We may note here that both Hort and Lightfoot contend for _the conciliatory_ aim of the Roman Epistle. They regard the great passage about Israel (ix.-xi.) as in some sense the heart of the Epistle, and the doctrinal passages preceding this as all more or less meant to bear on the relations not only of the Law and the Gospel, but of the Jew and the Gentile as members of the one Christian Church. There is great value in this suggestion, explained and illustrated as it is in the Essays in question. But the thought may easily be worked to excess. It seems plain to the present writer that when the Epistle is studied from within its deepest spiritual element, it shews us the Apostle fully mindful of the largest aspects of the life and work of the Church, but also, and yet more, occupied with the problem of the relation of the believing sinner to God. The question of personal salvation was never, by St Paul, forgotten in that of Christian policy.
To return for a moment to this Exposition, or rather to its setting; it may be doubted whether, in imagining the dictation of the Epistle to be begun and completed by St Paul _within one day_ we have not imagined "a hard thing." But at worst it is not an impossible thing, if the Apostle's utterance was as sustained as his thought.
It remains only to express the hope that these pages may serve in some degree to convey to their readers a new _Tolle, Lege_ for the divine Text itself; if only by suggesting to them sometimes the words of St Augustine, "_To Paul I appeal from all interpreters of his writings_."
RIDLEY HALL, CAMBRIDGE, ALL SAINTS' DAY, 1893.
[1] See also Westcott and Hort's _N. T. in the Original Greek_, vol. 2, Appendix, pp. 110-114 (ed. 1).