Implicitly, all through the passage, human failure is taught side by side with human responsibility. Such a clause as that of ver. 14, "_when they do by nature the things of the law_," is certainly not to be pressed, _in such a context as this_, to be an assertion that pagan morality ever actually satisfies the holy tests of the eternal Judge. Read in the whole connexion, it only asserts that the pagan acts as a moral being; that he knows what it is to obey, and to resist, the sense of duty. This is not to say, what we shall soon hear St Paul so solemnly deny, that there exists anywhere a man whose correspondence of life to moral law is such that his "mouth" needs _not_ to "be stopped," and that he is _not_ to take his place as one of a "world guilty before God."
Stern, solemn, merciful argument! Now from this side, now from that, it approaches the conscience of man, made for God and fallen from God. It strips the veil from his gross iniquities; it lets in the sun of holiness upon his iniquities of the more religious type; it speaks in his dull ears the words judgment, day, tribulation, wrath, bewilderment, perishing. But it does all this that man, convicted, may ask in earnest what he shall do with conscience and his Judge, and may discover with joy that his Judge Himself has "found a ransom," and stands Himself in act to set him free.
[17] Reading γὰρ.
[18] Here, perhaps, for once, the word εὐαγγέλιον is used in an extended and "improper" sense, to denote the whole message _connected with_ the Glad Tidings, and so now the warning of judgment to come, which gives to the Glad Tidings its sacred urgency.
[19] Manifestly "_the_ Law" in this passage means not the ceremonial law of Israel, but the revealed moral law given to Israel, above all in the Decalogue. This appears from the language of ver. 15, which would be meaningless if the reference were to special ordinances of worship. The Gentiles could not "shew the work of" _that_ kind of "law written in their hearts"; what they shewed was, as we have explained, a "work" related to the revealed claims of God and man on the will and life.