Romans Ix. 3.

of those souls always to elicit from themselves such a prayer as this. If the soul be not far advanced, it is incapable of [cannot comprehend] this. It is not easy to estimate the measure of love, in a Moses and a Paul. For the narrow boundary of our reasoning powers does not comprehend it ; as the little child is unable to comprehend the courage of warlike heroes. In the case of those two men [duumvirs] themselves, the intervals in their lives, which may be in a good sense called extatic, were something sudden and extraordinary. It was not even in their own power to elicit from themselves such acts as these at any time they chose. Grief [heaviness] and sorrow for the danger and distress of the people ; shame for their fault ; zeal for their salvation, for the safety of so great a multitude, and for still farther promoting the glory of God through the preservation of such a people, so carried them away, as to make them for a time forget themselves, Exod. xxxii. 32. I am inclined to give this paraphrase' of that passage: Pardon them ; if thou dost not pardon them , turn upon me the punishment destined for them, that is, as Moses elsewhere says, kill me , Num. xi. 15. It is therefore the book of temporal life, as distinguished from that of eternal life, according to the point of view, economy, and style of the Old Testament ; comp. Ex. xxxiii. 3, 5. The book of temporal life is intended in Ps. cxxxix. 16. — avr'og eyu, I my- self) construe these words with to he [were]. — avdds/xa s Jvcu, to be accursed) It will be enough to compare this passage with Gal. iii. 13, where Christ is said to have been made a curse for us. The meaning is, I could have wished to bring the misery of the Jews on my own head, and to be in their place. The Jews, rejecting the faith, were accursed from Christ ; comp. Gal. i. 8, 9, v. 4. Whether he would have wished only the deprivation of all good, and his own destruction, and annihilation, or the suffering also of every evil, and that too both in body and in soul, and for ever, or whether, in the very excitement [paroxysm] of that prayer, he had the matter fully present before his understanding, who knows whether Paul himself, had he been questioned, would have been able exactly to define ? At least that word [Ego'] I [all thought of self] was entirely suppressed in him ; he was looking only to others, for the sake of the Divine glory; comp. 2 Cor. xii. 15. From the loftiest