1 J. Gregory Mantle. 3 F. B. Meyer.
The Wages and the Gift.
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Literature.
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The Wages and the Gift.
For the wages of sin is death ; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.— Rom. vi. 23.
1. The whole Gospel is summed up in this contrast. What we are by nature ; what we should have come to, if we had been let alone; what we shall come to if we let ourselves alone: on the other hand, what we are by grace ; what God has done for us, and in whom ; and where it is to be sought, and how it may be found : all these things are contained in this brief verse.
2. Paul delights in contrasts. In these words there are three contrasts, and these may be looked at briefly in the light in which modern thought more clearly displays them.
(1) There is a Contrast of Character — God and Sin. While in the preceding passage Paul has personified sin and righteous- ness, he here retains only the personification of sin, and gives us, instead of the personification of righteousness, a personality. This is significant. Although the writers of the New Testament do recognize and assert the existence and the activity of a person- ality whose being and whose work is wholly evil, yet it would be the contradiction of a theistic position consistent with itself to contrast God and Satan in a passage such as this. The ideal of righteousness is necessarily and eternally personal. But as evil has no ideal, so it is the negation and extinction of personality. As Lotze has truly and nobly argued, God alone is perfect personality; and men become truly and fully personalities as they approach to God. Personality is self-consciousness, self- control, and self-completeness ; and good alone can have these marks. Evil constant, consistent, complete, is deception, division, and despair; and the being in whom evil is altogether divorced from good must be impersonal. It may have intelligence, desire, and purpose of a sort, but not such as constitute true personality.
346 THE WAGES AND THE GIFT
Accordingly, although it would be an anachronism to ascribe to Paul any such reasoning, yet it is very significant that here he does not contrast God and Satan, a contrast that would have been rhetorically more complete, but doctrinally less comprehensible.
(2) There is a Contrast of Connexion — Wages and Gift. The former term suggests desert, necessity, inevitableness ; the latter generosity, spontaneity, initiative. Sin's result is according to law : God's act is of grace. The death in which bad men find their desert is necessary, inevitable, under moral law ; but the life wherewith good men are blessed is not the wages of their goodness, but a generous and spontaneous expression of God's grace. Man's conscience does undoubtedly testify that there is this necessary and inevitable connexion between sin and death ; and man's religious consciousness as clearly testifies that it is no necessary, inevitable consequence of his deeds that brings the good man perfection and blessedness. The ethical inquiry of the present century confirms the Apostle's conviction of the inevitable- ness of the consequences of sin. Modern fiction lays stress on hereditary transmission of evil, on the fixity of evil habits, on the certainty of social retribution, and the irresistible and inevitable process of moral deterioration. Then, on the other hand, more cautious thinkers and exponents of the evolutionary process are led to recognize that the higher stages are inexplicable by the lower. Matter does not account for life, nor life for mind. Progress demands at various stages a divine initiative. This is what religious experience lays stress upon. The higher life of perfection and blessedness is not explicable by man's intellec- tual, emotional, moral faculties and attainments. It is the gift of God. This stage in man's progress demands a divine initiative to explain and account for it. Thus the process of moral deterioration does not demand the divine intervention, does not require for its explanation a personal action; whereas the progress of moral development does demand the divine initiative, is explicable only as the act of God.
(3) There is a Contrast of Condition — Life and Death. This contrast is not merely in the physical sphere; eternal life and eternal death do include physical life and physical death, but their significance is not exhausted thereby. To those who believe that the physical is but preparatory for, symbolical of, the