Besides, he has been hearing about the actual state of that all-important mission. As "all roads led to Rome," so all roads led from Rome, and there were Christian travellers everywhere (i. 8) who could tell him how the Gospel fared among the metropolitan brethren. As he heard of them, so he prayed for them, "without ceasing" (i. 9), and made request too for himself, now definitely and urgently, that his way might be opened to visit them at last.
To pray for others, if the prayer is prayer indeed, and based to some extent on knowledge, is a sure way to deepen our interest in them, and our sympathetic insight into their hearts and conditions. From the human side, nothing more than these tidings and these prayers was needed to draw from St Paul a written message to be placed in Phœbe's care. From this same human side again, when he once addressed himself to write, there were circumstances of thought and action which would naturally give direction to his message.
He stood amidst circumstances most significant and suggestive in matters of Christian _truth_. Quite recently his Judaist rivals had invaded the congregations of Galatia, and had led the impulsive converts there to quit what seemed their firm grasp on the truth of Justification by Faith only. To St Paul this was no mere battle of abstract definitions, nor again was it a matter of merely local importance. The success of the alien teachers in Galatia shewed him that the same specious mischiefs might win their way, more or less quickly, anywhere. And what would such success mean? It would mean the loss of the joy of the Lord, and the strength of that joy, in the misguided Churches. Justification by Faith meant nothing less than _Christ all in all_, literally all in all, for sinful man's pardon and acceptance. It meant a profound simplicity of personal reliance altogether upon Him before the fiery holiness of eternal Law. It meant a look out and up, at once intense and unanxious, from alike the virtues and the guilt of man, to the mighty merits of the Saviour. It was precisely the foundation-fact of salvation, which secured that the process should be, from its beginning, not humanitarian but divine. To discredit _that_ was not merely to disturb the order of a missionary community; it was to hurt the vitals of the Christian soul, tinging with impure elements the mountain springs of the peace of God. Fresh as he was now from combating this evil in Galatia, St Paul would be sure to have it in his thoughts when he turned to Rome; for there it was only too certain that his active adversaries would do their worst; probably they were at work already.
Then, he had been just engaged also with the problems of Christian _life_, in the mission at Corinth. There the main trouble was less of creed than of conduct. In the Corinthian Epistles we find no great traces of an energetic heretical propaganda, but rather a bias in the converts towards a strange licence of temper and life. Perhaps this was even accentuated by a popular logical assent to the truth of Justification _taken alone_, isolated from other concurrent truths, tempting the Corinthian to dream that he might "continue in sin that grace might abound." If such were his state of spiritual thought, he would encounter (by his own fault) a positive moral danger in the supernatural "Gifts" which at Corinth about that time seem to have appeared with quite abnormal power. An antinomian theory, in the presence of such exaltations, would lead the man easily to the conception that he was too free and too rich in the supernatural order to be the servant of common duties, and even of common morals. Thus the Apostle's soul would be full of the need of expounding to its depths the vital harmony of the Lord's work _for_ the believer and the Lord's work _in_ him; the co-ordination of a free acceptance with both the precept and the possibility of holiness. He must shew once for all how the justified are bound to be pure and humble, and how they can so be, and what forms of practical dutifulness their life must take. He must make it clear for ever that the Ransom which releases also purchases; that the Lord's freeman is the Lord's property; that the Death of the Cross, reckoned as the death of the justified sinner, leads direct to his living union with the Risen One, including a union of will with will; and that thus the Christian life, if true to itself, _must_ be a life of loyalty to every obligation, every relation, constituted in God's providence among men. The Christian who is not attentive to others, even where their mere prejudices and mistakes are in question, is a Christian out of character. So is the Christian who is not a scrupulously loyal citizen, recognizing civil order as the will of God. So is the Christian who in any respect claims to live as he pleases, instead of as the bondservant of his Redeemer should live.