So privilege had nothing to do with acceptance, except to countersign the grant of a grace absolutely free. The Seal did nothing whatever to make the Covenant. It only verified the fact, and guaranteed the _bona fides_ of the Giver. As the Christian Sacraments are, so was the Patriarchal Sacrament; it was "a sure testimony and effectual sign of God's grace and good will."[53] But the grace and the good will come not through the Sacrament as through a medium, but straight from God to the man who took God at His word. "The means whereby he received," the mouth with which he fed upon the celestial food, "was faith."[54] The rite came not between the man and his accepting Lord, but as it were was present at the side to assure him with a physical concurrent fact that all was true. "Nothing between" was the law of the great transaction; nothing, not even a God-given ordinance; nothing but the empty arms receiving the Lord Himself;--and empty arms indeed put "nothing between."
_The following is extracted from the Commentary on this Epistle in "The Cambridge Bible"_ (p. 261).
"[What shall we say to] the verbal discrepancy between St Paul's explicit teaching that 'a man is justified by faith _without works_,' and St James' equally explicit teaching that '_by works_ a man is justified, and _not by faith only_'? With only the New Testament before us, it is hard not to assume that the one Apostle has in view some distortion of the doctrine of _the other_. But the fact (see Lightfoot's _Galatians_, detached note to ch. iii.) that Abraham's faith was a staple Rabbinic text alters the case, by making it perfectly possible that St James (writing to members of the Jewish Dispersion) had not Apostolic but Rabbinic teaching in view. And the line such teaching took is indicated by Jas. ii. 19, where an example is given of the faith in question; and that example is concerned wholly with the grand point of _strictly Jewish orthodoxy_--GOD IS ONE.... The persons addressed [were thus those whose] idea of faith was not _trustful acceptance_, a belief of the heart, but _orthodox adherence_, a belief of the head. And St James [took] these persons strictly on their own ground, and assumed, for his argument, their own very faulty account of faith to be correct.
"He would thus be proving the point, equally dear to St Paul, that mere theoretic orthodoxy, apart from effects on the will, is valueless. He would not, in the remotest degree, be disputing the Pauline doctrine that the guilty soul is put into a position of acceptance with the FATHER only by vital connexion with the SON, and that this connexion is effectuated, _absolutely and alone_, not by personal merit, but by trustful acceptance of the Propitiation and its all-sufficient vicarious merit. From such trustful acceptance 'works' (in the profoundest sense) will inevitably follow; not as antecedents but as consequents of justification. And thus ... 'it is faith alone which justifies; but the faith which justifies can never be alone.'"
[46] On St James' use of that great incident, see detached note, p. 115.
[47] We see much reason, however, in the explanation which connects κατὰ σάρκα with πατέρα (or προπάτορα) ἡμῶν: "_our father according to the flesh_," our natural progenitor.
[48] In the Greek, ἐπίστευσε stands first in the clause, and is thus emphatic.
[49] Not that μισθὸς always gives the thought of earning as a right. It may mean merely "_result_, _issue_," however realized. See _e.g._ 2 John 8. But the context here decides the reference.
[50] By the position of the name in the Greek sentence.
[51] Διὰ ἀκροβυστίας: as if _passing through_ its seeming obstacle.
[52] So the Greek precisely. But practically the words "_for those_" may be omitted here.
[53] See Article xxv.
[54] See Article xxviii.