3. The Teaching of St. Paul. — It was reserved, however, to the Apostle Paul to give to the fact of predestination its fullest NT presentation. This was not because St. Paul exceeded his fellows in the strength or clearness of his convictions, but because, in the prosecution of the special task which was committed to him in the general work of establishing Christianity in the world, the com- jdete expression of the common doctrine of pre- destination fell in his way, and became a necessity of his arguiiunt. With him, too, the roots of his doctrine of predestination were set in his general doctrine of God, and it was fundamentally because St. Paul was a theist of a clear and consistent tj'pe, living and thinking under the inllucnce of the profound consciousness of a personal God who is the author of all that is and, as well, the upholder and powerful governor of all that He has made, according to whose will, thurofore, all that comes to pass must be ordered, that he was a predesti- naiian ; and more particularly he too was a pre- destinarian because of his general doctrine of salvation, in every step of which the initiative must be taken by God's unmerited grace, just because man is a sinner, and, as a sinner, rests under the Divine condemnation, with no right of so much as access to God, and without means to seek, much less to secure, His favour. But although pos.sessing no other sense of the infinite majesty of the almighty I'erson in whose hands all things lie, or of the issue of all saving ai'ts from His free grace, than his companion ajiostles, the course of the sjiecial work in which St. Paul was engaged, and the exigencies of the .special conlroveisicB in which he was involved, forced him
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to a fuller expression of all that is implied in these convictions. As he cleared the whole held of Christian f.iitli from the presence of any re- maining conHilence in Inuiian works ; as he laid licneath tlie hope of Cluistians a righteousness not self-wrought but provided by God alone ; as he consistently oll'cred this Goil-provided righteous- ness to sinners of all classes without regard to anything in them by which they might fancy God could be moved to accept their persons, — he was inevitably driven to an especially jiervasive refer- ence of salvation in each ot its elements to tlie free grace of God, and to an especially full exposition on the one hand of the course of Divine grace in the several acts which enter into the saving work, and on the other to the firm rooting of the whole process in the pure will of the God of grace. From the beginning to the end of his ministry, accordingly, St. Paul conceived himself, above everything else, as the bearer of a message of undeserved grace to lost sinners, not even directing his own footsteps to carry the glad tidings to whom he would (Ro V, 1 Co 4", 2 Co 2'°-), but rather led by God in triumphal procession through the world, that throuojh him might be made mani- fest the savour of tlie knowledge of Christ in every jilace — a savour from life unto life in them that are saved, and from death unto death in thera that are lost (2 Co 2"- '»). By the ' word of the cross ' proclaimed by him the essential character of his hearers was thus brouglit into manifestation, — to the lost it was foolishness, to the saved the power of God (1 Co 1'*) : not as if this essential character belonged to them by nature or was the prod>u:t of their own activities, least of all of their choice at the moment of the proclamation, by which rather it was only revealed; but as finding in ex])lauation only in an act of God, in accord- ince with the working of Him to whom all ditier- ences among men are to be ascribed (1 Co 4') — for God alone is the Lord of the harvest, and all the increase, however diligently man may plant and water, is to be accredited to Him alone (1 Co 3«-).
It is naturally the soteriological interest that determines in the main St. Paul's allusions to the all-determining hand of God, — the letters that we have from him come from Paul the evangelist, — but it is not merely a soteriological conception that he is expressing in them, but the most fundamental postulate of his religious consciousness ; and he is accordingly constantly correlating his doctrine of election with his general doctrine of the decree or counsel of God. No man ever had an intenser or more vital sense of God, — the eternal (Ro 16-*) and incorruptible (l'-'') One, the only wise One (10-'), who does all things according to His good-i)leasure (1 Co lo'* 1218, Col 1'9-"), and whose ways are past tracing out (Ro U") ; before whom men .should therefore bow in the humility of absolute dependence, recognizing in Him the one moulding power as well in history as in the life of the individual (Ro 9). Of Him and through Him and unto Him, he fervently exclaims, are all things (Ko 11^, cf. 1 Co 8») ; lie is over all and through all and in all (Eph 4«, cf. Col 1") ; He worketh all things according to the counsel of His will (Eph 1") : all that is, in a word, owes its existence and persistence and its action and issue to Him. The whole course of historv is, therefore, of His order- ing (Ac H" IT-*, Ro"l'»'; 3-^ 9-11, Gal 3. 4), and every event that befalls is under His control, and must be estimated from the view-point of His pur- poses of good to His people (Ro 8'-'', 1 Th 5"- '*), for whose benefit tlie whole world is governed (Eph l-^-, 1 Co 2\ Col l'»). The figure that is employed in Ro 9-^ with a somewhat narrower reference, would fairly express St. Paul's world-view in its relation