instance we have been analyzing, what do we
see but the disposition common to us all to find m our
Lord's temptations experiences that are not human,
and in Himself one who was not truly man. The
completed work and results of the Incarnation certainly
justffy it as a fact, but because we cannot comprehend
it we hesitate to accept it as a possibiUfy. Unable to
construe it to our minds or correlate it in thought, we
either reject it altogether or evade it by half or seeming
acceptances. It is one of the few ultimate matters in
which the whole tmth comes to us only through a
childlike acceptance of actuaUty as matter of fact, — as,
for example, the actuaUfy of human freedom in the
face of a universal cosmical necessify. The fact of
the personal Divine and the personally human at once
in the one Person of Jesus Christ has to be accepted,
not alone as a fact behind and above our comprehension
or construing, but Ukewise as a fact necessary to any
comprehending or construing of the higher facts of
both God and ourselves. As we are fairly launched
upon the quest, the nearer we pursue it to the end the
more are we persuaded that, at least in His relation
with us, God is fully and completely revealed to us as
God only in Jesus Christ; and equally, that we are our
realized and completed selves only in Jesus Christ as
God. I cannot constme the Incamation in aU its

302 The Gospel According to Saint Paul
necessary coexistences and seeming contradictions
either to myself or to others; but infinitely less can I
reject the Incamation without blotting out all etemal
truth of the universe and all higher lffe of ourselves.
However far off this, and all similar attempts, may be
from solving, or even satisfactorily stating, our difficul
ties, we must not only for the truth's but for our very
Ufe's sake continue such attempts. We must, if only,
hold on to and insist upon the opposite and com
plementary terms of our Lord's deity and His humanity,
until we can better correlate them in our minds and
approve their coexistent and equal truth to our reason.
Here I leave my exposition of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ as St. Paul sees it in Him and knows it in him
seff. According to St. Paul, as according to St. John
and according to the whole mind of the New Testa
ment, Christianity recognizes and accepts in Jesus
Christ, not alone the manifestation and revelation, but
the communication of God's own divine righteousness
and eternal lffe. The Gospel is not merely a truth, it
is a power and an activity. He who is in Jesus Christ
is in the actual operation or working of the selfsame
forces and causes which made Jesus Christ Himself
humanly what He was. Those forces or causes are
on one side divine, and constitute all that we express
by the general term grace. Grace covers all that God
Himself is or does in us, all that we experience as His
"motions" or designate as His spirit. They are on
the other side of them human, and are expressed by
the general terms faith, obedience, etc. In Jesus we

The Christ of Saint Paul 303
see, and by Jesus Christ we mean, the divine operating
causes, the grace, the salvatio salvans, as well as the
human elements, the operated effects, the faith and
obedience, the salvatio salvata. He is the divine as
well as the human, God as well as ourselves, in the
synthesis of our divine-human righteousness and Ufe,
which is our salvation. The mystery of the Incama
tion may be permanently a mystery, in the extremest
sense of the term, a fact or actuaUfy which reason
cannot construe nor language express; but it is the
mystery which solves and illumines all others.

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CONFIRMATION. By the Right Rev. A. C. A. Hall, D.D.,
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FOREIGN MISSIONS. By the Eight Rev. E.T. Chukton, D.D.,
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Oxford Library of Practical Theology. — continued.
SUNDAY. By the Eev. W. B. Tkeveltan, M.A., Vicar of St.
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THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION. By the Kev. Leighton Pul
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*»* This book contains an account of the origin of Jilpiscopacy, the three Creeds,
the Ancient Western Liturgies and other institutions of ihe Church. /Special atten
tion is also given to the early history of Sacramental Confession and to the principle
of Authority in the Church of England.
BOOKS OP DEVOTION. By the Kev. Charles Bodington,
Canon and Treasurer of Lichfield.
" Extremely valuable for its high tone, fidelity to Catholic standards, and
powerful advocacy of reality in private devotion. To those who have never
studied the subject, it shomd reveal a mine of devotional wealth, yet to he
worked with profit to man aud glory to God." — Church Times.
HOLY ORDERS. By the Eev. A. E. Whitham, M.A., Principal
of Culham College, Abingdon.
" For the educated layman who wishes to know what the Church is teach
ing about the minstry, and what the relation of the laity to it really is, this
Is the best book with which we have met." — Hlot (London).
THE CHURCH CATECHISM THE CHRISTIAN'S MANUAL.
By the Rev. W. C. E. Newbolt, M.A., Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul's.
** We think the book should be in the possession of every teacher who can
afford it, and In every Church Library for the benefit of those who cannot. —
The Reader and Layworker.
THE HOLY COMMUNION. By the Eev. Daewell Stone,
M.A., Librarian of the Pusey House, Oxford.
" The book meets a distinct want, and is indispensable to all (and surely
they are very many) who desire to have a concise and well-balanced sum
mary of the dilferent opinions which have been held with regard to the
Holy Communion from the earliest days of the Church." — Oxford Diocesan
Magazine.CHURCH WORK. By the Kev. Bernard Eevnolds, M.A.,
Prebendary of St. Paul's.
" WTiat is needed is a bright and sensibly written book which will suggest
topics lor consideration and the way in which a Christian should view them.
The book before us fulfils these conditions. It Is stimulating and sugges
tive, and that is exactly what is wanted." — Guardian.
CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND. By the Kev. W. H.
Abraham, D.D., Vicar of St. Augustine's, Hull.
OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION. By the Rev. W. J. Spakeow-
SiMPSON, M.A., Chaplain of St. Mary's Hospital, IHord.
THE PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS CEREMONIAL. By the Eev.
Walter Howard Frere, M.A., of the Community of the Resurrection.
THE ATONEMENT. By the Eev. Leighton Pdllan, M.A., Fel
low of St. John Baptist's College, Oxford.
VOLUMES IN PREPARATION.
THE BIBLE. By the Kev. Daewell Stone, M.A.
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM. By the Very Eev. Henet
Wage, D.D., Dean of Canterbury.
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., New York

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